So much of Prince's eponymous sophomore effort can be summarized by its hysterical cover. Where For You functioned as primarily a disco record, Prince fit more into the funk mold. The move from a hot and current genre to the (relatively) old-fashioned sound that helped spawned it is matched by the change from For You's blurry, flashy cover to the almost-pastel colored photograph that adorns Prince. Featuring a visibly bored Prince standing with his shirt off, the album art suggests Prince at once in his own skin (figuratively stripped down from disco to funk and literally stripped down to a bare chest) and uncomfortably and artificially donning an image in the fierce hunt for success.
That contradiction holds back Prince's second LP, but the fact that Prince is at least somewhat at home with the material marks a step up from his debut. It still sounds more like For You than Dirty Mind, but Prince shows its maker starting to consolidate his early sound into something more focused, capable of setting trends instead of merely following them. Hell, even as Prince starts to distance itself from disco, it does disco better than For You, managing to give even single-length numbers the elasticity and bounce of extended dance mixes and just having groove in the first place, an element sorely lacking from so much of the first album.
Prince opens with the extended cut of its lead single, "I Wanna Be Your Lover," instantly announcing the leap in quality and cohesion between this album and its predecessor. Adding a tighter low-end to For You's spacious synth lines, the track actually has a danceable beat to hook a crowd. Prince also develops his vocal style more, adding funkier, raunchier yowls to his slick falsetto that start to lay on the sex merely talked about in For You's more ribald tunes. "I Wanna Be Your Lover" proved to be a smash, climbing to the top of the Soul chart, going gold on its own and helping push the full LP to platinum status within months.
But it is not even remotely the highlight of the album. "Sexy Dancer" anticipates the compositional busyness that would make Prince's compositions among the densest pop ever recorded. With a female choir chanting the title over funky, spare guitar lines, programmed handclaps and drum patterns and humming synths, "Sexy Dancer" sounds more like a great b-side for Prince's next album than something from this era of his music. "Bambi," meanwhile, expands upon the rock-tinged For You closer "I'm Yours" with a much more refined guitar showcase that still makes an appearance live when Prince wants to cut loose with his axe. Best of all is "I Feel For You," which is not quite as Dirty Mind-ready as "Sexy Dancer" but is nevertheless the runaway highlight of the album. With giddy synths and a bassline that seems to pass through and back out of the song as if it were traveling in elliptical orbit around it, "I Feel For You" wouldn't fit in the arenas Prince would soon fill. But none of his songs to this point feel as primed to set a club going than this, even "I Wanna Be Your Lover," which clearly hooked listeners more.
As with For You, Prince suffers from an excess of uninspired filler. Generally, the fluff on this record rates higher than that of its predecessor: The half-rocking, half-funky "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" and swooning "Still Waiting" are solid numbers that simply do not stand out the way that the superior tracks do. "With You" and "It's Gonna Be Lonely," on the other hand, start slipping from memory even before they conclude. Both recall those weighted standing punching bags that always seem about to tumble, only to frustratingly whip back to their starting point unaltered. Even they seem like early classics, however, when stacked against "When We're Dancing Close and Slow." Easily the worst song off Prince's first two albums (and several LPs beyond that), this travesty lives up to its title by listlessly trudging through its approximation of a prom night slow dance. In fact, it so captures the awkward maneuvering and desperately repressed hormones of a teenage dance that the song may actually be a brilliant work of subjectivity.
But never mind the dross; Prince clearly develops from its artistically and commercially disappointing predecessor, and if it occasionally seems over-calculated to appeal to an audience, that planning clearly worked. In going platinum, the album helped conform Warner Bros' faith in the young artist when they signed him to a three-record deal. It must have also boosted Prince's confidence, as the man who mumbled nervously at the microphone of a rehearsal show for label executives would subsequently go out and support this album, proving so popular that he soon became Rick James' opening act. Before long, Prince and his assembled band would regularly sabotage James and win the open preference of the attending audience. That is more rebellious than anything on Prince, but Prince's music would soon match this brashness, and more.
Inspired by a series I came across at YAM Magazine, I've decided to complement my A Life in Movies post with a similar journey through the music that's stood out for me each year since my birth. Of course, I never heard most of these albums until I hit my late teens, but then that was the case for the movie post too. As I did with my movies post, I will limit myself to one selection per artist to avoid simply piling on, say, Radiohead and Animal Collective albums. I've also included videos for each to give a taste of the albums I picked.
1989: King's X — Gretchen Goes to Nebraska
King's X's second album is their most overtly Christian though the band always opposed description as a Christian rock outfit; indeed, even at its most spiritual, Gretchen contains doubts and realism, transmuting its loftier moments into wistfulness rather than sermonizing faith. Also, it's about as groovy and catchy as subversively technical heavy metal gets, emphasizing Beatlesque vocal harmonies and a funky bottom that manages to sound nothing like Red Hot Chili Peppers and its clones. Doug Pinnick's soul screams on "Mission" and "Over My Head" alone will convert you. To the band, I mean. Calm down.
1990: Public Enemy — Fear of a Black Planet
Admittedly a step down from their previous album, but that's only because every rap album is a step down from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Fear of a Black Planet occasionally tips the outfit's precarious balance between social activism and egomaniacal posturing in the favor of the latter ("Welcome to the Terrordome" blames Jewish groups for being angry about Professor Griff's disgusting anti-Semitic comments), but this is ultimately the third straight landmark from the rap crew. By the time you get to the final track, you're ready lob Molotv cocktails in the streets.
1991: Temple of the Dog — Temple of the Dog
I couldn't decide whether to put Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger or Pearl Jam's Ten here, so I split the difference with this proto-supergroup of members of both bands in tribute to Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone (the band that would became Pearl Jam). In contrast to Soundgarden's mix of sludge and Sabbath and PJ's classic rock throwback, Temple of the Dog is mournful and elegiac while still retaining an edge. The blistering build-up of "Call Me a Dog" and agonized screams of "Say Hello 2 Heaven" are Chris Cornell at his finest, while "Reach Down" offers a stunning glimpse at the guitar interplay that would make Mike McCready and Stone Gossard the best guitar duo of the modern era. Also, check "Hunger Strike" for Eddie Vedder's first recorded vocals for a major release.
1992: Faith No More — Angel Dust
Mike Patton's initial work with FNM on their second LP, The Real Thing, was nasally and half-hearted, only occasionally suggesting real range and skill. But Angel Dust saw not only him but the band grow to unfathomable heights of complexity and intelligence. No longer did Patton and the band sound like RHCP knockoffs; Patton infused the group with his interest in the avant-garde, resulting in an album sonically varied enough for him to unleash his full vocal capabilities. He croons, moans, gnashes, growls, shrieks, raps, holds operatic vibratos and more, and the band never flags behind him. About as daring as mainstream metal gets.
1993: Jeff Buckley: Live at Sin-é
Grace may be the album that will keep Buckley in infamy long past his untimely death ended his career just as it begun, but I prefer this intimate, lilting live album recorded before he made his first (and last) studio album. A four-song EP expanded to a packed 2-CD gig, Live at Sin-é shows Buckley at his rawest, that angelic voice of his echoing in a New York dive before an audience rapt into silence. Not since Van Morrison went into another world during "Listen to the Lion" on It's Too Late to Stop Now have I heard a crowd so utterly awed by a performer. Running through his collection of written material and an eclectic bag of covers running through Zeppelin, Dylan, Édith Piaf, even Qawwali icon Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It's the perfect snapshot of the forces swirling through Buckley, influences we never got to hear in full when he drowned during the making of his second album.
1994: Johnny Cash — American Recordings
Having long since taken on the role of legend, which, as Miles Davis will tell you, means you belong in a museum instead of a stage, Johnny Cash suddenly came stomping back to form with the help of Rick Rubin, who knew that the hard-traveled wisdom of Cash's work would only be more insightful now that he was an old man. The American Recordings series, however inconsistent, is one of the great late-career resurrections in popular music, and its first entry best captures the dying but still smoldering fire in the artist, one he managed to keep going for another decade without sapping all the heat from this sound.
1995: Pulp — Different Class
I've enjoyed some Blur and Oasis, but when I want Britpop, I go straight to the top. Yes, Pulp, with its witty lyrics (the best fusion of comedy and commentary in song since Morrisey came along), populist sympathies and crooning emotion, wins out every time in my book as the third party candidate of the Battle of Britpop. This album is damn near perfect, its title not only emphasizing the class consciousness that pervades their work but the caliber of their music. "Common People" is the best song of the '90s.
