Category: Revisited

Best of 2023
Revisited

Best of 2023

singallkindsLeave a comment

Long time, no post? 

I’ll make no promises (to myself) about returning to this space more frequently in the coming year, but I listened to more new music in 2024 than in any other year this decade and felt compelled to jot down some loose thoughts. I do plan to continue that in the new year, the listening at least. 

ALBUMS

1. Rat Saw God – Wednesday: I laugh every time Karly Hartzman opens this album by gazing into a wishing well and yelling “Fuck all y’all.” Their lower middle class western North Carolina circa 2023 doesn’t feel much different from the lower middle class Eastern Arkansas circa 1980-something where I grew up. “God make me good but not quite yet” is this band’s Lord’s Prayer, and they’re here to tell you all of their worst, with humor and insight. After all, every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes. So it goes. 

By the way, where does “Drunken laughter/Violence after” rank among greatest rock and roll couplets? Behind “Sweet little sixteen/She’s got the grown-up blues” and “Hangin’ out in the street/Same old thing we did last week” and definitely (duh) “Second verse/Same as the first.” But maybe top five?

They respect their Southern rock elders with a Drive-By Truckers name-check, and they’re even more country, with pedal-steel twang and a hint of Appalachia in Hartzman’s drawl. But the sludgy dissonance and barely controlled tempo shifts and whined/slurred vocals are more reminiscent of alt-rock elders Dinosaur Jr. Slower and heavier than my usual rock ideal, but all the details, lyrical and musical, conspire to overcome. The result: Very “for me.”  

2, The Record – Boygenius: The band name, attached to these three young women, is a lot of concept, underscored by band photos and group harmonies that consciously evoke Boomer icons Crosby, Stills & Nash. These tweaks on “classic rock” tradition make a point: This entire project is a turf grab, an assertion of relative self-worth, yet not quite a rejection. This band improves an indelible Simon & Garfunkel melody by giving it a better, plainer, deeper lyric. It’s love & theft. 

This dynamic finds its apotheosis in Lucy Dacus’ Lyric of the Year candidate, which somehow sings about as well as it scans: “Leonard Cohen once said, ‘There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’ And I am not an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery, writing horny poetry … but I agree.” 

The mostly subdued tempos and voices means it might require repeated listens and close engagement to bloom. And as a species of folk-rock, it’s very much a writer’s record. But what writing!

Ultimately, the true-blue concept here isn’t really the righteous generational and gender trappings. Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker have all soared solo, but have perhaps never been better than together, and the heart of the matter is a tribute-by-example to being young and finding your cohort. A wise twist on over-familiar vernacular that can be read a couple of different ways: “When you don’t know who you are, you fuck around and find out.”

Fucking around and finding out is risky, but so is youth, where fucking around is also a path to self-discovery.

3. Zach Bryan – Zach Bryan: Paul Simon told us that every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, and Bryan feels like an example, with the demographic modifiers more narrow than
“generation.” In a subgenre – commercial male country – riven by self-consciousness and calculation, Bryan never seems like anything other than himself here, and that idiosyncrasy, that lack of phoniness, makes him more relatable.

To these ears, this country/folk/rock chart-topper is a sizable leap beyond Bryan’s impressive but over-stuffed 2022 breakthrough-not-debut American Heartbreak. It’s appropriate that this fully formed fourth album is the one called Zach Bryan.  

Musically, these 15 songs with spoken intro rarely falter and often surprise: The red-dirt country rock augmented here and there with just the right dollops of fiddle, harmonica, piano or horns. The songwriting takes detours that pretty much always find something interesting along the way. Released in late August, it’s maybe still the most played 2023 album within my family. It just never quits. 

In a genre where “Nashville” is too easy a shorthand, Bryan’s pure Oklahoma: “I hear Turnpike’s getting’ back together and they’re writing songs,” “Kansas ain’t no place to be a man” (har har). His rough-hewn prairie drawl renders “Oklahoman” an accent I never recognized or knew I needed. 

4. Maps – Billy Woods and Kenny Segal: This indie-rap coup is more late-breaking for me than the top three, even the relatively recent Bryan, and it’s the densest of the bunch, so I’m still finding my way through it. But it’s the obsessive listen that ended my year. 

