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Who woulda thunk it? William Shatner, who once upon an age became a laughing stock for recording an album for spiteful reasons (damn that Nimoy anyhow!), not only managed to salvage his reputation by playing along with the gag and making himself into more of a self-parody than his detractors ever did, but in finally recording the follow-up to that so-bad-its-good-but-really-is-this-ever-bad album of yore... I can’t believe I’m about to say this. Okay: with his cover version of Pulp’s “Common People”, Shatner actually goes beyond that self-parody and actually hits the nail on the head, pulling out all of the anger that was merely implied in the Pulp original, and wielding it like a weapon at all of those doofus hipsters from well-to-do homes who think that poverty is a lifestyle rather than the soul-crushing and unavoidable fact of life that it is for far too many people. The fact that the Shat hasn’t had to live with that for at least four decades makes it all the more astonishing...the fact that the doofuses are re-adjusting their factory-aged faux-farmer trucker hats and nodding in ironic appreciation of the track makes it all the more infuriating.

Excerpts from a marginal critic’s diary
Oct 26, 2004 1:16pm: Just brought home the new Nick Cave album. It’s supposed to be one of the best things he’s done in years. I’m really looking forward to it. I mean, I loved his last two albums, so this has got to be fantastic.
1:20pm: So far so good. I was disappointed when I discovered that Blixa wasn’t on this one, but “Get Ready For Love” is a fantastic opening track...driving, overblown...all the things a good Cave album should be.
2:00pm: Oh man, I’m loving this album. “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” notches up another classic...wait, did he just saw what I thought he said? [rewinds] Shit, he did.. “I woke up this morning with a Frappuccino in my hand”...? What kind of bullshit is that? That’s the worst line he’s ever written!
2:30pm: Okay, second worst. I thought the beginning of the second disc would wipe the slate clean, but “God was a major player in heaven” really outdoes the Frappuccino line...it’s the sort of thing an angst-filled 17-year old theologically-impaired Cave-wannabe would write in order to make the line rhyme. I’m disillusioned. What am I going to tell the P&J?

I don’t care what anyone else says, U2’s “Vertigo” is one of the best singles of the year...immediate, rocking, and everything else we thought U2 had shucked off in favour of irony all those years ago. It’s obvious that the song sapped the band’s energy, though. How else would you explain the fact that a band with U2’s cash reserves could only get one of the best rock photographers of all time to take a picture of them while they’re asleep?
(badly photoshopped supporting evidence: here)

The idea that pop music can change the world took a body blow this year with Bush’s re-election...of course, the attempts to take the guy down were half-assed at best. Steve Earle’s The Revolution Starts Now! should have been a winner, but he didn’t manage to tap into the anger that so many people were feeling, choosing instead to write a hey-nonny-boo-boo song where he pretends to be trying to score with Condoleeza Rice. One of the strongest of the anti-Bush songs was easily Enimen’s “Mosh”, which not only proved to me that the guy was more than just a meathead, but which sported one of the best videos of the year. The problem is, the sentiment only goes so far when the kids really don’t care.

Memo to Robert Smith: Too bad the nu-metal fans weren't really into it either. Now, can we have a real one, for old times' sake? You know, with pop songs and everything?

Memo to Metallica: Don't think that the success of Some Kind of Monster means you're off the hook. People still think you're dickheads for that Napster thing.

Hey, Chely Wright: Three years from now when it costs you $8 a gallon to fill up your SUV, who’ll be giving who the finger then?

Everyone claims that Franz Ferdinand and the Killers are also benefiting from this indie-goes-mainstream trend, but I just can't imagine either of their stylish disco-inflected records as all that indie in the first place.

Truth is, I probably listened to less indie rock in 2004 than in any year since high school, mostly preferring pop and dance pleasures. Of the rock acts that did capture my attention, one was an old favorite: Sonic Youth did absolutely nothing new on Sonic Nurse, except perfect the loose guitar-army jams they've preferred since "The Diamond Sea," managing to sound both spirited and effortless.

Another, harpist Joanna Newsom, appealed to indie rockers but drew her inspiration from Dust Bowl-era folksingers and classical West African harp techniques. I saw her open for Will Oldham right before the hype swelled and was mesmerized by her intricate finger work and unique vocal delivery. Like a child, she murmurs one moment and shouts the next; her voice doesn't have much depth, but when it spills out, it's unabashedly generous and heartfelt. There's something quite precious about all this, of course, and I haven't even mentioned lyrics like "a thimblesworth of milky moon" or song titles like "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie." But the sort of precocious literariness Newsom puts on display in The Milk-Eyed Mender seems less a bid for cleverness and more an honest evocation of an interior world.

Newsom got lumped into the sub-genre of New American Folk, along with fellow California hippie poet Devendra Banhart, though his surreal lyrics and David Sedaris-as-Billie Holliday vocal style seemed somewhat forced and his two albums too fragmented. More interesting along similar lines was Animal Collective, whose Sung Tongs featured faux-naive campfire songs fractured and splayed by psychedelic multi-tracking. That album's weird studio-rigged pastoralism and occasional Beach Boys harmonies called to mind a druggier version of Brian Wilson's Smile, whose original charms were subverted by actually, finally putting the record together. I don't agree that the project was doomed from the start (some critics act like the 1966-67 recordings were infallible, the opium-induced dream in Coleridge's "Kublai Khan," where the 2004 version is the end of the poem, the more measured, faltering attempt to recapture what is gone). But for whatever reason, by streamlining the demos' absurd randomness, nu-Smile began to resemble nothing so much as a whimsical American musical revue. (And anyway, when I was in the mood for a convoluted pop narrative full of bizarre historical references, I turned to the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat.)

The new Wilco was frustrating, and ultimately I decided I liked the panic attacks (in the form of Crazy Horse-style freak-out guitar solos) better than the migraines (slow, dull murmuring silences). I finally came around on the Arcade Fire, after months of resistance, but I still think it's way overrated.

One of the trends that really got me going in 2004 was a resurgence of 1980s electro sounds, from the drippy synths on "Drop It Like It's Hot" (in which Snoop Dogg drawls over the sound of rising steam and Pharrell tongue-pops the beat like a Medulla outtake -- surely one of the strangest number ones in recent memory?) to Jacques LuCont's remix of Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For" (which trades the original's bratty cheerleader bop for an eight-minute-long wave of New Order electro-melancholy). Felix Da Housecat and Cut Copy both produced compelling full-lengths that trafficked in nostalgia for Nagel prints and leg-warmers, though the former was a stylized study of L.A. coke-and-neon glitz (perfect for the next Grand Theft Auto soundtrack!) and the latter wore its heart on its sleeve (and was the more consistent of the two records).

Also digging into the VH-1 crates were the Scissor Sisters, who mined Elton John, glam, and disco for a fun but ultimately superficial listen. (Although don't tell that to John Cameron Mitchell, who I hear already has them lined up to score Hedwig 2: The Inch Gets Angrier.) For me, the French band Phoenix was more satisfying in its retro pleasures: Alphabetical wed soft rock (late-era Steely Dan, Stevie Nicks-led Fleetwood Mac) to crisp hip-hop-inflected beats, reaching a high point on the playfully upbeat "Everything is Everything." Both Phoenix and their compatriots in Air delivered the kind of easy, friendly groove you might hear at a hip neighborhood boutique, but where Alphabetical was punchy and charismatic, Talkie Walkie was downright soporific.

The success of bands like Phoenix and the Scissor Sisters may have had something to do with the "indie rockers like to dance now" meme that first surfaced after "Hey Ya!" and "Crazy in Love" united all the world's people in 2003. For at least some people, though, the path to enlightenment was paved by smooth-voiced Norwegian folkie Erlend Øye, whose marvelous entry into the DJ Kicks series brought Kompakt-label microhouse (Justus Köhncke, Jürgen Paape) to the attention of Kings of Convenience fans. (And thankfully so: Øye's band's album was a snoozer, with the exception of the lovely "Misread" and the thrilling bossanova "I'd Rather Dance With You.") Others waded through the hype on blogs and online message boards to find Junior Boys, whose Last Exit was hands down my favorite record of 2004. Though vocalist Jeremy Greenspan is a pudgy, trucker-hat-donning white guy from Ontario, on record his gently desperate sighs mixed gorgeously with stark electro beats and trickling synths, leading critics to describe the record as Hall and Oates-meets-Timbaland.