1996: The Wildhearts — Fishing for Luckies
Admittedly, this isn't my favorite Wildhearts album (that would be 1995's P.H.U.Q.), but if The Wildhearts represent what Guns 'n Roses could have been if Axl didn't implode like a collapsing star, Fishing for Luckies demonstrates that even Axl's penchant for longer, more intricate songs could have still worked within the band's sound. Some of the songs on this 1996 expansion of a mini-LP stretch past the 7-, 8-, even 11-minute mark (one song is technically nearly 30 minutes, but it's just looped effects after a minute or so). But even the longer tunes sound like proper, party hard rock, frontman Ginger guiding the cascading, sometimes conflicting instruments to the next memorable riff and bridge.
1997: Devin Townsend — Ocean Machine
One of my five favorite albums of all time. Devin Townsend is the Van Morrison of extreme metal, personal to the point of esoterica in his lyrics and capable of vocal and musical ranges that shame most punters. This spectral, ghostly album is the sound of a man standing on a cliff overlooking the sea, contemplating jumping to his death on the rocks below. His side project, Strapping Young Lad, was all about anger, but the main feeling here is anguish. By the time he ends the album's final, hidden track with a sustained banshee shriek of pain, even this eardrum-splitting wail seems a continuation of its quieter, strained moments.
1998: Buckethead — Colma
Forget the goofy name, the weirder look and the penchant for effects-driven, hyperspeed shred metal; when he puts his mind to it, Buckethead is also one of the most beautiful guitar players on the planet. This album, recorded for his mother while she recovered from cancer, is his most gorgeous, a mostly acoustic affair that sounds gentle even when the old Buckethead style pokes through on the fast yet atmospheric "Big Sur Moon." When he goes electric, as he does on "Machete," his legato could challenge Eric Johnson's; it's almost like he isn't strumming, merely moving along the fretboard to the next note without ever diminishing the sound.
1999: The Roots — Things Fall Apart
I have a hard time even going into why The Roots are amazing. A mixture of Prince and hip-hop block party, they are without question the most exciting act out there right now, and they also happen to be one of the most consistent bands in the studio. This is their finest work, a showcase of deft lyrical ability and incredible flow. Jazzy and catchy, Things Fall Apart tightened the band's early, more jam-oriented work into something that knocked on the mainstream's door even as it could still surprise you.
2000: Modest Mouse — The Moon and Antarctica
Almost had to flip a coin between this and Stankonia, but in the end I like this album a bit more. Modest Mouse's greatest album somehow manages to add to their sound—chucking in orchestral touches and denser song structures—while feeling more sparse than preceding efforts. Isaac Brock's repetitious wordplay has never been finer ("I wanna remember to remember to forget I forgot you"), and the songs have never been more piercing and searching. The aggression is still there, but now it's tempered by more reflection, offering up some of Brock's greatest insights into pain and alienation.
2001: The White Stripes — White Blood Cells
The White Stripes were the apotheosis of rock primitivism, punk so punk it went back to true roots rock: blues. Their 2001 effort easily stands as their most ferocious studio offering, perfectly condensing the duo's blend of metal, punk and blues into bursts of energy short enough to fit on old 78s. "Hotel Yorba" is nothing but acoustic guitars and Meg's endearingly undisciplined drumming, but it sounds heavier than just about anything an electric band can cook up, while the blistering "Fell in Love With a Girl" is a sock-hop number as played by the Sex Pistols.
2002: Bruce Springsteen — The Rising
Springsteen's last great album had been his achingly personal and confessional (once you buried under the '80s synth sound) Tunnel of Love in 1988, but this album, released in the wake of 9/11 and informed by the attack, show that most American of rockers helping us through the tragedy. Anger, confusion and unending pain inform it, to the point that even the song written before the attack, "My City of Ruins," becomes inextricably linked to that awful day. But there is also hope, not only on a grand scale ("The Rising") but in the personal joys of continuing to live and love ("Mary's Place").
2003: Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros — Streetcore
Joe Strummer's final album is the best thing he'd done since London Calling, a recalling The Clash's blend of hard-hitting but melodic rock and an intuitive understanding of reggae. Indeed, it sounds like a lost Clash album, but it's also very much the product of a man who'd grown older and wiser. There's always a tendency to reevaluate final songs after an artist's death to see if he "knew," but despite Strummer's sudden death from an undiagnosed heart defect, it's uncanny how centered and at peace he sounds here, despite the political lyrics. At last, he can laugh at the world's darkness, not in nihilistic despair but in some sort of dinner-table understanding between bitter rivals who nevertheless observe etiquette.
2004: Mike Keneally and the Metropole Orkest — The Universe Will Provide
Of all the people to pass through Frank Zappa's ever-shifting, always virtuosic band, Mike Keneally is the one to best understand his former employer's outlook and preference of composition over showboating. Mixing rock with an orchestra is usually a recipe for pomposity and regret, but Keneally's compositions are clearly written with an orchestra in mind and not lazily transcribed for classical instruments. Not to be forgotten are the Orkest's own jazz and improv abilities that allow for greater interaction between them and Keneally. Keneally is sadly unknown, which is all the more upsetting considering how hook-laden a great deal of his music is, and you can hear that catchiness even in this grab bag of orchestral jazz rock.
2005: Robyn — Robyn
The killingest pop star on the planet came stomping back to life after a middling second and third album with a collection of ass-kicking, brilliant Europop to assert her world dominance. Well, America might not appreciate her properly, but I've yet to pass this along to someone who hasn't become a fan. Whether announcing her supreme power with "Konichiwa Bitches" or diving into genuine sorrow with "Be Mine!" and "With Every Heartbeat," Robyn is never less than sincere regardless of what emotion she's conveying at the time. She's also a great singer, not just catchy but aware of the perfect way to hit every note for maximum impact.
2006: TV on the Radio — Return to Cookie Mountain
TVOTR's art-soul is gripping from the moment you first hear one of Tunde Adebimpe's soaring falsettos. Their sound is always drifting, collecting and separating until you're not quite sure what's going on but can't help but love it. Even when the band drones, they do so with such rich harmony that the whole thing is transporting. And then they can come in with a perfectly formed slice of greatness like "Wolf Like Me" and tear the house down.
2007: Animal Collective — Strawberry Jam
Animal Collective's sonic textures have been evolving since their first album, moving from freak-folk all the way into the poppy strains of Merriweather Post Pavilion, but Strawberry Jam strikes the best balance between the mainstream and the avant-garde. The songs build into ecstatic frenzies of sounds so tactile and colorful the album might be the first to give people synesthesia. "Fireworks" and "For Reverend Green" give me such a high I can't even listen to them while driving for fear of losing all concentration.
2008: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds — Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
Nick Cave is another one of those artists who makes so few missteps that it's easy to simply get used to quality releases by him, but this hard-hitting LP demands your attention with its driving riffs and a demonically inspired Cave. Its best tracks are the bookends, the pounding title track and the heavy but spacious and searching "More News from Nowhere."
2009: The xx — xx
Post-punk R&B never sounded so good, with beats offsetting that existential vacuum feeling of post-punk production. The wordless intro alone is a mini-masterpiece, and this is one of the few cases of pop minimalism done perfectly. It's a bashful album, insecure but also determined to prove itself. This is the sound of someone placing a toe in a pool, with the suggestion that a cannonball is rapidly approaching.
2010: Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
What can I say? It's not West's best album (that would be Late Registration), but it's certainly his most "West" record. This is a momument to rap and rock megalomania, a pharaoh's pyramid erect to glorify Yeezy. Featuring a host of perfectly chosen guests, inventive samples (King Crimson? Oh Kanye, you beautiful madman) and lyrics perfectly situated between self-deprecation, self-pity and self-aggrandizement, MBDTF sounds like the end of an era even though I have no idea what era that might be.
Long-lost jazz recordings pique my interest as much as the tease of the most infamous lost films. The frequent airing of Miles Davis' vault brings as much valuable material to me as the discovery of the lost footage in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I would welcome a concert from Thelonious Monk with the same joy as I would those precious excised minutes from The Magnificent Ambersons. Imagine my delight, then, when Sue Mingus, Charles Mingus' widow, discovered tapes of what might have been her husband's finest band at the top of their powers. Remastered and released in full, Cornell 1964 blows previous Blue Note discoveries out of the water, including the rousing but incomplete show of John Coltrane teaming with Thelonious Monk.
Mingus' mid-'60s sextet is the source of as many live recordings as Miles' second quintet or Coltrane's quartet, both of which operated around the same time that Mingus collected his group to tour Europe. Before leaving, however, Mingus held an impromptu concert at Cornell University, a gig so secretive and spontaneous only those who were there knew about it. An ostensible warm-up gig -- the group would play their noted Town Hall concert less than three weeks later and would then depart for the much-bootlegged European tour -- the Cornell gig now stands as perhaps the definitive document of the sextet's short-lived existence.