 I knew Woods was my kind of guy when he opened the “Soundcheck” portion of this tour diary with this: “I will not be at soundcheck/I will not be in the green room if it’s too lit/Could be at the local greasy spoon or Szechuan establishment.”

Old fogey that I am, I prize rap as a medium drunk on wordplay, and Woods has a true writer’s/rhymer’s passion for words, both their meaning and, crucially, their sound. Lyrical sample from a song called “Rapper Weed” that many have found too good not to quote, myself now among them: “If the track slaps, in the back you can almost hear the black cackling/When it’s my time, no need to pass the hat/Just throw me in when the fire good and crackling.”

5. 10,000 Gecs – 100 Gecs: In a grand rock and roll tradition (see: The Ramones, Licensed to Ill, Mellow Gold), they are very knowing about how very stupid they are, in this St. Louis to SoCal duo’s case while sorting through the far less cool but age-specific pop detritus of mash-ups, nu-metal, pop-punk and Midwest mallbrat EDM.  

“Frog on the Floor” is the singalong song of the year. It’s about a frog. On the floor. “Give him some space/He’s still working it out/Give him some space/He doesn’t know what people think about.” Other important topics include snack food and a sore tooth, relationship uncertain. They don’t watch the news, they just read statements. Put emojis on their graves. They’re smarter than they look. They’re the dumbest band alive.

6. Guts – Olivia Rodrigo: A few months later, this not-quite-40-minute follow-up doesn’t seem quite as miraculous as her not-quite-35-minute debut. Sour was a mostly unprecedented pop triumph that crucially bracketed a nine-song dissection of one teen girl’s first breakup with an everyteen anthem up top and a song of everyteen empathy to go out. 

My favorite lyric on that album, from “Enough for You,” was this: “I knew from the start this is exactly how you’d leave.” She knew her subject was mundane, and fated to be temporary. And she knew it still felt like the biggest thing in the world to the person experiencing it for the first time, she being that person. And Rodrigo honored both sides of this dual knowledge.

On Guts, she applies the same trick – being outside and inside her experiences as they’re happening, analyzing her mistakes as she makes them – to what’s actually more mundane pop territory: Not the first breakup of a regular girl but the romantic travails on the road to adulthood,  celebrity division. 

That she makes so much of it anyway is a testament to her talent, and how grounded and smart and decent and musically gung-ho she remains. Plus: “Get Him Back!” is a popcraft masterpiece even if the charts somehow haven’t agreed. 

7. This Stupid World – Yo La Tengo: Another very good album from a great band, long past the point where we have any reason to expect such a thing. Bonus points for supplying my favorite concert experience of 2023, the reason for a father/daughter indie-rock road trip to Nashville. 

8. Everyone’s Crushed – Water From Your Eyes: Cryptic lyrics, sprung rhythms, funny little sound-for-sound’s-sake bleeps and bloops and blurts, real tunes bubbling up from the noise. Just a couple of kids fucking around and finding out. Punk rock lives, and takes many forms. 

9, Time Ain’t Accidental – Jess Williamson: A dozen things could have gone here but I’ll let this be a kind of backdoor acknowledgement for the family’s most played album in 2023, the late 2022 released I Walked With You a Ways from Plains, a duo debut that paired the Texas/Los Angeles Williamson with Waxahatchee’s Alabama/Kansas City Katie Crutchfield. On her own, Williamson can get a little precious, both in word choice and phrasing. Her partnership with the more pleasingly sour Crutchfield mitigated that. Still, this solo followup was a good coda to a great duo record.  

Nine More Albums

  • How to Love – Withered Hand
  • I Play My Bass Loud – Gina Birch
  • Weathervanes – Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
  • Eye on the Bat – Palehound
  • Several Songs About Fire – A.Savage
  • The Devil I Know – Ashley McBryde 
  • The Age of Pleasure – Janelle Monae
  • The Window – Ratboys
  • Rabbit, Rabbit – Speedy Ortiz

Nine (or so) More Songs

Some favorite 2023 songs not on my top 18 albums.