Tim Mosley himself was noticeably absent from the scene in 2004, but commercial hip-hop still thrived. Likely Pazz & Jop victor Kanye West scored with four singles from The College Dropout, a smart, relaxed album that held up despite a few too many muddled skits. Of West's biggest hits, I liked "Slow Jamz" -- the funny paean to quiet-storm vocalists -- better than the furrowed-brow gospel march "Jesus Walks." Part of it had to do with a guest spot from speed-rapper Twista, who emerged as my favorite MC of the year. On "Overnight Celebrity" Twista borrowed West's sped-up soul sample gimmick to reflect on his own sudden fame. And though I've always been somewhat indifferent to crunk, Trick Daddy's "Let's Go" artfully mixed Twista's sharply enunciated flow with Lil Jon's trademark guttural shouts and a persistent Ozzy Osbourne sample. Apart from being roasted on Chappelle's Show, Lil Jon's shining moment of the year was breathing life into Usher's career on "Yeah!", an interesting marriage between crunk and soul but one that ultimately felt limp to me. Still, it beat Usher's follow-up singles, "Burn" and "Confessions Pt. 2," which I couldn't tell the difference between.

My three favorite R&B songs of the year were Christina Milian's sexy "Dip It Low," Nina Sky's non-chalant Latin boombox groove "Move Ya Body," and Janet Jackson's criminally underplayed "All Nite (Don't Stop)."

I can't understand 80 percent of what either M.I.A. (in "Galang") or Dizzee Rascal (in "Stand Up Tall") are saying over the standard-issue grime elements in both songs -- distorted rattling beats and low, squelching Nintendo keyboards -- but I don't care, since it's such cheerful nonsense they're shouting. Dizzee's yelping pronunciation of "Chinese suits" wins me over; ditto M.I.A.'s sleek British-via-Sri Lanka accent on her skip-rope sing-along: "Ya ya yay! Ya ya hey! Whoa-oh-ay-oh!"

Britney Spears got married (twice!) and still put out the best single of the year ("Toxic"), a sugar rush in which her usual fembot persona gets breathy and light-headed amidst swooping Bernard Herrmann strings and 007 stuttering guitar. Jessica Simpson bragged about going bottomless on the infectious "With You," while her sister Ashlee cutely mimicked Suzanne Vega on "Pieces on Me" before giving into the Matrix. At year's end, the pop singer with the most promise was Annie, whose import-only debut, Anniemal, was crammed with hooks, including the bittersweet "Heartbeat."

In the badass-old-ladies comeback sweepstakes, 64-year-old Nancy Sinatra's record was better than 70-year-old Loretta Lynn's. The fact that critics largely preferred the one produced by future rock legend/treasurer of authenticity Jack White to the one that credits at least fifteen songwriters on its sleeve might be chalked up to the scourge of "rockism" than Kelefa Sanneh alerted us all to in the New York Times. The attitude that Sanneh described has been around since the early 1980s at the very least, but his impassioned defense of Christina Aguilera sparked a fun if sometimes tiresome debate among music scribes toward the end of the year. (I wonder if Sanneh's apoplectic readers calmed down when they saw that his year-end top ten included such hipster humanities-grad faves as Joanna Newsom, Modest Mouse, and the Arcade Fire.)

Lastly, the digital revolution continued on its merry way in 2004. I've been using iTunes for a while, but I recently bought an iPod so I could listen to music at work, and now the only time I have reason to touch actual CDs after I buy them is when I put on music next to my bed while I'm falling asleep (or sometimes in the shower). I've never even seen a physical copy of one of my favorite records of the year: United State of Electronica put the entirety of its D.I.Y. disco debut on its website to download for free. Since most of my CDs end of strewn across my living room anyway, this trend is more than all right with me.

BACK TO LENGTHY POSTS!

ALBUMS:
1. Big & Rich Horse of a Different Color (Warner Bros.) - 15 points
2. Various Artists Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats (Essay) - 15 points
3. M.I.A./Diplo Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1 (no label) - 14 points
4. Various Artists Crunk Classics (TVT) - 12 points
5. Yolanda Perez Aqui Me Tienes (Fonovisa/Univision) - 11 points
6. Notekillers Notekillers (Ecstatic Peace) - 9 points
7. Courtney Love America's Sweetheart (Virgin/EMI) - 7 points
8. Gene Watson ...Sings (Intersound/Compendia) - 6 points
9. The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me (Frenchkiss) - 6 points
10. Country Teasers Full Moon Empty Sportsbag (In The Red) - 5 points

Taking sides: whiskey girl vs. bottle action

Toby Keith's great "Whiskey Girl" was running neck and neck with Miss B.'s "Bottle Action" for the final spot on my singles ballot. The two were in a dead heat as far as my pleasure in the sound. I finally went with "Bottle Action" for having the more positive message, "I don't argue, I just hit that bitch with a bottle" being more genuinely proud of self and of social group than is the falsely self-affirming "She's my whiskey girl; I like 'em rough." Hey, I can like 'em rough too, given that I have "CODEPENDENT" tattooed across my forehead in bold letters. My problem here is that the country genre drenches us in its pride too damn much and too damn often, its self-awareness on dim. My one sonic problem with the whiskey-chick tribute is the growl Toby puts in his voice when he's, you know, liking her rough - he isn't quite convinced that we'll be convinced, so he has to paint a growl on his face. And I'm not convinced. Yeah, it's OK to be a whiskey girl, to be part of my bar, it really is, really really really is. I mean really, it's OK. There's nothing wrong with being a whiskey girl. I like whiskey girls. Yes, I'm not kidding, I like them. Good for me! I want them with hair somewhat askew, rocks in the voice box. Etc. etc. etc.

Strangely, country's actual self-destruction songs, the ones about drinking oneself to death and being completely unmanned by a breakup, are celebratory at heart, or at least self-accepting, self-loving, the everyday affirmation of people in their great funny tragedy. Whereas the officially self-affirmative ones are the ones that live in pain, extolling God, country, region, social stance, hair, pants, shoes, and one's choice of vehicle. In a gratuitously pandering moment in Blake Shelton's generally likable "Some Beach," he identifies the road-rage guy who gives him the finger as a foreign-car-driving dude, and the car that rooks him out of a parking spot as a Mercedes, as if being an asshole on the road were strictly a specialty of the rich and the cosmopolitan.

Unfortunately, I'm not yet able to explain why country's insatiable need for reassurance strikes me as so wrong, given that I found the Dolls' reassuring "Bad Girl" and "Trash" and "Personality Crisis" absolutely exhilarating in their day. (She's my nervous-breakdown girl, I like them fucked-up.) I'm a critic, I'm supposed to articulate the difference. Maybe it's that the Dolls were relatively early in the process, the dark funny night of the soul being discovered where it wasn't supposed to be, amongst teenyboppers and trendies and glitter babes and groupies, a sadness with pizzazz. While in country the self-affirmations just go on and on and on, the dark neurotic-compulsive night of the whining soul.

Now, how is hip-hop, which I love, any better? Maybe it's the hip-hop matter-of-factness: She just hits that bitch with a bottle, then onto the next one. Or when it's not matter of fact - several million self-assertive thug and gangsta anthems (note songs 3 and 4 on my ballot) - it understands that it's problematic. Like, we know, actually, that violence and being tough aren't a way to live, in the long run. A teen I know told me confidently, when he heard Snoop Dogg insert "C.R.I.P." into the "P.I.M.P" remix, that Snoop was going to be the next rap star to get shot. But actually, I don't buy my own argument here. "Whiskey Girl" knows it's problematic too, and so does "Redneck Woman."

My thought peters out...

The Hives, "Walk Idiot Walk"
The humble idiot was to 2004 what the metrosexual was to 2003: everywhere, hep, new, now, the future, winning the World Series and 51% of the popular vote and what-have-you. And, being a genre that thrives on smartasses making fun of dumbasses, punk took that ball and ran with it. The Hives have always traded on great, catchy songs that specialize in condescendingly sneering at people who more or less deserve to be condescendingly sneered at, which is pretty much the essence of great garage rock right there, and even if the riff's familiar -- "I Can't Explain" as a Rubik's cube where only three sides match -- the language in "Walk Idiot Walk" is what justifies treading that threadbare turf. It's a weird syntax you rarely get (but usually only get) with a band from a non-English-speaking country, like they learned the language from Mad Magazine (key word: "putz," which they somehow rhyme with "connect the dots") and then superglued it all together with the Daily Show's political subtext (fitting that the '04 election was, as the chorus anticipated, between an idiot and a robot). Not that "Walk Idiot Walk" is necessarily a political song -- it just turned out to be a great one by accident. Mostly because it contains the most overdramatically unfurled (and, therefore, best) vocalization of the word "lie" in rock history: "lie-i-i-i-uh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-OH!"