Funnily enough, however, the show's first eight minutes do not highlight the sextet at all. Instead of launching into group improvisation, Mingus opens the show with two solo spotlights, one for pianist Jaki Byard and one for himself. "ATFW You," a tribute to Art Tatum and Fats Waller, rollicks out of the gate with bouncy block chords, not only making an instant case for the underrated Byard's prodigious, genre-leaping skill but setting the tone for the rest of the evening, one seeped in reverence and irreverence for jazz history. Mingus then comes in for a rendition of Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady," and within seconds the gulf of interest, talent and grace between Mingus' fretwork and the average rock bass solo is unmistakable. Mingus's bass is lyrical, occasionally playful and intense, and he plays with such verve that one suspects, by the end of the piece, a fired bullet would simply shatter on one of his calluses.
Then, the band comes out swinging, in more ways than one. Slurred bass clarinet and tenor sax lines from Eric Dolphy and Clifford Jordan, respectively, introduce the riff to "Fables of Faubus," Mingus' sardonic ode to the Arkansas governor who defied the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court and refused to let the Little Rock Nine into white public schools. A version of "Fables of Faubus" has lyrics that make the political attack more pointed, but it should be noted that Mingus was one of the few composers, of jazz or any genre, who could make instrumental music funny. The 30-minute, wordless rendition here, the centerpiece of the first CD, is simply hysterical. With Dolphy's light brand of free jazz involved, the song's smooth riff gets chopped up by bass clarinet squawks. As the piece weaves through the solos and group improvisations, the group finds new ways to snipe at Faubus. Byard and Mingus trade perfectly timed references, from Byard's use of corny nationalist folk like "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and Chopin's "Funeral March" to Mingus executing a sudden segue into "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." The already-potent satire explodes with these allusions and their connotations. It's also a pleasure to hear trumpeter Johnny Coles so clear and piercing here, as he would spend much of the European tour terribly ill. Not the strongest player, Coles instead hones his notes to a dart that can poke through the wall of sound made by the others.
Amazingly, this half-hour tour-de-force is not only not the climax of the show (in fact, it's the opposite, serving to get the audience hooked), it is not even the finest moment of the performance. Disc two contains another half-hour improvisation around another of Mingus' political songs, in this case "Meditations" (short for "Meditations on Integration"). Hauntingly started on Dolphy's flute and arco bass by Mingus, morphs into such an astonishing sonic journey that the song feels both longer and shorter than its running time and features such perfect interplay between the musicians that the sextet sounds much larger, orchestral even. At times, Dolphy's clarinet and Jordan's sax play off each other in such harmony that I started to think only one of them was playing even though I was hearing sounds exclusive to each instrument back-to-back. Coles even perks up here and bolster his precision playing, while Dannie Richmond not only holds down the rhythm but adds to the improvised yet carefully charted direction. Byard, once more, slays, and Mingus plays off all of them and maintains that indefatigable swing that informed all of his compositions, even the orchestral ones.
The rest of the tracks offer their own delights. Mingus returns to his Ellington worship with a rousing version of "Take the 'A' Train," one that captures and magnifies the lyrical imagery of Duke's composition but turns the jaunty ride through Brooklyn and northern Manhattan into a fire-belching locomotive out of control, slowly gaining speed through a mid-tempo opening and a lovely interlude by Byard into increasingly fast solos. Mingus starts yelling at one point, and so does the crowd, who scream with laughter at the brilliant madness.
After "Meditations" comes "So Long Eric," Mingus' tongue-in-cheek but affectionate farewell to Dolphy, who planned to remain in Europe at the end of the band's tour, that was sincere enough to live on as a devastating eulogy when the multi-instrumentalist died three months later of diabetic shock in Berlin. I will save most of my superlatives for Dolphy for when I inevitably give him a post all his own, but the man was astonishing, capable not only of learning multiple instruments but mastering them and even forging new rules for each to pass down to future players. Whether playing the flute, bass clarinet or alto sax -- and all get a workout at this gig -- he sounds as if the finest players of each, those who dedicated their lives to only one of these instruments, could not approach him. What's more, Eric might have been the only person to come into contact with the highly bipolar Mingus and emerge physically and emotionally unscathed: not only did Mingus viciously berate others when angry, stories abound of him ruining a trombonist's embouchure with a punch to the mouth or slamming a piano lid down on the player's fingers, but of Dolphy he never had anything but praise and brotherly love. Here, with the band still in the States and all the players hale, the tune is still a fond thank-you to a friend, a sweet au revoir and not a goodbye. Later performances of the piece in Europe have a tinge of elegy to them, but this is the best way to remember Dolphy: its wit, sincerity and complexity matches the man for whom it is played.
That lighter tone informs the last two numbers, rarities played by Mingus for a laugh. "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" gets a jazz makeover for St. Patrick's Day (the concert was March 18), and Coles gets his moment to fully shine with a fantastic, energetic yet still measured solo that moves so smoothly you wonder when he breathes. The performance closes with a reading of the standard "Jitterbug Waltz," faeturing Dolphy back on flute playing off Byard while Mingus and Richmond sync up in the way that only they could; Richmond was the only person strong enough to see it through to the end with Mingus, joining his group in 1957 and staying by the mercurial bassist/composer until Mingus died in 1979. Who knows how many fights Richmond witnessed or was even involved in, but Mingus must have known he could never have allowed the drummer to leave. He understood Mingus too well, understood what he wanted to do with his sound and where he wanted to travel sonically. Their hive-mind understanding is nakedly visible throughout this song, and as ever they move the music in different directions even as they maintain the original rhythm.
Cornell 1964 catches Mingus at a crossroads. Having assembled a band he knew go wherever he wanted them to, his happiness is infectious. He was also aware that, despite the obits, jazz was alive and well in 1964 and was heading in powerful, bold new directions (Mingus himself had only just released his jazz ballet The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, what may well be the apex of jazz, even over Miles' Kind of Blue). In a few months, however, the man he called a "saint" would die on a hospital bed, plunging Mingus into a depression he would not shake for nearly a decade of inactivity. Yet even in context, not even a wisp of a gray cloud hangs over this recording. Here are six hot players at the top of their improvisational game; just add swing and you've got one of the greatest live albums ever released.
For those in the know, Tom Verlaine is the best alt.guitar soundsmith this side of Robert Quine, though those not in the know would be even less aware of ol' Quine. Picking up where Robert Fripp left off, Verlaine added sinewy, raw energy to Fripp's piercing laser lines. Amazingly, he took this style to CBGB in time for the punk explosion there and somehow stayed on the stage. He even fired the only punk among his group of actually competent musicians, Richard Hell. And yet, Television thrived during its brief lifespan, releasing just two albums and building a decades-long influence with only one of them.
Marquee Moon does not remotely sound like anything that came out of out CBGBs, including the work of Talking Heads. Mislabeled as proto-new-wave by those struggling to find some genre for the wild album, Marquee Moon is the greatest rock guitar record. to rest just outside the spotlight, neither obscure nor mainstream. It's too advanced and esoteric to ever fly as quickly to the lips of any sputtering wannabe axe-slinger as Are You Experienced? or Machine Head, but it's also too damn appealing and transporting to be ignored altogether.
By the time Verlaine made Marquee Moon, he ironed out all the wrinkles with Television, canning Hell (a move for the best for both of them), solidifying his interplay with rhythm guitarist Richard Lloyd and hammering out his poetry. Yes, his poetry. That Verlaine took his stage name from the French symbolist poet was the first indication he might not jel with the ethos and style of the Ramones. Verlaine didn't even mesh with Hell or Patti Smith, who both traded in a more gritty, streetwise brand of poetry. For where Smith and Hell used harsh rock as a backdrop for socially conscious and rebellious lyrics, Verlaine used lyrics to weave in and out of the music, as if instead of imagery and meaning Verlaine obsessed over meter.
From the opening strains of "See No Evil," his approach can be vividly heard. Vocals bend and scatter with guitar lines, chugga-chugga rhythms fall apart into peeled-off notes at mid-tempo, as if someone took a shredder, slowed him down, then placed him over a crunchy post-punk riff to see if anyone would notice. When everything snaps together for the chorus shout of "I see/I see no/EVAHLLLLLLLL" the effect is, if anything, more disorienting than when the band all seemed to be doing their own thing. What might have passed for a more accomplished brand of slop from a half-talented punk group suddenly reveals itself to be a carefully modulated effort by supremely gifted and practiced musicians.