  • “Vampire Empire” and “Born for Loving You” – Big Thief: My favorite music of 2023 is here, on a couple of standalone songs from the band whose 2022 Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is my favorite album of the decade so far. An exultant two-song encore to that album or a sneak preview of something big to come?
  • “It’s Only Poison” – Robert Forster: A love song about chemotherapy.
  • “Tiny Garden” – Jamila Woods featuring duendita: A love song about necessary labor. 
  • “Thicc” – Gloss Up: Favorite Memphis song of the year. When she invokes Ja Morant and the beat switches, it’s on. “Collard greens, cornbread-eating, ass getting thicc” fills me with pride of place. Memphis runner-up: Optic Sink’s bass-forward “Glass Blocks.”
  • “The Old Woman in Me” – Lori McKenna: The best country/folk songwriter of her generation adds another great one to her songbook.
  • “Tiny Little Titties” – Corook: Lyric of the Year candidate: “I don’t feel like a man/I don’t feel like a woman/I tried to describe myself/It turns out that I couldn’t.”
  • “Kill Bill” – SZA feat. Doja Cat: Single from a late-2022 album, a reminder that I should do a retroactive 2022 post. 
  • “Bored of Men” – Mhaol: “I’m so bored of talking about men/Look at the news, is it that time again?”
  • “Bravo” – Tobe Nwigwe: One hundred seconds of undeniable beats-and-rhymes, a reminder that I need to search harder for hip-hop in 2024. 

MOVIES AND MORE

I have somewhat more of a professional rationale to share my move list, so I’ve already written on this at The Daily Memphian. As a result, I won’t write much here. This is a longer ordered list than shared there. The Top 10 is also slightly different. I intentionally left “The Zone of Interest” and “The Taste of Things” out of my Top 10 in that piece, partly because neither has been available to local readers and in the case of “The Zone of Interest” because, additionally, I didn’t want to write about it. It also sort of felt out of place. Jonathan Glazer’s depiction of the domestic life of the man running the Auschwitz concentration camp is a kind of pure art movie, unlike anything else on this list. It almost feels more like it belongs in a museum installation than at a multiplex.

  1. Oppenheimer
  2. Showing Up
  3. Past Lives
  4. May December
  5. The Zone of Interest
  6. Killers of the Flower Moon
  7. The Taste of Things
  8. Barbie
  9. The Killer
  10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  11. Poor Things 
  12. Asteroid City
  13. Anatomy of a Fall
  14. You Hurt My Feelings
  15. A Thousand and One
  16. The Boy and the Heron
  17. The Holdovers
  18. Godzilla Minus One
  19. Theater Camp
  20. Rye Lane
  21. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
  22. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
  23. American Fiction
  24. Priscilla
  25. The Iron Claw

Best Old Movies Seen for the First Time This Year: Fat City (John Huston, 1972), Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981), Thief (Michael Mann, 1981), Daisies (1966, Vera Chytilova).

Television I Loved Without Hesitation: Succession, The Bear, Slow Horses.

Television I Watched With Appreciation: The Last of Us, Daisy Jones & the Six.

Television I Watched Out of Perceived Obligation: The Crown, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Best Novels I Read For the First Time This Year: In Country – Bobbie Ann Mason (1985), White Noise – Don DeLilo (1985), Libra – DeLilo (1988). 

Best Non-Fiction I Read For the First Time This Year: In Cold Blood – Truman Capote (1966). 

1970 Revisited
Revisited

1970 Revisited

singallkinds4 Comments

One would have thought our coronavirus spring would have yielded more time for this ongoing, intermittent personal project, where I relisten to my entire music collection and catch up on some things I missed along the way.

But with work unabated, parenting demands increased and the existential fatigue felt by all of us lucky enough to continue existing, that has not been the case. 

So, some quick notes and then the list:

1970: A new decade.

Decades are arbitrary, but in retrospect, if not at the time, this year has a transitional feel. 

The Beatles went caput, with John Lennon immediately releasing what would remain the greatest of the group’s solo offshoots. (1969’s Abbey Road is the true swan song; the recorded earlier but released later Let it Be is a near-miss here and the singles comp Hey Jude not considered.) The Stones took a break amid an historic four-albums-in-five-years peak run and Bob Dylan reemerged in minor form with New Morning. 