Franz Ferdinand, "Take Me Out"
The Killers, "Somebody Told Me"
Belle & Sebastian, "Your Cover's Blown"
Modest Mouse, "Float On"
All the indie kids are dancing now. Well, they're moving, at least. It's a two-year-old phase that hasn't entirely gotten old yet (though you can't fault !!! and Radio 4 for tryin') -- hell, it's been a boon year for dance-punk or indie-dance or whatever you want to stick the word "dance" onto to delineate that this stuff actually has a rhythm for once. Funny thing: most of the great songs that came out of this genre, or at least orbited in the same satellite pattern, were best used for laments about the tribulations of messing around with women and how it shoots your nerves all to shit. "Take Me Out" is the idiot bastard son of "Gimme Shelter"'s love-apocalypse lyrics ("just a shot away" and all) and the martial march of "Sunday Bloody Sunday", which makes it a pretty harrowing party dance track (and, with a bit of tweaking from Daft Punk, a real banger). The Killers' too-many-Red-Bulls disco-pop (again with the Edge guitars there, though the moogs and the cold sweats are a bit less U2 and a bit more Magazine as big fans of Anita Ward) is an overly-desperate plea for reacceptance with a baffling androgyny element -- boyfriends that look like girlfriends, though we're not privy to the actual gender of the party in question, much less the person he's breaking his back just to know the name of -- and an earworm chorus for the ages. And even the twee kids got in their genre exercise: Belle and Sebastian, like Green Day and the Fiery Furnaces, went the whole "A Quick One While He's Away" route, but they made it sound like the flippin' Doobie Brothers. The song, naturally, is about tenuous liasions and wanting to be by oneself, away from the travails of sex pressure. So is any of this stuff actually happy? Technically, yes, probably a bit naively so: Modest Mouse (no strangers to the 4/4; cop "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" already) have some giddy little ditty about lucking out or at least smiling after you fuck up; the guitar gleams, the voice cracks all aw-shucksily and the stupid optimism flies in the face of a moment in time few people are going to remember fondly. Which makes "Float On" sadder than any other indie dance track going.

Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse
Two decades after establishing themselves John Lydon got fat and boring, Lou Reed tore off his robot face to the thrill of nobody, Richard Hell vanished, Debbie Harry did Vice City voiceovers, the Ramones siphoned the last of their energy into cover songs, Iggy stumbled 'round Butt Town, and Sonic Youth released their most subtly beautiful album ever. I don't know how that works. My guess is that somewhere along the line SY kind of forgot they were Punk Rock with a capital PR, eventually perfected the notion of when to dial things down, and mastered the art of deriving power from calm. They find quiet ways to be noisy -- the raining chime-drone that blankets the first two minutes of "I Love You Golden Blue", Kim Gordon's creepy rasp on "Dude Ranch Nurse", the slow build of the drums' potency on "Unmade Bed" -- and noisy ways to be quiet; the alarming squall that shreds "Pattern Recognition" to confetti has an oddly meditative quality to it. Combine that with the fact that their interplay just keeps getting better -- Moore's guitar and Shelley's drums sound like they're being played by the same set of ridiculously ambidextric hands sometimes -- and the result is the best album ever released by a band older than a decent chunk of their fanbase. Listen to it as the third part of a trilogy that started with Evol and continued with Dirty and it'll really sink in.

Clinic, Winchester Cathedral
Comets on Fire, The Blue Cathedral
God is in the details -- or maybe it's the devil, I forget which. It was a pretty decent year for hallucinogenic records that conveyed monolithic, archaic monuments to religious experiences in their frameworks, even if the most lauded one of all -- Brian Wilson's teenage symphony to a distinctly American (and therefore young and confused) God -- drew its biggest fascination from me for how it sounded completely unstuck in time, like pop that never existed before, could never exist again, and would sound almost out of date if it didn't sound like it had no space in history to truly occupy. But there were two albums that pieced together hazy ideas of drug-induced genius non-past just as effectively. Clinic's '04 effort was roundly dismissed as more-of-the-same by the easily-disappointed, but hearing them perfect the old formula instead of sneaking in a bunch of new bells and whistles is a reasonable trade-off; most of the older songs the new songs resemble ("W.D.Y.Y.B." vs. "Hippy Death Suite"; "Vertical Takeoff in Egypt" vs. "2nd Foot Stomp"; "Home" vs. "Goodnight Georgie") sound at various stages of partial completeness in comparison. This happy familiarity gets resisted because the original template feels like it can accomodate so much more than it already does; in the process it's easy to overlook how weirdly novel it is in the first place -- Augustus Pablo's melodica as interpreted by Ennio Morricone, the Velvet Underground with a yen for Mingus, Nile Rodgers as the original guitarist for Them. Comets on Fire tap a more traditional vein -- if there's anything "traditional" about Hawkwind's sax-squonk speed-psych ("The Antler of the Midnight Sun"), much less songs that turn the MC5 into Satan's car alarm ("The Bee & the Crackin' Egg") and cut off Tom Verlaine's fingertips to turn him into Iommi's apprentice ("Blue Tomb"). The idea of warping doom rock acid freakouts into sneakily complex art-noise isn't horribly novel -- anyone who's never heard technical cleverness in "Iron Man" is completely fooling themselves -- but Blue Cathedral is a fantastic example of controlled chaos, exercises in improv wailing (voices, guitars -- the bass wails, even) suddenly falling into carefully-led riff-hammer lockstep. It is worth mentioning that in writing this I was in the midst of listening to "Death Squad" in WinAmp, decided to pause it, but wasn't paying attention and hit the "back to beginning of track" button instead. The ensuing temporary respite of silence being broken by the clammy hand of death as personified by horror-guitar feedback nearly stopped my damn heart.

You may be wondering where all the well-known hip-hop in my ballot, when it's the single most dominant force in pop music today. Let me answer that: as much hip-hop as there was this year that I found exciting, too much of it forced me to ignore ugliness in order to enjoy it. I'm not going to beat the same "gangsta bling thug pimp crack degenerate rap" horse the usual suspects like to flog -- this stuff's always going to be around, it's usually going to be popular, and it's often the most forward-thinking music on any charts anywhere. But I just don't feel like the reward's been worth it this year, not like it was when I first heard Reasonable Doubt or "Sippin' on Some Syrup" or David Banner's Mississippi albums: aside from the fact that so many acts were massively disappointing -- we really needed Eminem to shine, we could've used a focused Nas, we needed Mos Def to kill the mic, and they failed us -- the marquee names this year seemed fewer, more far between and not innovative enough to overcome their more unpleasant aspects. For someone who took three years to capitalize on the circa-'97 helium-soul production tricks from Heiro's "You Never Know" and Wu-Tang's "For Heaven's Sake", Kanye West sure seems full of himself -- not street bragging, but nerdy-kid smug -- and once The College Dropout reaches the halfway mark there's little to look forward to save the already-familiar "Through the Wire" and that Twista track. And it's fun to hear Lil Jon yelling at the top of his lungs, just as it's fun to listen to hardcore punk and Motorhead and the like, but I know crunk's capable of more than just greasy paeans to pudenda and the conflation of partying with punching people in the jaw -- it's just that when the general impression I get from club music is aggression instead of fun, I try to keep it to ten-minute doses instead of a whole night's worth; happy drunks are more fun than the violent ones. Also, there are plenty of interesting ways to rhyme about what it's like to sell crack, but the odds are 20:1 the Clipse already beat you to it. Sorry.