Just as you get a handle on this, the band launches into "Venus," a warped ode with a call-and-response chorus that makes the shaking yelp of the previous track seem tame. Lilting guitar lines always sound as if leading to a solo until it becomes clear Verlaine has been soloing the entire time over his plaintive lyrics. When the backups shout "Huh?!" one sympathizes. "Friction" brings Lloyd into the fore with Verlaine, trading intervallic licks and crunching effects as Fred Smith's bass and Billy Ficca's drums hold down some semblance of a beat. Ficca and Smith are superb in their own right: Smith's bass so fluid he must have torn out his hair dealing with the average string smashing goon holding down the low end in other CBGB favorites. He meshes perfectly with Ficca, whose jazzy style navigates the winding turns of each song.
Lloyd and Verlaine's intertwining guitars, unified only when not in direct, thrilling conflict with each other, find their true outlet on the next song, the title track. A 10-minute behemoth that severed any ties still linking Television to its earlier, rawer roots, "Marquee Moon" is the culmination of Verlaine's approach to music, much as it much chagrin him. Savage and beautiful, contradictory yet whole, the song is a mounting climax, Lloyd and Verlaine thrusting and receding, pitting Lloyd's more chord-based improvisations rubbing against Verlaine's legato style. But to lump in this cascading, wild soloing with the dinosaur rock Television's contemporaries raged against would be inaccurate: this is a whole other style of rock, one that incorporates jazz without being fusion (which came with its own host of lumbering, masturbatory musicians). As much as Verlaine might be the mastermind, the others are not there merely to back him up, and a degree of understanding and intuition exists between them one normally expects only from a jazz combo. It makes even their most drawn-out noodling thrilling, something to be taken in for more than mere admiration of musical chops. The solos here are alive, vivacious and emotionally engaging as well as jaw-dropping in a "how the hell did they do this?" kind of way.
Anyone else would have ended the album with such a show-stopper, yet Television regroups for a whole other side of material, all of which holds its own against the preceding leviathan. "Elevation" sports such a beautiful riff I find myself almost wishing it remained a simple tune just so I could hear it more, but Verlaine and Lloyd by now are emboldened; they used the title track to prove their mettle, freeing them to explore full-time. The rest of the cuts demonstrate the same degree of exploration as seen in the side-one closer at shorter lengths, cramming jams into manageable chunks. "Guiding Light," with its lilting melody, could have worked as an off-kilter slow dance tune, but even Verlaine's softer pleads have their witticisms -- I always get a kick out of "Never the rose without the prick."
The album closes with "Torn Curtain," a song that appropriately tears down the veil. Staccato lyrics flit around clanged chords and broken choruses. Everything falls apart, then it comes together just long enough to prove to everyone that the crumbling is a planned detonation before breaking down again. Still, even the mild insecurity of this double-check cannot hinder the raw energy of the song, its broken windchime-like jangles doing as much to pave the way for atmospheric post-punk as the two Joy Division albums a few years down the pipeline.
Marquee Moon exploded among the critical community in 1977, placing third in the Pazz & Jop poll and building mountains of hype the band could never hope to match. Their live shows were clear expansions of the rapport the band shared in the studio, long songs growing into longer ones (but still coherent and focused, in the band's singularly unfocused way), and the punks who might have tolerated Television in the studio found little use in their live act. Johnny Rotten himself, a not-so-closeted art rock lover, reversed his complimentary appraisal of them after seeing Television live and understanding he could not protect his punk cred unless he threw Verlaine under a bus.
When the group returned to the studio to record the follow-up, the wonderful Adventure, the pressure had taken its toll. Though Adventure is more than a worthy successor, it received and continues to be received indifferently by many for the terrible sin of not being as revolutionary as Marquee Moon. Few albums are. Even today, the guitar work of Verlaine and Lloyd defies easy description, and Verlaine's scattershot poetry holds up a great deal better than many of the supposed rock bards. Television broke up shortly after the release of their second album, and Verlaine went on to enjoy a decently healthy solo career befitting a cult hero, but everything in those albums can be traced back to this one wild slice of art rock outside any genre. Verlaine's name has faded from the minds of many, but I can't understand it. One listen to Marquee Moon and every neophyte will come away with a new guitar god. I'll take these magnificent fractals and searching melodies over Eric Clapton's tired crap any day of the week.
When he died Dec. 17 at the age of 69, Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, had not produced any music since 1982's Ice Cream for Crow. Nevertheless, his passing summoned an unlikely yet not unexpected outpouring from those who ignored him in life but found reader mileage in giving him tribute in death. Thankfully, he was not absorbed into the mainstream he shunned in the same way that his old buddy Frank Zappa was when he got induction into the Rock 'N Roll Hall of Fame months after his own passing, but once January rolls around, I bet the odd name that most had never heard before will disappear from people's lips as quickly as it appeared.
Rather than eulogize the man, which would require a knowledge of the other forms of art he produced after retiring from music that I do not possess -- though that certainly has not stopped some -- I would like to honor one of the most advanced and original artists I have ever heard with a review of my favorite album of his, one fans embrace but the critical press often relegates to the heap in favor of the legendary Trout Mask Replica. Beefheart always was the kind of guy who would never be allowed more than a single shot at recognition anyway.
Yet Trout Mask Replica's follow-up, 1970's Lick My Decals Off, Baby, takes the fractals of avant-garde brilliance from Trout and hones them. It is still, first and foremost, a work that defies easy classification, but the sound is clearer now, the compositions more coherent. The opening title track bursts out of the gate with precise guitar lines and carefully controlled percussion, a shocking harmony that Beefheart shatters with his trademark yelps and growls when he jumps in with the lines, "I wanna lick you where it's pink/In everywhere you think," and the sheer force of his weirdness instantly breaks the band, who splinter into the carefully controlled chaos that is Beefheart's specialty.
Decals brings back the bluesier influence of Safe as Milk and mixes it with the off-the-wall genre blend of Trout Mask Replica, delighting in the unleashed id but retaining a soulfulness in its fitfully recalled Chicago blues that Beefheart could always command. By vocalizing not only Howlin' Wolf's pained growls but the hideous-beautiful squawks of Ornette Coleman's saxophone, Van Vliet unites the avant-garde with the traditional and direct, and his free-associative poetry likewise blends the abstract with the articulately real.
Where some artists might couch their libidos in double entendre and innuendo that usually isn't half as clever as people think, Beefheart lays it all out there, so blunt that his explicit and graphic descriptions of lewd acts and almost medical close-ups of genitalia loop around into interpretive metaphor. On the hilariously titled "I Wanna Find Me A Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go" -- the title is so long Van Vliet barely has time to speak the words and a few other lines before the song reaches its conclusion -- Beefheart never goes beyond the stated body part but fills the mind with obscene imagery simply through the suggestive properties of his sex-mad yelps.
Yet, by and large, Lick My Decals Off, Baby does not place primary focus on sex as Trout Mask Replica did. Instead, vaguely political, highly apocalyptic imagery abounds. The "parapliers" (sic) tugging on the sky in "Bellerin' Plain" send the heavens crashing down around a locomotive engineer who pumps coke into the furnace in a futile attempt to outpace the end of days -- besides, where could he go, trapped on those rails? "Petrified Forest" hones Beefheart's lyrics for a devastating attack on the world's polluters choking the planet and its inhabitants. And nothing sums up the rapidly mounting social terrors afflicting the United States and the world at the onset of the '70s like the terrifying lines of "The Buggy Boogie Woogie": "One day I was sweepin' down by the wall/I bumped a mama spider 'n the babies begin' to fall/Off o' my broom/Now I gotta keep on sweepin' 'n sweepin'/'fore they fill the room." With all this pressure weighing down on matters, it's no wonder the good captain so often retreats into the only safe haven available to him: the birth canal of the nearest willing woman.
Van Vliet composed much of the album on the piano, which poses something of a problem as he did not know how to play the instrument. But part of the charm and purity of Beefheart's recordings was his penchant for having his band play anything and assembling something from the cacophonous results. Apocryphal stories abound regarding Van Vliet's authoritarian touch with his bandmates, the most infamous of which concern his supposedly cult-like breaking of will during the months-long rehearsal for Trout Mask Replica. Whether Van Vliet psychologically tortured his crew depends mostly on whose memoir you read, but what is unquestionable is that he took his players' musical training and unmade it, showing them how to break every rule before refashioning the shattered pieces into something that makes music.