Meanwhile, the best American bands of the Sixties (Velvet Underground, CCR) released their last great albums (and just last in the Velvets case). Four of the greatest solo artists of the Seventies — Neil Young, Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Al Green — opened the decade with major statements and, in the case of Morrison and Newman, perhaps still career peaks. 

That Newman record — a personal chart-topper in a year with lots of competition and no clear No. 1 — is quiet and short and weird and mean and perfect. 

With Spirit in the Dark, Aretha Franklin followed Isaac Hayes’ lead (via 1969’s Hot Buttered Soul) in the transition from singles-oriented Sixties soul to the more conscious album-making of Seventies R&B, beating Marvin and Sly by a year and Stevie by a couple, though Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis also qualifies here. (Sly’s Greatest Hits, an avalanche of singles released in a tight tumble, makes the know-it-when-you-see-it cut as a compilation that functions as an album.)

Semi-popular music: The Stooges with the best American punk album before “punk” knew its name (and maybe still the best regardless). Delany & Bonnie (times two) and the Tracy Nelson-led Mother Earth with some roots lessons Americana should have better learned. Swamp Dogg with some idiosyncratic soul. The Insect Trust with a musical bohemia that unites Up North and Down South. 

Albums

  1. 12 Songs – Randy Newman
  2. Loaded – The Velvet Underground
  3. Fun House – The Stooges
  4. Plastic Ono Band – John Lennon
  5. Moondance – Van Morrison
  6. After the Gold Rush – Neil Young
  7. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs – Derek & the Dominoes
  8. Greatest Hits – Sly & the Family Stone
  9. Spirit in the Dark – Aretha Franklin
  10. Cosmo’s Factory – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  11. To Bonnie From Delaney – Delany and Bonnie
  12. Total Destruction to Your Mind – Swamp Dogg
  13. Mother Earth Presents Tracy Nelson Country – Mother Earth
  14. Al Green Gets Next to You – Al Green
  15. Gasoline Alley – Rod Stewart
  16. Part Time Love – Ann Peebles
  17. His Band and Street Choir – Van Morrison
  18. Sex Machine – James Brown
  19. Curtis – Curtis Mayfield
  20. On Tour – Delaney and Bonnie
  21. Hoboken Saturday Night – Insect Trust
  22. New Morning – Bob Dylan
  23. Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround – The Kinks
  24. Struttin’ – The Meters
  25. Bitches Brew – Miles Davis

Singles

  1. “Pressure Drop” – Toots & the Maytals
  2. “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” – Sly & the Family Stone
  3. “Don’t Play That Song’ – Aretha Franklin
  4. “Lookin’ Out My Backdoor” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  5. “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” – James Brown
  6. “Yes We Can” – Lee Dorsey
  7. “Ohio” – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
  8. “Up Around the Bend” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  9. “Help Me Make it Through the Night” – Sammi Smith
  10. “Vietnam” – Jimmy Cliff
  11. “Domino” – Van Morrison
  12. “Who’ll Stop the Rain” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  13. “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” – Stevie Wonder
  14. “Band of Gold” – Freda Payne
  15. “ABC” – Jackson Five
  16. “I Can’t Get Next to You” – Al Green
  17. “I’ll Be There” – Jackson Five
  18. “Part Time Love” – Ann Peebles
  19. “Super Bad” – James Brown
  20. “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” – The Delfonics
  21. “Daddy Come and Get Me” – Dolly Parton
  22. “Once More With Feeling” – Jerry Lee Lewis
  23. “Rivers of Babylon’ — The Melodians
  24. “Turn Back the Hands of Time” – Tyrone Davis
  25. “It’s a Shame” – The Spinners
  26. “Shocks of Mighty” – Dave Barker & the Upsetters
  27. “Run Through the Jungle” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  28. “Stealing in the Name of the Lord” – Paul Kelly
  29. “Instant Karma (We All Shine On)” – John Lennon
  30. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” – Loretta Lynn
  31. “Cinnamon Girl” – Neil Young
  32. “All Right Now” – Free
  33. “Paranoid” – Black Sabbath
  34. “Patches” – Clarence Carter
  35. “Duppy Conqueror” – Bob Marley & the Wailers
  36. “A Good Year for the Roses” – George Jones
  37. “Wake the Town” – U.Roy
  38. “Give Me Just a Little More Time’ — Chairmen of the Board
  39. “Heaven Help Us All” — Stevie Wonder
  40. “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe” — Swamp Dogg