Madvillain, Madvillainy
MF Doom, Viktor Vaughn Venomous Villain
MF Doom, MM... Food
My guess is that MF Doom is somewhat insane. I don't mean in the typical his-head's-not-right sense, since from what I can hear in his lyrics he's a very lucid, very aware person who too good a grasp of how communication works in a storytelling sense to suffer from some problematic mental facilities. I mean "insane" as reference to the idea that anyone who creates this much output has to be holed up in some place or another -- presumably in a home studio -- and will eventually get so obsessed with the act of creation that things just start going a bit weird somewhat. The end result is that the subject can't exist without constantly concocting something, and in the case of Doom it seems that the man won't rest until every well-known conversational tic, b-movie plot twist, comic book catchphrase, Bible verse, playground insult, back porch bullshit session aside, internet message board snipe and hot-shit-on-the-mic cliche is turned on its head and rhymed with something that you never realized would make any contextual sense. I'm tempted to just list them -- "borderline schizo/sorta fine tits, though"; "you on the battlefield with lyrical militants/you know he's feeling bent
when he see little pink elephants"; "some say it's the eyes, some say the accent/a lotta guys wonder where they stacks went" -- but that's only part of the context; it'd be like describing the fight scenes in Hero by transcribing "whoosh, wh-psssh, clang clang, skkkkkkk-THUMP". Eventually it gets a bit easier to comprehend once you realize there's maybe an hour and a half's worth of actual lyrics strung across three full albums, but it's a better 90 minutes than anyone else has offered this year, and when it's laid out over three disparate production backdrops -- Madlib indica jazz on Madvillainy, the soldered-together electro-industrial grind-hop of VV2 and his own classic '80s R&B/syntho-fuzak/Spider-Man incidental music/Children's Television Workshop contraptions on MM... Food -- it feels ridiculously expansive. Dude should cut back this year, though. Keep it to two full-lengths, one instrumental record, three guest spots, and get some vacation.

THE BALLOT: ALBUMS

1. Homosexuals - Astral Glamour - Hyped to Death/Messthetics (15 points)
2. M.I.A. - Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1 - Hollertronix (14 points)
3. Necks - Drive By - ReR (13 points)
4. Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans - Sounds Familyre (12 points)
5. Kanye West - The College Dropout - Roc-A-Fella (11 points)
6. N/A - I Remember Syria - Sublime Frequencies (9 points)
7. Oren Ambarchi - Grapes from the Estate - Touch (8 points)
8. Trick Daddy - Thug Matrimony: Married to the Streets - Slip-N-Slide/Atlantic (7 points)
9. Erlend Øye - DJ-KiCKS - !K7 (6 points)
10. Dead C - The Damned - Starlight Furniture Co. (5 points)

THE BALLOT: SINGLES

1. Portobella - "Covered In Punk" - Island
2. Kenny Chesney - "There Goes My Life" - BNA
3. T.I. - "Rubber Band Man" - Grand Hustle/Atlantic
4. Black Dice - "Miles of Smiles" - DFA
5. Janet Jackson - "Love Me for a Little While" - Virgin
6. Cecile - "Hot Like We" - Greensleeves
7. Gary Allan - "Songs About Rain" - MCA
8. Blaque - "I'm Good" - Elektra
9. Archigram - "Padre" - Kitsuné
10. Gabry Ponte featuring Little Tony - "Figli di Pitagora" - Bliss Co./Universal

WE GOTTA START IT WITH

I passed at a chance at owning an iPod this Christmas. My $70 MP3 player with the petite 128MB capacity serves me *just fine* for the times when I want mobile headphone action, like when I go running by the river or want to feel awfully interior in a museum. Elsewhere? Nah, too many jackasses in this city don't pay attention to where they're going anyway and I don't want to be one of 'em. Besides, knowing me, within a year the thing'll just disappear, or get dropped on the ground and become a cute slab of useless. However. HOWEVER.

My pop music moment of the year came from animated pop-up ad hawking Best Buy's digital music technology. It's a woman in a kicky beret and expensive teeth bopping in place to a sort of distorted house track, twisting shoulders, raising arms, keeping the MP3 player up high and strategically close to her face...and, just as strategically, she looks at you, only a little at first. Then upwards and to the side in coy non-acknowledgement, sometimes letting her mouth glide along silently to the wordless music, twice coming close to singing "I love..." in a way that suggests the ellipsis is completed by Y-O-U. She's not looking at you and then she does and finally everything freezes at her blissfully phony stare. I think I cried when I played it for the fifth time or so. I was in a foul mood at the time, as I was throughout much of our *Adagio for Strings*-haunted year, but tossed off and bursting with suggestion, this was like a ten-second distillation of the joy in "Overnight Celebrity" and "IT IS ON!" and "Gekloppel B2" none of which I voted for, preferring to fixate on the aggressive or regretful instead. She isn't even holding an iPod but who cares? Oh, did I mention I'm gay?

You can see the ad here, though maybe not for long since Unicast just merged with another company:

http://cache.unicast.com/upload/production/5806/70200/70211/bestbuy_ipodon_v1.swf

If the URL breaks up in my e-mail, try the tinyurl version:

http://tinyurl.com/6royf

IT'S THE DOOM HOUR

I stopped listening to music while I slept. Really quiet music now just seems like a set-up for quiet annoyances breaking my concentration, like sounds from the boilerroom underneath the floorboards, or cockroaches skittering into a soda can, or the run-of-the-mill far-off rumbles and booms that are going to make me think of suicide bombers and suitcase nukes no matter how much therapy I get. So I leave the TV on instead, a terrible waste of energy even with the timer on, but it seems to mask ambient citysound better.

Thank to a regime change at my place of employment, I can wear headphones while I work without incident, though obviously there's a limit to how far I can sail off into musical reverie. Expansive stuff that demanded a monopoly on attention rarely progressed beyond a few agonized plays. I think I put Morton Feldman's *Patterns in a Chromatic Field* and the highly-touted Sachiko M/Toshimaru Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide set *Good Morning Good Night* -- the least music-like thing I think they've ever done, no melody no rhythm and basically no texture even, too full of sudden HA HA GOTCHA sounds -- into the CD tray maybe over twenty times, and in neither case have I made it all the way through. So my music-listening habits conformed to workplace exigencies, prompting a slight return to "tracky" albums I can easily pause between songs when the phone rings. Or the paranoid easy-listening of *Drive By*, an immaculately-vacuumed carpet of creeping dread where every part seems almost interchangeable with any other, and every moment seems to promise a final turn to something horrible and final just around the corner.

***

Sufjan Stevens has become my new favorite token Christian. I am mildly terrified by him because he so confidently welcomes apocalypse, making him a little too much like those scary Americans for whom the horrors of war, genocide and natural disaster could never detract one scintilla from the glorious possibility all those corpses might hasten rapture in our lifetime. Yet his serenity gets me right in the place which still harbors some religious feeling -- the joyful kind that wants to erase all alienation between man and God, and between man and man in God -- and is my new favorite example of "the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces," which feels like a re-assuring corrective to those on the religious right so bent on replacing "calm" with "smug." (Though not having read the whole passage the quote comes from, I suspect Twain might've been talking about Christian smugness; doesn't matter, take away the sneer, if there is one, and he was still onto something.)

CONSTRUCTION WORKERS AIN'T REALISTIC

Sometimes I think I'll fall for anything sung by a quavering sensitive male voice. And then along comes Xiu-Xiu. I've been making cruel fun of them all year ("I just wish the lead singer would make himself useful and go into gay porn or something.") and YES YES I KNOW one of you just gave the thing a C but that doesn't stop my stream of bile. There was music out there with an acutely anti- message this year, sure, but none of them got the level of reaction from me that "Support Our Troops Oh! (Godspell Oh!)" did, with its sneering at a soldier that just killed an Iraqi girl -- the blind moral certitude of Dubya and his handlers meets its fun-house mirror obverse, shakes hands, goes for a drink together. It made the fabulous muscles in my hands clench up into the shape that normally comes about when people strangle babies. Only the lead guy's GAY (Dennis Cooper likes 'em, the pervert.) which means I'm supposed to have feelings of solidarity with him -- you know, us against the jocks of the world! OR SOMETHING.

After totally fucking that shit, I found the more satisfying way to get my negation-jollies was by slightly repurposing songs. On the surface of it Kenny Chesney's "There Goes My Life" boils down to "gee, I'm so glad we didn't abort that fetus," but since its story arcs from a guy feeling trapped in his small town to sobbing as his daughter drives a Japanese car to a blue state college education, it's also an illustration of the kind of social mobility that really *is* something honorable and worthy about our country. And it's worth fighting for to ensure that folks like Kanye West and Trick Daddy finally get equal access to that dream, especially as we Americans get distracted like Mynah birds by the bright and shiny promise of tax cuts and the "right" to drive SUVs the size of God's cock.

Is this really what moves me about the song? Well, I know I must sound like one of those Marxist dudes who wrote essays that went "Shakespeare's one of us, no, really!" but it kinda does, though I have to add that this was also the year I started to really cherish children -- I'm a godfather now, btw.