Where the brief snippets of Trout Mask Replica represented the sound of the breaking apart, Lick My Decals Off, Baby shows off the reconstruction. Bill Harkleroad a.k.a. Zoot Horn Rollo took the tapes of Van Vliet's haphazard piano sketches and helped assemble the "I Love You, Big Dummy" loses the melody before it even begins, but it still works as a rollicking blues number that hides a danceable beat somewhere in its collapsing squeal. The instrumentals -- the best of them being "Peon" -- could be mistaken for warm-ups if the tones of the clanking, atonal instruments did not carry a passion one doesn't put into scales.
Even the philistines who would dismiss Beefheart as yet another charlatan hiding behind random noise as art could not deny that the world lost an original satirist Dec. 17. With scant lines and even less coherence, Captain Beefheart could skewer anything, from the aforementioned polluters to the re-homogenization of the post-Love Generation nuclear family ("Space-Age Couple," all condescending jabs toward those who incorporated the progressive into the reactionary). But I feel we lost so much more with this artist, whose five-octave range never sounded so expressive as it does here. Lick My Decals Off, Baby represents the apotheosis of Van Vliet's output, aligning the music to the same dynamic range as the captain's hoots, hollers, shrieks, growls, purrs and whoops while offering the best of his sexual imagery and his sociopolitical observations. Following this album, Captain Beefheart would move his Magic Band into increasingly mainstream waters until he shoved too hard and trapped them in the No Man's Land between commerce and the avant-garde where no fan treads. Van Vliet would later pull them back from the brink with his last three albums, all of them magnificent, but they all lacked the spark contained in these early albums. With Lick My Decals Off, Baby, Captain Beefheart said all he could say, and that just so happened to be more than anyone else to come along in the intervening four decades.
Though I didn't listen to nearly as many albums this year as I do normally, I still managed to find a number of impressive works by various groups, many of which I'd never heard before. I don't know enough about music and musical trends to break down the musical landscape of the year in the way I do film, but here at least are my picks for the finest albums of the year, a selection of rap, pop and rock tunes that dug into the recesses of my mind in the most maddening ways.
With rock stars now divided between the introspective or, in the case of such megastars as Bono, the preaching, Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a refreshing bit of self-congratulation from the best egomaniac in pop music today. Mixing the earnestness of his previous album with the whirlwind of self-mythologizing bravado from his early stuff, Yeezy makes not only his best album but a masterpiece of mainstream hip-hop, a genre that's been hard up for truly great records over the last few years. Not a single song fails, and several could vie for the title of best Kanye song, from the King Crimson-quoting deification of "Power" to the guest star smorgasbord of "Monster" to the simultaneously plaintive and bitingly satiric "Runaway." I've always liked Kanye's braggadocio more than his music -- even though I've enjoyed that too -- but this is a modern classic.
2. Big Boi — Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
Outkast's less-praised beats André 3000 to the solo album punch and produces a work of Southern hip-hop that, were it not for that pesky Yeezy, would have been far and away the best rap album to hit the mainstream in years. But a respectable second is no damnation of Sir Lucious Left Foot's copious offerings, a carefully selected set of tunes to get any club hopping at an instant. Yet the lyrical range he covers is astounding, from the pure, egomaniacal dance track "Shutterbugg" to racial politics in "Fo' Yo' Sorrows." Through it all, he maintains a deft flow and a devastating wit, and he boasts perhaps the finest production job of the year. He may be overdue for the critical raves thrown at him this year, but at least we all finally realized that Big Boi casts a long shadow.
3. Deerhunter — Halcyon Digest
Deerhunter's balance between the aggression of shoegaze and its softer alter ego, dream pop, crystallized in 2007's Cryptograms, and the band have further honed it ever since. Lacking the off-the-wall, schizophrenic heights of Microcastle/Weird Era Cont., Halcyon Digest nevertheless presents Deerhunter, for the first time, without the waffle. Never have Bradford Cox's reflections on mortality been more direct, as on "Basement Scene," where he cants the usual youth rhetoric "I don't want to get old" until he realizes what that truly means and changes his tune. Closing with a tribute to the late Jay Reatard that ends on as frustratingly curt and maddening a note as the musician's life, Halcyon Digest may not add anything major to Deerhunter's sound, but it does demonstrate how much more powerful they can be with a formula most would be happy to call fully developed.
4. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — The Social Network
At once a work of postmodern, post-digital age electronica and a throwback to Harold Faltermeyer scores of '80s action movies, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score for The Social Network is as masterful, forward-thinking yet reverent to art history as the movie it complements. The score is sinister, bubbling and hissing like the industrial age in its death throes as we move into the new age: the digital era, where the only industry is virtual. Electronic scores are hit-and-miss, and even when they work (e.g. Vangelis' work for Blade Runner), the score chiefly reflects a certain aspect of the atmosphere. Reznor and Ross manage to truly dig their processed beeps and static into the fabric of the film itself, not an occasionally aligning moodscape but a true expression of both feeling and narrative. Besides, it also works as one of the best standalone records of the year.
5. Agalloch — Marrow of the Spirit
By far Agalloch's most musically accomplished work to date, Marrow of the Spirit shows the Portland instant legends returning to black metal just to show how far beyond it they've evolved. While it lacks the seeping atmosphere of the group's masterpiece, The Mantle, the new album deftly mixes the band's Emersonian folk with a Nordic edge, capturing the evil and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest in a way that would terrify every Twihard making a road trip to Forks, Wash. These guys may play fast, but what impresses me the most about them is how they can stretch only a few chords into 10-, 12-, 17-minute sojourns that are in no way minimalistic but dense, ever-shifting and adventurous. Besides the honing of instrumental craft, the vocals have never sounded better either, from the articulate rasps to those chilling moments of clean voice that roll over the sound as if John Haughm had been taking lessons from Mikael Åkerfeldt. The most consistently rewarding band in modern metal strikes again.
6. Flying Lotus — Cosmogramma
Flying Lotus' blend of electronic and jazz has never been so pressing. It's an album layered with detail and conflicting noises even its quietest moments, a densely packed web of carefully programmed sounds and the tension that only live performers can bring, especially Steven Bruner's thunderous bass, which has the laser-like precision of Robert Fripp's guitar. Jazz, techno, IDM, even the hints of blaxploitation swirl into the mix, homogenized into a unified artistic vision without sacrificing the identity of each genre incorporated. It's Steve Ellison's most cohesive work to date, and also his most musically accomplished. Considering he was already ahead of the curve, I wonder if anyone can catch him now.
7. The Roots — How I Got Over
The most consistent group in hip-hop make an album that stands out even among their discography. Taking a page from all the indie bands The Roots have seen and occasionally played with on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, their latest is more stripped down and spacious than some of the hard-edged and dense records they've done. But the room only allows Black Thought to expand, laying down some of his finest and most direct rhymes. How I Got Over is perhaps the finest album to come along since the 2008 election to touch upon the flip-side of Obama's optimism (best seen in earnestness, if not quality, on Springsteen's Working on a Dream). It gets into the disillusionment, the frustration, the fear of the fringe that exploded in fury. As ever Black Thought can be bluntly real and abstractly allegorical in the same savage line, and nothing sums things up quite like "Got immunized for both flus/But I'm still sick."
8. The National — High Violet
After crafting one of the seminal alienated youth albums of the decade with Boxer, Matt Berninger and The National shift gears, asking of the audience that they break themselves of their obsession with the adolescent and consider the even more chilling meditations of middle age. Now Berninger doesn't simply croon about the feelings of isolation in a world where interaction occurs mainly in the abstract of the Internet, he introduces his fears as a family man. With more of an overt Springsteen vibe than ever before, High Violet retains the core National sound but develops a new lyrical direction. "Bloodbuzz Ohio" has the tragic air of misery in hindsight that makes Springsteen's "The River" so haunting, while "Afraid of Everyone" updates the sense of loneliness and fear that undercut Boxer's "Mistaken for Strangers" to reflect the heightened terror of a man trying to defend his family from the same uncaring world. It may lack the rawer, more personal feeling of Boxer, but then I say that as a 21-year-old to whom that album more directly appeals. High Violet is an album I intend to revisit over the years, as I imagine it will have more and more to say to me as I grow older.
9. Buckethead — Shadows Between the Sky
Another year, another seven Buckethead albums, including an all-banjo set and two multi-disc box sets made with Brian Mantia and Melissa Reese. Of the latest crop, the best is easily Shadows Between the Sky, a release already on its way to to classic status even among the treasure trove of Buckethead's canon. For all his guitar wizardry and electronic noodling, there's an ineffable grace to Buckethead's acoustic and soft electric side, from the beautiful Colma to the darkly ambient Electric Tears. Made during one of the guitarist's periods of illness, Shadows is somber but not bleak, the assured work of a man who has had to ponder mortality before and hasn't let it get him down (did I mention the six other albums he released in 2010?). The use of harmonics is gorgeous, and a surprisingly sophisticated bass element -- the weak element in every Buckethead project that doesn't involve Les Claypool or Jonas Hellborg -- is both contrapuntal and suggestive in its own right, hinting at the darker energies Buckethead holds at bay. Brian Patrick Carroll has put out 29 albums and three box sets under his moniker alone since 1992, and Shadows Between the Sky stands proud not only among them but taken with the innumerable collaborations he's done in his 20 years of work.