MOVIES

Taking a pass at a movies list at the end of these — there’s no “rewatching” project — is always an exercise in realizing how many blind spots I still have. Oh, I still haven’t seen Claire’s Knee or Patton or Little Big Man or … . 

But here are some 1970 films I have seen that I think that I like, based on the memories of when I saw them, in rough order of preference, starting with an easy No. 1:

  • Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson)
  • Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh)
  • Husbands (John Cassavetes)
  • M*A*S*H (Robert Altman) 
  • King: A Filmed Record … Montgomery to Memphis (Sidney Lumet)
  • Tristana (Luis Bunuel)
  • The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Sam Peckinpah)
  • Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles)

1980 Revisited
Revisited

1980 Revisited

singallkindsLeave a comment

If the music of 1980 had a theme, perhaps it was the expansion of punk as the decade turned.

The Talking Heads looked beyond CBGB, incorporating Afropop influences on Remain in Light (No. 4 album). Gang of Four’s Entertainment! (No. 3 album) weaved Sex Pistols energy into jagged Marxist funk. The (English) Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It (No. 13 album) was as good as British ska got. And on London Calling (No. 1 album, natch) the Clash invoked Elvis Presley on the cover and laid claim to everything in earshot in the grooves. 

In the U.S., the Manhattan-centric punk scene began giving way to a post-punk/indie scene blooming throughout the country, whether across the state lines to Jersey (The Feelies’ No. 7 Crazy Rhythms) or to the opposite coast (X’s No. 16 Los Angeles), both hints at the eruption of more localized indie scenes on the immediate horizon.

In the U.K., a similar broadening was happening in the form of the Raincoats (No. 22 album), Slits (No. 7 single), LiLiPUT (No. 10 single), Psychedelic Furs (No. 23 album), the extant Elvis Costello (No. 25 album), and Joy Division (No. 23 single), three of whom appear on the classic scene compilation Wanna Buy a Bridge? (No. 5 album).  

It was also the year that the greatest R&B artist of the 1970s, Stevie Wonder, made arguably his last major album, Hotter Than July (No. 17), and the greatest R&B (for starters) artist of the 1980s, Prince, made his first major album (and third overall), Dirty Mind (No. 2). The latter showed more than a little punk/post-punk influence, showing that these exchanges could work both ways. 

It was a year when two giants of blues-based music, pre-recording Memphis/Chicago blues singer Alberta Hunter (No. 15) and New Orleans piano master Professor Longhair (No. 6) made their greatest studio-album testaments, the former made well into her 80s, the latter months before his death.

In was a year that saw one rock institution of the Seventies (Bruce Springsteen, No. 10 album) transitioning his sound into what would be an (at least) equally great decade, and a couple of others (No. 20 Neil Young, No. 24 Rolling Stones), holding on, for a moment, with merely good albums. And it was when another, John Lennon, left us for good but with a wise, warming, unintended final testament (No. 8 album).

The lists …

ALBUMS

  1. London Calling – The Clash
  2. Dirty Mind – Prince
  3. Entertainment! – Gang of Four
  4. Remain in Light – Talking Heads
  5. Wanna Buy a Bridge? — Various Artists
  6. Crawfish Fiesta – Professor Longhair
  7. Crazy Rhythms – The Feelies
  8. Double Fantasy – John Lennon and Yoko Ono
  9. Storm Windows – John Prine
  10. The River – Bruce Springsteen
  11. Snockgrass – Michael Hurley
  12. Happy Woman Blues – Lucinda Williams
  13. I Just Can’t Stop It — The English Beat
  14. Real People – Chic
  15. Amtrak Blues – Alberta Hunter
  16. Los Angeles – X
  17. Hotter Than July – Stevie Wonder
  18. Black Market Clash — The Clash
  19. Seconds of Pleasure – Rockpile
  20. Hawks and Doves – Neil Young
  21. Doc at the Radar Station – Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
  22. The Raincoats — The Raincoats
  23. Psychedelic Furs – Psychedelic Furs
  24. Emotional Rescue – Rolling Stones
  25. Get Happy!! – Elvis Costello & the Attractions