OH, LOOK AT THIS: WHITE PEOPLE VOTED THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!

As a liberal American living under a government actively hostile to any part of the world not happily lubricating our military-industrial complex death machine, I feel have some moral obligation to enjoy the cultural products of not-America. So, of course, like every Pazz & Jopper says every year, I promised to hear more, as with many (most?) Pazz & Joppers, this largely did not happen, with the defiantly *Italian* trance-trash of "Figli di Pitagora" being my sole concession to the stuff sung entirely in a foreign tounge. Yet I've also got music from France, Norway, Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand -- cosmopolitan and all, sure, but we're not bombing THEM...yet. Well, there's *I Remember Syria,* though that's more of a travelogue, and eight months after living with it I had to face the fact that it didn't prompt me to find out anything more about the country we seem to be itching to bomb.

On the other hand, I found intense satisfaction from bohemians hotwiring connections to all sorts of thems and uses. I bet the M.I.A mixtape, one of the Baile Funk CDs and at least one Sublime Frequencies compilation places higher in the poll than something like Youssou N'Dour's *Egypt* (something I never successfully downloaded, ugh) because hipsters like myself prefer fantasies of falling into interzone solidarity better than the stuff that could more effectively pose as the raw unmediated. The thing is I still can't decide whether this is more a product of Western narcissicism (we cannot tolerate anything that lives outside ourselves) or Western hope (beauty without cruelty).

TAKING SIDES: 50 CENT VS. BRIAN WILSON

After 37 years of musical doggy-paddling, an enfeebled Brian Wilson did what nobody expected, nobody asked for, and quite a lot of people dreaded he'd fail at once his plans were public: he undid the most agonizing choke in all of rock & roll. And I loved him for it. The bootleged live performances of SMiLE that were circulating were really fantastic, I thought. He finally got his shit in gear and stitched together all the main fragments that had been floating around in bootleg for decades into an emotionally coherent whole, with Brian sailing in his drunken boat to and fro and through and away from the bedrock certainties of American song and into America, or "America" or whatever. And you know something? Once I heard the way he hobbled "you're unda arrest" on the record I kinda didn't want to hear any more -- his voice is as cringe-inducing as the "diaper me with your love" line in that song from *Love You.* But I heard it alright though, quite in spite of everything -- in fact I had to flee the Union Square Barnes & Noble when they played it on the PA. I guess the poor fidelity of the bootlegs turned out to be so much kinder to Brian's infirmities, and boosted the bass.

AND NO ANNE MURRAY!

My number one single, Portabella's "Covered in Punk," seems like an extended bukkake joke (note missing "s"), but it really proves that fashion models need punk rock, too.

I wanted to write something about *Astral Glamour*, but as my copy's at work, I downloaded a few Homosexuals things from my p2p program and...well, these are my MP3s. I can tell. I ripped *The Homosexuals' Record* a couple years ago - first album I ever ripped from vinyl and it sounds like it, all tinny as hell - then let the Napster gremlins suck them up into the Heavenly Jukebox, and crazily enough they've come back to me. Heh. I suspect this is more interesting my take on them will be.

In my mind I'm not actually voting for Archigram's "Padre" so much as its remixed form in a DJ Hell set at L'Élysee Montmartre, captured for all time in MP3 form. It starts off with a cute harpsichord loop in waltz time, as campy-scary as a circa '64 movie adaptation of a Poe story; eventually it belches shaking hell like lava from the speakers.

This is all kind of random.

ASHLEEGATE

I wonder if Ashleegate is the terminus of the past decade's Great Pop
Dream. The success of Die Britney-Maschine has rested upon the
expertise of her handlers and her absolute willingness to turn herself
over to them. That's nothing revealing, but it shows someone who is
professionally prepared, someone who has learned through all
her rock-star guidance counseling that all bases must be
covered—not merely the portable glam squad and the tireless
interview-coaching, but what must happen in the event of an emergency.
Brit probably got the rundown on this the very day her manager handed
her "Baby One More Time." She's apparently had it under control ever
since, cuz she's never had to blame her stage fright on bad
gas.

Ashlee Simpson comes at the ass-end of America's seemingly
indefatigable worship of teen-queens-for-tweens. And yes, she's awful
(my pop apologism isn't that elastic), but she's a product of
the process. Exploitation cycles rapidly and viciously, and sometimes
the exploitation is wonderfully fabulous (Kelly Osbourne), or at least
sociologically interesting (Pink), and sometimes not so hot (Nelly
Furtado), but what's consistent in the peak years of a phenomenon is
how the concept is pitch-perfect, everything in its right
place. Little malfunctions happen all the time (ask Janet 'n' Justin)
and if artists keep their wits about them, only the hired guns and the
career bootleggers will ever know. That's rule number one, what they
tell you before your humiliating seventh-grade talent show: keep
going.

Here's where it's obvious that NO ONE in the industry cared about
Ashlee. Career trajectory pre-SNL was this: Jessica's getting
up in years, Jessica has a sister although she's kind of a
mieskeit, sister is given a record contract and a nose job,
aaaaand break a leg kid, it's showtime.

Perhaps Solange Knowles and Jamie Lynn Spears got the memo long ago
that they were the reasonably attractive younger siblings of famous
people. Maybe Ashlee was out sick that day, refluxing. She should've
known, and if she were smart, she would have done it right, paid her
artist-development dues, gone into what Broadway calls previews and
soft openings, like on the Christian-pop circuit down south, or on
Disney-knockoff satellite-radio programming. There are so many tiny
niches now that you can be a grassroots nobody for as long as you
want! Just get it out of your system while you're still young and
relevant.

PUSHING THINGS FORWARD

In 2004, much ado was made about the issuing and reissuing of rare
archival material, the deluxe repackaging of established classics, and
new music that steeped itself in the pastiche but placed a low premium
on innovation.

I can appreciate the critical turn of this last point, but what those
thirsting for novelty need to remember is how slow real time actually
is. This is it, folks; we don't live in a frosh-level
rock-history bullshit class where the times they a-change every few
inches on the syllabus. Music's constantly in flux though, and maybe
it takes 20 years of hindsight to properly assess the development. We
can look back now and determine that 1981 (an historically
unremarkable twelve months save for Reagan taking office and MTV
coming on-air to play two-year-old promo spots) had a recognizable
sound, a dialect of its own, one that quietly mutated into
something else in the following few years.

(By the way, the question of whether "video killed the radio star" is
moot; the more interesting fact is how the song most associated with
pop culture's amazing technicolor rocket launch into the end of
squareness, the beatific baby Jesus leaping out of the mural on
glowing roller skates, takes most of its inspiration from the Golden
Age of radio 40-some-odd years prior. And this was not unheard of in
the '70s: Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band got in on the ground
floor in 1976, producer/arranger Charlie Calello made a fantastic
big-band disco record in 1979, and the McGarrigle sisters and Randy
Newman and the Muppets were all over that ragtime shit. Even by 1982,
we had Taco's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and the Depression-era twee of the
Annie soundtrack threatening to dismantle the new wave. But we
still got Madonna, Grandmaster Flash, and Duran Duran out of the deal,
so my advice to you impatient whippersnappers is to shut up and stop
complaining and go listen to your damn Big & Rich record until
something better emerges.)

SINGLES

My two favorite singles of 2004 were by a '70s band (of erstwhile '60s
retronauts) imitating the Stock Aitken Waterman Brit-disco and
Latinoid NYC hip-hop its lead singer tried on in the mid-'80s, and by
a merry band of Swedes (with a Spanish name) alchemizing '90s
elliptical-machine Real McCoy-style Eurodance out of a 20-year-old
Genesis chorus, with sexy results.

Blondie's "Good Boys" got a U.S. release in early '04 after making the
rounds in Europe and Australia the year before. I'm not very surprised
that the single and corresponding album tanked over here (established
American acts who have to pimp their records outside their home turf
are basically finished getting any kinda stateside support ever
again), although it's ironic that Annie's aesthetically similar
Anniemal is the belle of the Critics and Hipsters Playas' Ball.