10. Robyn — Body Talk
Technically a compilation of her two 2010 EPs with some new tracks that would make their way onto a third, Robyn's Body Talk is nevertheless the finest pop album in some time, at least since Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster if not Robyn's own 2005 eponymous effort. Where Gaga has appropriated Eurotrash into her raunchy, hissing garishness, the Swedish elf puts her efforts toward something more beautiful and direct. Her lyrics are some of the most forward-thinking I've heard in a long time from pop: take her novel approach to the love triangle on "Call Your Girlfriend," in which she steals away another's man but gently nurses their breakup to minimize hurt feelings. And listen to her genuine pain on "Dancing on My Own" as she finds herself on the other side of that line, watching the object of her desire happy with someone else. The Body Talk EPs were already tight bursts of perfectly chosen pop, and together the songs lose none of their immediacy.
11. Beach House — Teen Dream
Beach House's third LP is as delightful as dream pop gets. Victoria Legrand's voice is not particularly accomplished, but it is perfectly suited to the ethereal roll of the genre, her vocals drifting and dissipating in the wind in half-remembered gusts. Equally rewarding as soft background noise and as a work worthy of dedicated listening, Teen Dream may not reach the same dream pop heights of The xx's powerful debut last year, but its lilting, immaculately paced melodies make for one of the best listening experiences of the year.
12. Matthew Dear — Black City
Matthew Dear's Black City is a microhouse take on David Bowie, and the range of primal and processed sounds covered in its length explicitly recalls the African-tinged Krautrock that made Lodger such a warped delight. Black City is as tortured and grim as you might expect from the title, filled with funky beats that crawl and creep. It's danceable but also unsettling, and I didn't know whether to sway to the excellent "You Put a Smell on Me" or book a therapy session. The album's standout, the demented disco epic "Little People (Black City)," Dear's Scary Monsters-era Bowie vocals eat themselves, moving in spoken-word rhymes that convey Station to Station-era desperation. Black City is one of the year's albums most worthy of repeat listens, but perhaps that's a side effect of its schizophrenic and paranoid atmosphere.
13. How to Dress Well — Love Remains
Tom Krell's pet project evolved from its incessant stream of EPs to a fully-formed statement that blends lo-fi ambience and classic R&B. Love Remains' intervallic leaps between the sparse ("Suicide Dream 2") to the melodic ("Youn Won't Need Me Where I'm Goin',""Lover's Start") never breaks How to Dress Well from its prevailing atmosphere of moody emptiness. The unlikeliest album of the year, Love Remains is also all the more rewarding for somehow pulling itself off.
14. John Grant — Queen of Denmark
Former Czars frontman John Grant emerges from the ashes of the dream pop/country outfit to team up with '70s soft rock throwbacks Midlake. Queen of Denmark is a purging for the immensely underappreciated singer, a way for him to come to terms with growing up gay in a conservative community. From the hysterical breakup song "Where Dreams Go to Die" -- featuring the catty-as-hell line "I regret the day your lovely carcass caught my eye" -- to the bizarre pop-culture-as-autobiography "Sigourney Weaver," Queen of Denmark is savage but dear, melding Grant's haunting baritone with Midlake's spare but effective orchestration to convey lingering anger and hardening regret. Especially powerful are the anti-religious screed "Jesus Hates Faggots" and the closing title track, a final purge of Grant's hangups and the most beautiful song on the album. The Czars were unjustly neglected during their run, and Grant proves just as masterful striking out on his own. Seek him out, please.
15. Titus Andronicus — The Monitor
A boozy blend of Bruce Springsteen's working-man directness and The Pogues' loutish folk-punk, Titus Andronicus' The Monitor loosely configures post-Obama political frustration around Civil War imagery, perhaps a commentary on how we've progressed but also a statement on the renewal of tensions based at least partly on extreme racial tension. But the chief delight of The Monitor is in its rousing, anthemic blend of sloppiness and razor-sharp writing, an Irish wake and subsequent angry hangover. "The enemy is everywhere," barks Patrick Stickles throughout, but this buzzing crash of punk will drive the demons away like beasts from fire.
Honorable Mentions: Arcade Fire — The Suburbs; Johnny Cash — American VI: Ain't No Grave; Marc Ribot — Silent Movies; Richard Thompson — Dream Attic; Sufjan Stevens — The Age of Adz; The Fall — Your Future Our Clutter; The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble — Miles Away; Vampire Weekend — Contra
Let me just be clear from the start: I love Kanye West. I love his production values, I love the ambition of his raps (even when he overreaches) and I love the impressive range of his sampling. But most of all, and this is where I break from the majority, I love his ego. These days, it's impossible to find a true egomaniac in pop music. There are self-absorbed celebrities a-plenty, but they don't have ego so much as adolescent petulance. The only time you see any true self-worship now is in the loathsome back-patting of the Bonos of the world, acting as if increasingly stale music and stage shows that suck up untold megawatts are going to save the planet. Kanye West doesn't waste my time acting as if he's important to the vitality of the Earth; he just comes out and lets everyone know that he's better than us, and when he's done singing to a crowd that paid top dollar for concert tickets, he'll go party like a king.
No one else has managed to combine product-placing, corporatist hip-hop culture with the equally hollow "fuck you" attitude of stadium rockers who live on merchandise sales. If West's ego wasn't as massive and self-sustaining as it is, he could never position himself as the last great rock star in an era that demands everything be small and manageable. You can't handle Kanye, and that's what I adore about him.
Thus, when he stripped his sound down to the mellow, minimalist electronica of 808s and Heartbreak, Kanye lost his most precious asset: his bombast. By the same token, it was a logical progression for the man who'd turned himself into the David Bowie of hip-hop, smashing together contradictory genres and complex, occasionally revealing lyrics through a removed, self-aware prism and somehow making it all work within the mainstream. Tom Breihan of the Village Voice rightly compared it to Bowie's Low, though I believe the comparison only applies to the thought process behind it, not the quality. Where Bowie found a way to deliver plaintive desperation through Krautrock hiss and beeps, West stripped the self-love of hip-hop to delve into ideas of loneliness and forlorn love via black roots instead of white noise. At times, the album touched upon R&B; in other places, it traveled all the way back to the tribal drums that formed the basis for all of humanity's music. A great many parts of 808s worked, and the decision to truly give into self-examination after circling the idea in previous albums was a surprisingly candid move for the artist, but he could never fit all his ideas into the sparer sound.
With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye finds the bridge between the introspective, forward-thinking pop of 808s and the swirling, cataclysmic excess of his fiery early work. Not only is it West's best album to date, it is the finest mainstream hip-hop album in years, perhaps since OutKast broke out of their rewarding but esoteric sound with Stankonia, or at least M.I.A.'s Kala.
West's latest album is, of course, colored by his tumultuous behavior in recent years. On-stage tantrums over malfunctions, huffy reaction to VMA shutouts (they're VMAs, Kanye. Like you can't just buy any kind of bookends to serve the same purpose?), a hilariously angry blog that poured from a stream of consciousness, all of these things reflected an increasingly erratic MC. People started to turn on Kanye, and even his mother's death from elective surgery could not win him a break as fans descended upon her still-warm body to cluck tongues and speculate over her plastic surgery. It all culminated, of course, with the 2009 VMAs, during which Kanye leaped on the stage as Taylor Swift accepted her award for Best Female Video with a now-infamous (and parodied to death) rant that set the media ablaze with condemnation. Everyone fell upon a black man for ruining some innocent, porcelain doll-faced white woman's moment in the spotlight, and even Jay Leno used the first episode of his execrable 10 p.m. show to humiliate West for ratings, having the gall to bring Kanye's dead mother into the fray. What no one mentioned was that Kanye was right: Beyoncé's video was better, and even MTV agreed when it awarded her Video of the Year -- and I don't recall anyone making a fuss over Beyoncé somehow making the best video period but not the best by a woman (or, for the matter, why artists are credited with music videos they have little to no creative input in). The damage was done, scarring West from the burns of the media and sustaining Taylor Swift's fleeting career for a whole extra year.