Singles

  1. “You Shook Me All Night Long” – AC/DC
  2. “Zulu Nation Throwdown” – Afrika Bambaataa/Zulu Nation/Cosmic Force
  3. “London Calling” — The Clash
  4. “Bon Bon Vie” — T.S. Monk
  5. “Upside Down” – Diana Ross
  6. “The Breaks” – Kurtis Blow
  7. “Master Blaster (Jammin’)” — Stevie Wonder
  8. “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” — The Slits
  9. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” – George Jones
  10. “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?” — Brother D. & Collective Effort
  11. “Precious” — The Pretenders
  12. “Die Matrosen”/“Split” – LiLiPUT
  13. “Refugee” — Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
  14. “Call Me” — Blondie
  15. “Brass in Pocket” — The Pretenders
  16. “9 to 5” – Dolly Parton
  17. “She Just Started Liking Cheatin’ Songs” – John Anderson
  18. “Train in Vain” – The Clash
  19. “(Just Like) Starting Over” – John Lennon & Yoko Ono
  20. “He’s So Shy” — The Pointer Sisters
  21. “People Who Died” – Jim Carroll Band
  22. “I’m Coming Out” – Dianna Ross
  23. “Hungry Heart” – Bruce Springsteen
  24. “Celebration” – Kool & the Gang
  25. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” – Joy Division
  26. “Freedom” – Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five
  27. “The Tide is High” – Blondie
  28. “Mirror in the Bathroom” – The English Beat
  29. “Going Underground” — The Jam
  30. “Shining Star” – The Manhattans
  31. “Twist and Crawl” – The English Beat
  32. “Hey Nineteen” – Steely Dan
  33. “She’s So Cold” — The Rolling Stone
  34. “Private Idaho” — The B-52s
  35. “Whip It” – Devo
  36. “Bankrobber” – The Clash
  37. “Take Your Time” – SOS Band
  38. “Vicious Rap” – Tanya Winley
  39. “Too Many Creeps” – Bush Tetras
  40. “Love Sensation” – Loletta Holloway

Movies

Per usual, these movie lists are more of a guess because I don’t have time to rewatch, an attempt to filter older memories through a current sensibility. I do think that Raging Bull and The Shining are “classic” films that are probably each a little overrated relative to their respective directors’ other best work. I remember being smitten by Sayle’s low-budget college-radicals-reunite film as a teenager, but I haven’t seen it since. (It’s pretty hard to come by.)

  • Atlantic City (Louis Malle)
  • The Big Red One (Sam Fuller)
  • The Return of the Secaucus Seven (John Sayle)
  • Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
  • The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)
  • Used Cars (Robert Zemeckis)
  • Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper)
  • Coal Miner’s Daughter (Michael Apted)

Revisited

Best of 2019

singallkindsLeave a comment

This film list is a little different from the Top 10 of my Southeastern Film Critics Association ballot I published about a month ago. That’s partly the result of this list being one of pure favorites, where my SEFCA ballot allows for some strategic voting toward the end of the Top 10. It’s partly the result of having seen a couple of contenders for a second time since then. And it’s partly because any list of favorites is likely to change a little each time you consider it. 

In both cases, my four-film top tier remains the same, with only the order changed a little. I love these four films and don’t have particularly strong feelings about order. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women jumps from No. 4 to No. 1 here after a second viewing and first in a theater, during which it knocked me flat. Maybe there’s a little recency bias at play. But I think it’s a genius work of adaptation that arrives as an instant family-film classic. 

Like Little Women, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a thrilling feminist period piece, searing where Little Women is warm. These films don’t so much inject a modern sensibility into their respective 18th- and 19th-century settings as make their stories feel very much present-tense. 