Meanwhile, a sleeper single called "This is the World We Live In," by
Alcazar, is delighting '90s kids who thought Haddaway's "What Is Love"
was a perfectly agreeable work-it-girl gay-bar/fashion-runway canticle
(much better than "Gay Bar"!) until those Roxbury goons from
Saturday Night Live ruined it. "This is the World" swerves
along to a charming sani-funk groove with a distinctively contemporary
boyband-soul falsetto (originating from eager singing teachers
bootcamping their young careerist cherubs towards Star Search).
But the chorus is the payoff—trading the downward motion of the
foregrounded refrain with the swoony responsive upswing of "oh-OH-oh."
The "Land of Confusion" steal does sound like a heartfelt rallying cry
(to dance) rather than another opportunity for winky-face nostalgia
and implied "Remember Phil Collins' hair? Wow, what were we THINKING?"
VH1-ish quips. (My boo, upon sending him the mp3: "What, is liking
Genesis ironically cool now?" Me: "They're not ironic, they're
Swedish." Touché, he said, and listened to the track three more
times.)

FAVORITE ALBUMS

There were several albums I loved, but when I compiled the final list,
only a small handful of new releases by working artists made it to the
top ten. It's not anyone's fault and I'm not gonna go calling
2004 a shit year because of it, I just spent most of the time
listening to older things. However, the Fiery Furnaces and the Walkmen
made fine records in '04, ones that I'll remember well into the future
when I'm brainstorming up a yearmix CD.

The Fiery Furnaces may not be the best band we've got (shrug) but
they're certainly the coolest. Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger are two
dark-eyed, ancestrally Jewish/culturally Ameri-Greek siblings born and
raised in the Chicago suburbs, one of whom has lived in England and
traveled a lot, and one of whom is a self-described lazy introvert who
has admitted to spending his childhood reading atlases, almanacs, and
dictionaries for pleasure. They have great port-city accents, all
dropped rs, glottal ts, and diphthongy vowels—they'd be
the wisecracking getaway drivers in a Bob Hoskins bank-heist comedy.
They're smartasses, but their saving grace is that they back it up by
being smart (not just "asses"). It's all there in the delivery,
especially little Eleanor's; she sings a rapid-fire rat-a-tat of
intentionally clunky (but poetically sound) words and rhythms with
brassy confidence and perfect dramatic inflection, never faltering.
And Matt's flamboyantly sloppy musicianship on keyboards and guitar is
that of someone whose ideas often outrun his technical aptitude (nota
bene: I thoroughly approve).

Blueberry Boat is a knotty and weird junior-adventure-storybook
with tales of a Grand Rapids fruit exporter accosted by pirates en
route to Hong Kong (this song starts off with an Art of Noise-y
industrial sequencer pattern and veers off into subdued Soft Machine
jazzfolk), an inept Ericsson cell-phone wholesaler lost in translation
on a Syrian business trip (Sondheim/post-punk/pre-crash Dylan), and a
motley cast of jilted lovers, police, thieves, and ADD kids. Whatever
it all means, the arcane slang checks out (to hell with that hoary old
Damon Runyon '90s neo-rockabilly shit; the Friedbergers have a palette
of lingo befitting Rudyard Kipling imperialist swine, and their
turn-of-the-century railroad jargon includes the "Pere Marquette"
among a menu of extinct trains and routes). Pretentious, sure, but
less "grad-student suck-up" (Decemberists) than "hyper-enthusiastic
jazzbo stoner" (Malkmus).

People hate the Walkmen because they're rich. They're children of
privilege, they went to prep school, they have names like "Hamilton
Leithauser," and they dress nice. If the Walkmen were the blue-collar
sons of plumbers and sanitation workers, an American Oasis that
blood-'n'-toil-obsessed Americans could relate to while
listening to their iPods on cab rides home from their junior-analyst
jobs, that'd be dandy. But that's just not how it is.

Still, how rich can the Walkmen be if their first album was on a tiny
Brooklyn indie and Bows and Arrows is on a fly-by-night
fake-indie farm-team sublabel of a major, one that will probably go
tits up in a year? How rich can they be if their two videos from
Bows ("The Rat" and "Little House of Savages") were shot for
peanuts on a shitty DV camera? Why do they need to hire out their
recording studio—assembled with their Jonathan Fire*Eater severance
pay—to local bands? And have you seen their stage setup? It's
minimal. Paul Maroon may not be an accomplished guitar player, but he
sure gets a lot of mileage out of one '50s Gretsch hollowbody and a
delay pedal. And Walter Martin's Vox Continental organ has been
looking kinda banged up lately—you'd think someone so wealthy would
get that taken care of posthaste.

The thing is, fuck money. I like the band and their music and their
personalities (there's the putzy-but-hearty-voiced Roger Daltrey/Rod
Stewart frontman; the guitarist who you can tell spent too much time
as a teen in front of his bedroom mirror, perfecting his hilarious
Eddie Van Halen smirk; the shadowy bass player who wants to be in the
Clash; the very serious-looking and well-groomed keyboardist who
probably scours circuitry newsgroups for eBay listings; and the
brilliant, wiry drummer who's also the band's secret weapon). And it's
okay if you think they sound like 1982; they've definitely got those
dubby Mancunian bass textures. But there's a fair bit of 1962 in there
as well—not the Hamburg Beatles so much as the Tornados' "Telstar," a
dusting of twangy country/western (not that Bows is a country
record), the innocent optimism of early protest folk (and later, the
brutal cynicism of Bob Dylan). Now put these preppy boys through
university; give 'em the requisite Rolling Stone '80s dadrock
that '90s college students loved (Waits, Springsteen, Pogues, old-man
Dylan), let 'em start a couple of bands, and we'll see what sticks!

What sticks, circa 2004: the sound of winter in New York, slush on the
streets, the low oscillations of icy wind, people escaping into
Starbucks to use the can. Bows matched beautifully with the
month it was released (February) and prior to that, when I was walking
around listening to an advance copy, always pulling the ratty
headphone foam over my ears to keep the cold from freezing them off.
Bows is beers at Sophie's bar in the quiet morning light of New
Year's Day, vaguely remembering the argument you had the night before,
but not telling anyone cuz it's not important. The songs are lovelorn
and weary, sentimental and proud, spiteful and hopeful. The only
emotion missing is self-pity, which I'm sure they feel they're too
male for. (There's no crying in lacrosse.)

The Jay-Z-Linkin Park mash-up album was better than it had any right to be—especially since Chester Bennington has 9,999 problems and a bitch is at least 9,987 of them.

-Jonah Weiner, Brooklyn, New York

Also, massive xpost:

“God was a major player in heaven” really outdoes the Frappuccino line...it’s the sort of thing an angst-filled 17-year old theologically-impaired Cave-wannabe would write in order to make the line rhyme. I’m disillusioned. What am I going to tell the P&J?

It's supposed to be funny! There's something about Nick Cave's sense of humor that seems to get lost. I mean, give the guy some credit, he doesn't put a Frappucino in there not knowing it's going to sound absurd.

Kanye's red bear sweater is from the Ralph Lauren 2001 Christmas collection—2001!

-Nick Sylvester, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Crimony, that's so close to my own mental image of B&A it's uncanny.

Does anyone besides the people who vote in this poll
listen to the music that finishes at the top of the
lists? Is there any such thing as shared musical
experience anymore? I feel like I need a membership
card to write about these releases now. For as pure as
my role as critic remains – I’m in a position to lead
readers through great works and why they should care
about them – I feel the only people I come across who
listen to some of these releases (Dizzee Rascal’s
records are a good example) are either other rock
critics or whine-and-cheese blue-staters who spend way
too much time reading what I have to say. Say what you
want about old dudes like Anthony DeCurtis and David
Fricke, but at least they drool over things that the
schmuck who works in the mailroom might be drooling
over, too.

The Arcade Fire's surprisingly tough guitars, Queen-y harmonies, overemphatic strings, and French lyrics match the tumult in the band's hearts note for note, suggesting a way out of their self-absorption that their best lyric understands without the bombast: "Guess we'll just have to adjust."

"Take Me Out" captured the moment in pop culture when the obsession with metrosexuality was at its peak. "Michael" marked the moment in pop culture when experimental homosexuality was most accepted.

Well, that proves it: Contempt isn;t just reserved for the artist anymore ... :-)

Don't get me wrong -- blogs are wonderful.

#1 reason why this sentiment boils my blood:

There are thousands of albums put out every year. There is a LOT of music to deal with, and it's ridiculous to narrow one's focus only to the hugely popular stuff with the money behind it out of some warped ideal about the everyman. There's nothing wrong with being popular, but music appreciation and criticism shouldn't have to be all about what the "common man" is listening to. Critics are better off being curators rather than hack sociologists.

Yay! I did it! :-)

My point, really, is that there is a disconnect between what we like and what the populace buys/listenbs to. Moreso than ever before. Most of that isn't our fault, of course. It just feels odd.