With that pressure still weighing on him, West has decided, after trying to make amends in noble but misguided efforts, to take the only sensible route: to laugh it off, get some shots in at himself, and then introduce the public to the most egotistical Kanye yet. Oh, you thought he was a jackass before? Well, just try to withstand the sonic onslaught of a rock star putting aside his personal record and returning to the arena. God help anyone caught in his path.
Opening with an electronic take on "Once Upon a Time" fairy tale introductions, "Dark Fantasy" wastes no time leaping into Ye's fever dream, backing up the invitation to read a hip-hop fable with choir vocals, at last sending West in to start upping himself from the word go. West's flow sounds immensely improved, no longer overstuffed with too many words that threaten to collapse the meter. Only the stray line "Too many Urkels on your team/That's why your win's low" screeches to a halt (it is the worst moment of the album, but at least it passes in an instant). With its church choir chorus, "Dark Fantasy" brings back the religious icon feel of Yeezy. Only West could use such a bombastic and self-serving track as the gentle introduction to his self-promotion.
"Gorgeous" moves into the other side of the album, in which West comes to term with the more insufferable side of his pompous personality. Referencing, among other things, South Park's scathing takedown of his arrogance, West takes stock of the down side of his ego, reframing it around the feeling of being hated by seemingly the whole world. That self-pity turns to self-righteous anger as West refuses to give in to these feelings of victimization, even as he softens his ambitions. "What's a black Beatle anyway?" he asks of his desire to be a legend, "A fucking roach?"
Elsewhere, Yeezy gets deeper into the heart of the war between his ego and the world. "Power" brilliantly samples King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man," a song that described man with everything and nothing. "Nothing he's got, he really needs," intones Greg Lake through distorted vocals, a perfect encapsulation of where Kanye's at right now. The album's centerpiece, "Runaway" pays tribute to himself by way of honoring the "douchebags, assholes and jerkoffs." It's a 10-minute marvel, one of the most garishly self-loving pieces of music ever recorded, but the range of moods covered -- sarcastic, tragic, boastful -- is impressive. By the time it ends, you too will be ready to give a toast to the douchebags.
But not even Kanye can spend the entire time praising himself. "All the Lights" places a number of guests front and center, and the most affecting line is Kanye's brief mourning for Michael Jackson, one of his heroes. "Monster" plays out nearly as a rap duel, pitting Jay-Z, Rick Ross, even the frontman Bon Iver(?) against each other. Then Nicki Minaj bursts in and just destroys them. It's a fierce number, and another that Yeezy entrusts to others. Yet his hand guides these tracks, his expertise with production orchestrating the guests until they feel like conduits for Kanye's vision. I've heard a handful of complaints regarding the production values of this album, and I just cannot comprehend them. West has never been so able to capture the full bombast of his self-love, but here he at last directs everything back to its source: himself. It's utterly shameless, and utterly brilliant.
Wronged by the VMAs and humiliated at the hands of no less ignominious a villain as Jay Leno, West uses My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to make his own plaudits. When he closes out "Blame Game" with an extended Chris Rock bit, he makes his own talk show in which he is the beloved star, not the butt of a joke. It turns the album into a variety hour, complete with the parade of musical guests, all of them working to make Kanye look good. The voices come together on "Lost in the World," all auto-tuned to magnify the sound further as West gets some last minute proclamations in, and it's amazing how fresh the album still feels at this point.
With nowhere else to go, West releases us from his glorious present and looks to the future, taking a spoken-word performance by Gil Scott-Heron to tackle the vicious political climate that has resurfaced in America. Scott-Heron's portentous poem, punctuated by profane innuendo, lets us know that Yeezy knows of the problems that affect us mere mortals, but the hilarious suggestion inherent in the track is that West considers the self-immolation of the United States as it enters the final stages of its days as a superpower the only implosion more spectacular than his. "If God had an iPod," CyHi Da Prynce raps in "So Appalled," "I'd be on his playlist." It's a line West must wish he'd said himself, but by the end of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, even a self-promoter like Kanye must have realized that particular truth was self-evident.
The opening chords of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation lurch, dissipate and echo as if reaching through the murk of the '80s underground, searching for that vein of emotional and sociopolitical gold that ran through the rough of cocaine-fueled hyper-gloss. Sonic Youth, having honed their craft from a messy, highly experimental yet tame no-wave sound into something unique and formidable with previous albums EVOL and Sister, were on the precipice of launching themselves to the top of the budding indie rock heap. In Kim Gordon's drifting prologue, the band at last sees the path to glory, and they break through to it with as much majesty as rock 'n roll has ever contained.
When the riff for "Teen Age Riot" flies out of the speaker as soon as Gordon's prose fades, you know the band has crossed a threshold. An anthem worthy of placement with "Like a Rolling Stone," "Born to Run" and "My Generation," "Teen Age Riot" manages to cement the noise side of the band after it developed over the last two albums even as the group blended it with their first dose of pure, unadulterated pop. Unlike those aforementioned odes to defiance, "Teen Age Riot" is not a call to arms, instead capturing the feelings of youth in all their ennui. By not presenting adolescence as an "us vs. them" struggle with the outside forces of the establishment and elders but a tug-of-war within teenagers' own ranks for a sense of clarity, "Teen Age Riot" achieves the purity of an anthem with the complexity of a more realized composition.
From there, Daydream Nation combines the heightened songwriting ability the band displayed on their previous two albums with their propensity for elongating tunes into noise jams in a live setting. Songs easily stretch past the six- and seven-minute marks, elongating the band's most developed pop hooks into its most successful art-noise jams yet. "Cross the Breeze" opens with jangling, blissful chords before morphing into a fast-paced freak-fest that might pass for a thrash metal song. When Kim Gordon, at her most intensely stand-offish, enters the mix several minutes in, she leads the Youth through a song too long and disoriented to be considered punk but so righteous and furious that it's impossible to view it as anything but. "The Sprawl" is even looser, propelled by a tight beat that pits the band against each other as if in a battle royale. Both songs shouldn't stay together; you expect them to take off in a thousand different directions, either in reckless abandon or mathematical precision. Instead, the group always finds their way, always keeps the beat and always finds just the right balance between considerable ability and free-form, emotional playing.
When the lengths of the songs are tighter, as they are on "Silver Rocket" and most of the second LP, Sonic Youth attains a ferocity they occasionally displayed but never fully developed. The echoing clang of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore's guitars, the buzz and hum of Gordon's bass and the carefully modulated sloppiness of Steve Shelley form a white-hot focal point on the shorter numbers, melting through whatever surface they touch. The raucous "Kissability" shows off Gordon's dry wit, while the three-part finale pays homage to the band that pointed the way for Sonic Youth's growth into the ultimate teen band, Dinosaur Jr.
Daydream Nation, despite being released the year before I was born, always sends me back to visions of high school, slamming lockers and idly doodling in binders. Like all teenagers, Daydream Nation mumbles, moves around uncertainly and self-consciously. But it also has the bravado of youth, the brash confidence of its crashing punk sound. Beneath it all, though, is the sincerity that marks the best of adolescence: we may not have a damn clue how the world works, but we mean well and want to change things for the better. And that's a damn sight more appealing than selling out for greater popularity and wealth (right Boomers?).
I actually have less to say about Daydream Nation than other Youth albums, such as Sister or the magnificent late-career masterpiece Murray Street. But the simplicity is what I most admire about the album. On its surface, it's just a blend of songwriting hooks and post-Krautrock electronic wash, but that doesn't get at its appeal. After all, Krautrock itself was, in the best cases, a mixture of pop hooks and sonic wash. What makes Daydream Nation so transcendent of time is the subtle, almost indescribable manner in which the band marries that sound to an undercurrent of shared emotion. Nearly everyone can relate to the feeling expressed by the record, even though the lyrics themselves border on nonsense (or, given how rarely anything approaches logic in the words, perhaps it's more accurate to say they border on sense).
One of the few enduring classics of the 1980s, Daydream Nation is all the proof one would ever need of Sonic Youth's greatness. Fortunately, they decided to pad their resumé with at least three or four other classics, just in case. Dinosaur Jr. inspired Sonic Youth with their seminal You're Living All Over Me, but Moore, Gordon and co. replaced J. Mascis' sludge with a sort of industrial twang; yes, there is a hint of country sorrow under the punk and no-wave influences, and maybe that's the aspect that makes Daydream Nation so gripping. That trace of a genre built upon self-pity, however justified, fits seamlessly with the crafting of the ultimate teenage anthem. It took numerous listens to glean that from the record, to hear in the echo of ringing guitars the sound of outlaws. Most of the country rebels weren't really that dangerous, and they peddled an angst not too dissimilar from the sort that alt.rockers sell. The only difference is that country aims years down the road, once the doubt of youth reveals itself to be a correct foreshadowing of a broken life. Because that sound, whether the band intended it or not, moves through the cascading mix of sounds and moods, Daydream Nation not only survives for each new generation of teenagers, it can be equally affecting as one moves out of that age range. It's as forward-thinking as it is nostalgic. Not bad for an album that contains the lines "To the extent that I wear skirts/and cheap nylon slips/I've gone native/I wanted to know the exact dimension of hell."