And yeah, Usher is an exception to the rule, I guess. But I don;t like Usher's music, myself.

Yes, critics are specialists -- but ehy're also supposed to be journalists. Do I opine? Of course, but it;s not in the context of analyzing the work. People can have refined, specialized tastes without being snobs about it, you know?

next year let's DOUBLE those votes for outkast

Make that tens of thousands.

There is a LOT of music to deal with, and it's ridiculous to narrow one's focus only to the hugely popular stuff with the money behind it out of some warped ideal about the everyman.

Try even keeping up with that. As in, try keeping up with all the stuff on all the Billboard charts. It's not really feasible to keep up with what amounts to popular in terms of sales.

but music appreciation and criticism shouldn't have to be all about what the "common man" is listening to.

What is "the common man" anyway? I've really come to resent that term.

An undeniable truth of criticism is that it's irrelevant unless it is read by someone other than the author. So there's a market force involved here that goes beyond whatever the editor decides to print. It's nice to conceive critics as random curators, but that's just not the case because of their relation to what is popular. Refining taste, or more succinctly, refining critical scope, is completely logical and only seen as limiting by those who disagree with the parameters.

so feel free to go work at an alt.weekly in iraq.

NO

(but that New York line = wha?)

The Federation is possibly the best thing to happen to
hip-hop that people outside the Bay Area haven't
really noticed sufficiently yet. The lyrics are fast,
the production is funky, and the choruses are stupid.
It's no fun to hate conscious rap anymore because
everyone else does too, not that it slows it down. I
got a new cell phone this year which meant, you
guessed it, new ringtones. Jay-Z is out, and Ciara is
in. The Ignition (Remix) ringtone isn't very good, but
the Came Back For You one is hot. Lil' Wayne's track
"Tha Heat" is a fantastically homoerotic track about a
man and his gun which feels like a Matrix-style trip
inside a firing chamber. So that's the most sexy-thug
track of the year. After reading "What's The Matter
With Kansas" I decided that music-scandals are boring
because they just exist to keep red states thinking
red. Another true story: people tell me that on New
Years night I kept calling this one girl I was coming
onto "Britney." "Whoever you thought I was, you were
really digging her," she told me the next day. I
bought mainly mixtapes this year, which is all about
the economy of cool. The dealer wants you to feel that
you need to by the mix to be cool, you want them to
feel you're so cool you don't *need* to buy the disc.
Thanks to downloading, the whole thing is more about
willpower than music. But then music is all about
willpower. Except for conscious rap maybe.

This was a very interesting year. By "interesting," of course, I mean "hellish and nightmarish." But there you have it. It was a good year for music, but then again it always is.

To me, this was the year of the Latina. I was a slave to MTVEspanol all year, because Paulina Rubio kept putting out amazing videos, each more batshit-great than the last. My favorite: the one where she is clad only in yellow "cuidado" tape. My second-favorite: the one where she gets loaded on tequila and shoots a hole in a plate-glass window. This is Mexican pop music, people. We are truly living in amazing times.

My taste in singles is increasingly shaped by whether or not my nine-year-old daughter likes a song or not. I think this is how I will vote for all my singles in the future. She and I, after examining many videos, have decided that we both kind of like Usher's weirdo dancing in "Yeah!", and we both kind of feel sorry for him in "Burn," but that by the time he got to "Confessions Part 2" he deserves what he gets because he was a bad boyfriend.

I feel myself moving farther and farther away from the critical mainstream. I heard hundreds of records in 2004, but I didn't hear most of the things that will end up in the top 30. I can't imagine that this is a bad thing, except that it feels a little lonely sometimes. I see all the cool kids at their cafeteria table talking about Franz Ferdinand, and I just know they won't like me if I go over and start talking to them about Argentinian ska or Daby Toure or the new stars of Urban Regional music. I'd like them if they'd like me, but I don't think they'll like me.

Urban Regional will come out of nowhere in 2005, astounding only those who weren't paying attention in 2002 or 2003 or 2004. This is because any kind of music with tubas and accordions AND hip-hop beats is triple-awesome.

Now that the novelty of "oh my gawd there's this kind of hip-hop called crunk and it's totally off the hizzy OMG" has worn off, we are more easily able to understand that there is good crunk and bad crunk, just like there is good and bad in all forms of music. Trick Daddy made his best record by doing tender crunk. Lil' Jon made an electronic masterpiece and then thugged it up so ugly that it hurts to listen to it. I love pulling into the Whole Foods parking lot with "Stop Fuckin' Wit' Me" blasting out of my '98 Saturn with the 10-inch rims, freaking out the hippies with metal madness and rap frenzy at the same time. Plus, it's a great remake of "Institutionalized."

Single best rap line of the year goes to: Chingo Bling, for "Martha Stewart, she's a hot girl."

I wanted to give myself to Usher but he is only into himself so I realized that he's not going to be there for me when I need him, and just spent another year listening to Anthony Hamilton and being happy that he's the go-to guy for everyone's choruses now. This is a rare case of the good guy succeeding and we MUST salute that.

I want to buy Fat Joe a belt so he can dance but there is not enough leather in the world for that. It would be a bovine holocaust.

I think the majority of good music writing is happening in blogs now, but I fear that will change as people just put up MP3s and stop actually talking about the songs. Next format, please: I'm guessing cave paintings will be the way for the best critics to communicate in 2005.

Really? Why not? Your blog's way more popular than mine.

Also, wine and cheese is good food. And they have it in Red States too, for real.

Next year!

I don't really understand what this comment means. It's a compilation, right? I don't think we listed artists on any of those Subliminal Frequencies comps. (Obviously, how we list these is open to debate, and I'm not even going to claim it's always consistent -- Nicky Siano's and Morgan Geist's disco comps are probably not credited to any particular artist, either. Unless they are; with thousands of albums to deal with, it's hard to remember -- and believe me, individual voters voted for them in every conceivable way, which proves how ambiguous this kinda task is. I don't think anybody voted for the Syria comp as a Porest record, though I could be wrong. Anyway, we take these kinda things on a case by case basis; it's silly to suggest there is one "right" way to list them. I do really want to know, though, if the votes for any record are split into two different places -- like, say, with that Common single noted above; I've already sent that correction to our new media department. As I will with others that strike me as actual factual errors.)

"World music comps" are starting to get on my nerves. I mean come on,
there's no way *all* these countries make good music!

Advance album downloads have gotten so out of hand, I think it's safe
to say that the days of proper release dates are officially over. On
my iPod right now I have the next seven Strokes albums, a comedy album
Outkast plan to put out in 2006, and the entire discography of pop
singer Carolina Jostlin, even that crazy country-rap album of hers
nobody liked. Never heard of Carolina? That's because she hasn't even
been *born* yet.

Does anyone know what "mash-up" really means anymore? At the beginning
of 2004 the term meant when two songs were played at the same tempo to
make a new song. By March a mash-up also meant when DJs played rap a
capellas over instrumental tracks. By November a mash-up was simply
when two artists work together on a song or movie or community service
project. I could go on obviously, but you'll have to excuse me: in a
couple seconds my band and I are going to "mash up" a guitar line with
a drum beat and vocals to make this crazy thing we call a "song."

Why are Fiery Furnaces fans such assholes when I say I don't care for
Blueberry Boat? It's as if I have some huge character flaw. Sometimes
I'll get, "I'm really really sorry, man," as if someone in my family
died or I just lost my job. Most times it's worse though: "Well, you
know it does take a while for people to really get it if you know what
I mean," or even more patronizingly, "Don't worry, I know you're
trying." The Fiery Furnaces play really boring blues riffs and have
less charisma than a cup full of urine – what am I supposed to be
excited about again?

Stricken with unfathomable grief by the death of their grandparents,
Montreal's The Arcade Fire gave us the appropriately titled Funeral,
their indie rock debut comprised of this year's most maudlin, crybaby
epics. Yesterday the band revealed to me plans for their next two
albums: the first one will be called Bad Grades, for which the Arcade
Fire will try to capture that feeling we all used to get when we
worked really hard on a paper for a college professor, but we got a
bad grade on it anyway. The second album will be called Leftover
Lunch. LL will be a concept album about elementary school hardship,
and will follow the story of a brown-bag lunch that is abandoned in
the school cafeteria and sadly, never eaten.

According to music journalists, every record that came out in 2004 was
influenced by Arthur Russell, the Homosexuals, the Blackouts, the
Beakers, Blue Cheer, the Free Design, obscure strains of Connecticut
hip-hop, Ghana funk, Miami bass, Canadian-made italo disco, or some
combination of these extremely important acts that, for whatever
reason, couldn't stay in print without a reissue. I can't wait for
reviews in 2005: word is that every band plans to ape the Beatles.

Kanye West definitely had this year's most fashionable and up-to-date
hiphop sound, but that doesn't mean he himself was the most
fashionable or up-to-date dresser. That red bear sweater Kanye wears
on the cover of The College Dropout is a piece from the Ralph Lauren
2002 Christmas collection – 2002!

So everyone knows: Seattle Weekly music editor Michelangelo Matos'
last name is pronounced "MAH-TOS", not "MIAAAA-TOS". I fucked this up
in October and he never let me forget it.

Dizzee Rascal finally made his debut in the States this year, and
that's just great. Now, instead of getting "What the fuck is this
shit?" when I play Boy In Da Corner, I get "Oh this is that British
kid, isn't it. I read a review of him in Rolling Stone! The reviewer
was like 'What the fuck is this shit?'"

Tricia Romano was right: the New York City dance scene is pretty much
garbage. When Kompakt's Michael Mayer and Reinhard Voigt came all the
way from Cologne in October, not only did they get stuck playing the
Bowery, but only about 200 people showed up, and I'm pretty sure about
150 of them were just music journalists who got in for free.

heh

Speaking as one of the two people who voted for I Remember Syria (Jody Beth being the other), I didn't. Since the CD spine and cover simply has "I Remember Syria" and nothing else, I figured the powers that be didn't want to present the record as being "authored" in any strict sense, at least when it came to the exterior packaging.

Cause we get a lot of "I read your book report thing on Blueberry Boat, it's really, um, impressive. You bloggers! You sure do write a lot, huh!" Which luckily isn't patronizing at all.

In order to explain why dance music yet again dominates my Pazz & Jop ballot I must cite no less an authority than the great Baal Shem Tov, may his sacred memory be ever blessed:

"REPETITION, the power which weakens and discolors so much in human life, is powerless before ECSTASY, which catches fire again and again from precisely the most regular, most uniform events." (Martin Buber, "The Legend of the Baal-Shem", p.18)

And speaking of ecstasy: in the same way that the rule in politics is "follow the money" (and in a year when ExxonMobil donates a quarter of a million dollars to the Commander-in-Chief's Inaugural alone, who can tell the difference anymore?), often in the music world it helps to "follow the drug", which is now reportedly BINGE DRINKING. This is why, instead of the fluffy, e-fueled rave/ambient tracks of a mere 10 years ago (anyone remember "The Irresistible Force"?), we're now getting mash-ups of tunes that go together about as well as tequila and white wine on an empty stomach.

Thus my FAVORITE MASH-UP MOMENT OF THE YEAR: on "How to Kill the DJ Part Two" the peroxide apotheosis of Blondie's "Atomic" ("Your hair is beautiful!") is followed by Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" played against "Dexter" by Ricardo Villalobos, who’s quite chichi at the moment (e.g. at last year's Sonar he teamed up with techno demigod Richie Hawtin for a duo set). As a result, Suicide is transformed from black-and-white to color, while Villalobos's laptoppy microhouse gets an infusion of red blood cells and raw meat.

moodymann and Theo Parrish seem to be siblings separated at birth whose careers are now beginning to converge. To oversimplify, Theo has spent years giving a deep-dub treatment to Larry Heard by way of Bobby Konders, while moodymann sits in his studio re-inventing soul and blaxploitation (Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone). Now, however, they're both using live musicians and singers, blending them in with their own rhythm tracks and loops (cf. Theo's Rotating Assembly project).

And so my FAVORITE SINGLE TRACK OF THE YEAR is Theo Parrish's "Summertime Is Here", which was re-released in 2004 in an expanded and remixed version. I'm not sure whether it's classified as "soul-techno" or "Afro-house" (as I understand it, such terminology has to first be cleared by Simon Reynolds in those cases where he doesn't actually come up with it himself), but the grand ironic bonus is that it is *this* track, and not all the jazz I've ever heard in my life, that shows me what a genuine New Orleans JAZZ FUNERAL must have been like. Against the bass drum's insistent ba-doom-boom-boom, the horns step up for pithy, tasty solos, and then fade back from first line to second line. (Olu Dara, call your office. Wynton Marsalis, get a day job.) And speaking of funerals, check out the second female vocalist who enters at 4:20: she is not merely imitating, nor performing an homage to, but actually CHANNELING the late, great Jeanne Lee (or maybe they just share the same orisha)! The first several dozen times I heard it, I thought that it was a sample of Ms. Lee rather than a live contemporary singer. This last aspect constitutes the Koganistic "free lunch" of this twelve-and-a-half-minute all-you-can-eat masterpiece.

Despite my yet again placing in the bottom ten of the Critical Alignment list, my ballot selections aren't exactly obscurities: you can hear samples of most cuts at soulseduction.com, and the few record retail outlets left in Vienna stock many of them. As for whether it's "old-school", look at it this way: it's 1957 and I'm blown away by the just-released album, "Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster" and people are coming up to me and saying, "Hey man, don't be such a square -- check out this new record by DAVE BRUBECK."

Besides, things simply look different on this side of the Big Pond. And rock isn't telling me anything that I don't already know. And as for hiphop, unfortunately, if I kept up with it as closely as I used to, very bad things would have happened by now to certain peckerwood partners at various crap office jobs.

In Europe, Detroit techno is accorded a place analogous to jazz in 1950s Paris and Copenhagen. Par exemple: within 48 hours of my lending out my copy of "Nocturbulous Behavior -- The Mix", half a dozen DJs and musicians had already copied it (uh, I think) and it got played in its entirety at a public event at Vienna's Museumsquartier.

In a nutshell and by way of metaphor: in techno, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson together constitute The Creator, who still exercises divine intervention. Then followed Jeff Mills, the Savior of the music, who redeems it from formula and remains eternally relevant. When he ascended into the cosmos to produce crateload after crateload of space loops on vinyl, he left us with Underground Resistance, a faceless Paraclete who comforts us and guides us to the truth.

But in 2004, Jeff Mills came again! And gave us a mix CD even better than his classic "Live at the Liquid Room in Tokyo". The difference is that, whereas 10-12 years ago he and UR used to bury the Latin rhythms back in the mix, a cowbell here, a conga sample there, now the Latinisms are as out-in-the-open as a street festival. (Similarly, check out the way moodymann slyly uses Brazilian rhythms on the first two tracks of "Black Mahogani".)

Lastly, Roscoe Mitchell is a national treasure, and not just for jazzheads. Lester Bangs once wrote about guest-hosting a radio show and playing Roscoe's famous solo version of "Nonaah" on one turntable while playing Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on the other (and announcing it as a live date that they all played together!). In 1988, inspired by Lester's example, I performed my own sound experiment, with a shorter and equally abrasive solo "Nonaah" on one tape deck and Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" on the other, and y'know what? I was startled to discover that not only pitches, but even intervals and melody contours often coincided in a bizarre way. So why hold anything against Roscoe just because he's a natural-born cubist and maybe musically dyslexic? And this is not to overlook the sublime achievements of his Note Factory group, nor the fact that it was Roscoe who made the difference between a good Art Ensemble of Chicago concert and an utterly transcendent one: when Roscoe was hot, the whole band was hot, often for two chaotic hours at a time.

praise be,
peace out,
RESPECT.

J.w.

Yeah, this is what people say to me when I tell them I don't believe in God.

According to music journalists, every record that came out in 2004 was influenced by Arthur Russell, the Homosexuals, the Blackouts, the Beakers, Blue Cheer, the Free Design, obscure strains of Connecticut hip-hop, Ghana funk, Miami bass, Canadian-made italo disco, or some combination of these extremely important acts that, for whatever reason, couldn't stay in print without a reissue.

This is about right for me, except Nick forgot that I've also been plumping for turn-of-the-last-century Euro-romanticism originally sung in Slavic and Indic languages (w/ beats and bass from Blue Cheer and Miami, natch). What puzzles me, though, is how Nick managed to glimpse the email I sent my friend Elizabeth, the one where I extolled the influential Canadian-made Italo-disco of Lime and Tapps. Maybe he's clairvoyant!

(For those of you who aren't aficionados of Italo-disco, think of it as Miami bass without the bass.)