No songwriter better exemplifies that old maxim our mothers used to tell us, "It's not what you said but how you said it" like Stephen Malkmus of Pavement. Scarcely any songs of the band's earliest (and best, though Pavement maintained such a standard of quality that the distinction is a matter only for die-hards) recordings hold up to any lyrical scrutiny, with unhelpful liner notes only offering one of countless misdirections and the obscurity of the lines themselves never letting on whether the group was sincere or taking the piss.
When processed through the band, however, these floating reveries of sub-Bowie free association become intense and universal, the soundtrack of the suburbs in a way that neither glamorizes bourgeois life nor, and this is important, condescends to the stifling ennui of middle-class conformity. Plenty of Malkmus' lyrics are hip and sardonic, but the manner in which he can cast his irony aside for a moment of sincerity without warning suggests that the real joke is acting as if he doesn't care.
After making a handful of EPs that hinted at Pavement's direction but lacked even the cohesion of their early, looser albums, Malkmus finally bolstered the spare lineup of guitarist/vocalist Scott Kannberg (a.k.a. Spiral Stairs) and 40-something drummer/producer Gary Young with bassist Mark Ibold and multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich. Before either could get down to business, however, the original trio convened for their debut full-length, kissing off the old Pavement by offering the first complete taste of what they had to offer. The result is perhaps the greatest of lo-fi masterpieces, and an enduring staple of indie rock.
Slanted and Enchanted sounds like crap. Even in its remastered form, it hisses and buries the mix to the point that you wonder if the band accidentally set up in the same room as the soundboard without realizing the mics were next door. Not helping matters is the fact that Kannberg played bass lines by running a down-tuned guitar through a bass amp, or that Young was so routinely plastered during the few weeks of recording that Nastanovich had to keep time for him. Yet the grimy sonic wash somehow benefits from its grubby recording, giving the whole thing an air of authenticity most bands would kill for these days.
It is a time-consuming enterprise to act as if one doesn't care. Proper attention must be paid to the right sort of anti-fashion, the practiced glares of defiance, the careful judging of just enough success to make a living without going noticed by a major label or more than a vaguely defined "acceptable" number of fans. Even Jarvis Cocker, who deftly avoided the pissing match that was the Britpop's movement to out-working-class every other band, had too much style and cool to be totally immune to image-making. Pavement may have been the first band that genuinely didn't give a damn, or at least the first to mix that with music so compelling that no sane individual could, once hearing it, could ignore.
From the opening hum of "Summer Babe (Winter Version)," SM and co. establish the warring contradictions of the album, not so much a balance between noise rock and pop as a tug of war that never consistently cedes to any one side. Malkmus' lyricism, though nowhere near the impressionistic purity of, say, Van Morrison's, nevertheless cuts to the heart of everything while circumventing the subject entirely. One might as well count to infinity than name the songs focusing on an unattainable woman, but "Summer Babe" uses lines like "Ice baby,/I saw your girlfriend and she was/Eating her fingers like they're just another meal" to evoke deeply personal visions of that someone you had a crush on but could never approach.
The chief influence on the band, at least in these days, was The Fall, and the impact of Mark E. Smith's absurdist realism, to say nothing of the percussive, careening style of his singing and his ever-shifting lineup's playing, can be felt all over Slanted and Enchanted. The energetic "Conduit for Sale!" might as well credit Smith as a co-writer, what with its repeated yelp of "I'm trying!" over clanging guitar squeals. Yet where the early EPs show the band only occasionally moving beyond Smith's influence, Slanted and Enchanted cements Malkmus as his own writer and Kannberg as his own arranger.
Smith could never really handle sincerity, at least not in the plaintive sense, but Pavement throws a curveball when they reach "Here," a song that would qualify instantly as a power ballad were it not as angular and obscure as any of the songs on the record. But its first pair of lines are so direct that the song grips you instantly: "I was dressed for success/But success it never came." No song on the album better epitomizes the band's ability to condense an entire worldview into a few cogent lines before diverging into esoteric absurdity and surrealism that only deepens the meaning. So many affecting songs rely on targeting a specific feeling and addressing it vaguely enough to be universally appealing while inserting a few phrases focused enough to give the audience an easy feeling of "Hey, this guy's on my wavelength!" Malkmus gives an audience on the barest of threads to go on before moving into areas that only he can understand, and that brave willingness to expose only himself without throwing us all into the mix makes his lyrics more powerful than a number of more direct songs.
In that respect, Pavement's reception by rock critics surprises me. Without much in the way of traditional hooks (the band always pulls back just before they settle into an identifiable groove) or discernible lyrics, the group offers critics few of the traditional ledges to latch onto for an analysis. Yet the rock press fell over themselves to praise the album, shooting it to the top of best-of lists before Slanted and Enchanted even hit record store shelves (well, in the few places that would stock it, anyway). Ray Carney, that lover of Cassavetes and one of the more thought-provoking contrarians in film criticism, bases much of his critical approach to a typically stand-offish view of traditional criticism. He says teachers, critics and those the former instruct look for symbols and metaphors as a way of cheaply unpacking a work of art into something manageable while ignoring the nuance and tones of a film or book. "Metaphors, symbols, images are the most primitive way of making artistic meaning," he said in one interview, looking, as ever, for a fight. As much as I find Carney infuriating in his condescension and arrogance, I think his point, while not a universal truth, does apply in cases: certain bands and directors -- even, I think, great ones -- put out works that directly appeal to a broad audience because an artist lives of his or her work, and the more people who can identify with it, the more copies or tickets one sells.
Rock writers, or at least the best ones, tend to follow Carney's view of ideal criticism. Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Cameron Crowe, vastly different as they all are, are linked by one universal trait: they wrote according to how the music hit them. Bangs, the greatest of music critics, got at the heart of the matter: he responded to primitivism, writing exegeses on neglected garage rock and trashing any band that dared to treat rock 'n roll as anything more than an outlet for savagery. For him, rock was about feeling, not just any feeling but the primal, unevolved emotions that poke out from behind social conditioning.
Pavement, with its perfect blend of sneering indifference and freely associated personal relevance, strike a chord and steadily grow in cultural stature as Nirvana fades more with each passing year. Kurt Cobain could put misery into chunks of Pixies-esque pop that appealed to the demographic that had not yet figured out its emotions: teenagers. Malkmus, in contrast, didn't humor the young by suggesting that their feelings were true and that society really didn't understand. No, Malkmus captured the doubt of puberty and that nagging feeling of reason in every teen's mind that what you're thinking isn't necessarily how things truly are, that the anxieties and pain are real in the sense that they are felt, but also misleading in that they do not carry an understanding of the world. Ergo, Pavement is sarcastic but also lets that front drop without vanishing, mocking the SoCal lifestyle relentlessly but acknowledging the band returning to the suburbs at night for safety. By admitting this dichotomy, they avoid becoming hypocrites.
Slanted and Enchanted placed second on the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop list comprising the submitted lists of numerous critics, but it has yet to be certified gold. Even today, it exists more as an acid test for underground music fans than a cultural touchstone on the level of Nevermind. Pavement would clean up their sound (barely) on their next album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and brush with commercial success, only to react against it as if placing a hand on a hot stove and instinctively pulling back immediately to avoid serious damage. That album offers serious competition to the title of best Pavement album, though all five LPs are great, but what makes Slanted and Enchanted such an enduring landmark for those in the know is how personal the method of sharing it is. I spent quite a lot of time in high school sneering at those who enjoyed something up to the point that most of the other students caught on, only to abandon it -- bands weren't the only target; even YouTube videos suddenly lost favor in the eyes of the beholder -- but Pavement's music suggests a more emotional reason to limit an audience. Slanted and Enchanted works because nobody has yet made the mistake of assigning any central meaning that tidies up the mess of an album. Even the routine mentions of suburbia that run through every review of the band's early work -- including this one -- are less attempts to summarize the album than the placement of one of the many ideas Malkmus' lyrics swirl around provocatively. Pavement sang about disaffection with SoCal and its celebrity worship, but the music could speak to a suburbanite in any state, as well as someone living in the city. Just shy of two decades later, it has solidified its position as one of the defining works of the 1990s, and one of the few works that can proudly call itself indie. Of course, because it is true indie, it would never call attention to itself so openly.