I think Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s best movie in nearly 25 years. In an expansive, charmed middle sequence that intertwines a day in the life of each of his three protagonists – Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate kicking up her bare feet to watch herself on the big screen, Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth reminiscing on the roof and taking a drive, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton getting himself together for the best acting young co-star Trudi’s ever seen in her life – it’s also the best filmmaking of this year or Tarantino’s career.

Parasite is as brilliant and urgent as advertised. It could have easily been my No. 1, and if I’d had time to give it a second viewing, it may well have been.

The Irishman moved into my Top 5 on a second viewing. I feel like it not only earns its run-time, but ultimately needs it. The awkwardness of the film’s de-aging technology – these old actors move like old men even when meant to be younger – lends a poignancy that may or may not be intentional. But the film is framed as a recollection of an old man; you feel the present fragility even in memories of relative youth.

My No. 6 (The Farewell) and No. 8 (American Factory) would make a good double-feature on the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China. The former is deceptively light, but that lightness is a reason I’ve recommended it to so many people of differing tastes.

I didn’t do a music list this year. My listening was too scattered and unsatisfied. Perhaps I’ll “revisit” 2019 somewhere down the line. I do have some brief notes about my year in TV and books at the end. 

  1. Little Women (Greta Gerwig)
  2. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
  3. Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho)
  4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma)
  5. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
  6. The Farewell (Lulu Wong)
  7. Diane (Kent Jones)
  8. American Factory (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichart)
  9. Ford v. Ferrari (James Mangold)
  10. The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent)
  11. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (Martin Scorsese)
  12. Amazing Grace (Alan Elliott, Sydney Pollack)
  13. Uncut Gems (Josh & Benny Safdie)
  14. Peterloo (Mike Leigh)
  15. Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)
  16. Her Smell (Alex Ross-Perry)
  17. The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)
  18. Us (Jordan Peele)
  19. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller)
  20. Knives Out (Rian Johnson)

Better Than Expected (or Than You Heard): Long Shot, Peanut Butter Falcon, High Flying Bird, High Life, Last Black Man in San Francisco

Ambitious but Flawed (in descending order of success): Dolemite is My Name, Queen & Slim, 1917, Atlantics, John Wick: Chapter 3, Jojo Rabbit, Harriet

Performances Better Than Their Films: Charlize Theron (Bombshell), Florence Pugh (Midsommar), Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein (Booksmart), Jennifer Lopez (Hustlers), Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins (The Two Popes), Taylor Russell (Waves), Adam Driver (The Dead Don’t Die)

I’m So Bored With the MCU …  But What Can I Do?: Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Captain Marvel. 

Duds I Didn’t Avoid: Joker, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Judy

Ten I Haven’t Seen (Yet): Ad Astra, Apollo 11, Ash is Purest White, A Hidden Life, Dark Waters, Honeyland, The Lighthouse, Pain & Glory, Synonyms, Transit.

Best Old Movie Seen for the First Time This Year: The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952)

Television I Loved Without Hesitation: Fleabag, Unbelievable, Mindhunter

Television I Watched With Appreciation: Watchmen, The Deuce, True Detective, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Killing Eve, Glow

Television I Watched Out of Perceived Obligation: Deadwood, El Camino, Game of Thrones, Bluff City Law

Best Novels I Read For the First Time This Year: Sula — Toni Morrison (1973) and The Dog of the South — Charles Portis (1979). 

Best Non-Fiction I Read For the First Time This Year: The White Album — Joan Didion (1979) and Is It Still Good To Ya?: 50 Years of Music Criticism — Robert Christgau (2019)

Revisited

Best of the 2010s: Movies

singallkinds1 Comment

I basically wrote myself out on the companion albums post a few days ago, so this will mostly just be a list. 

As with the film lists in the yearly “revisited” posts, this generally does not benefit from rewatches, as time sadly does not allow it.

I did rewatch the two movies at the top, which felt like masterpieces when I saw each of them in a theater upon initial release, and which both fully held up. 

While both are critical depictions of obsessive, gifted protagonists from obsessive, gifted filmmakers, they are otherwise quite different,

“The Social Network” feels like the great public movie of its era, with more to say about How We Live Now than perhaps any other film of the decade. If anything, its resonance has grown.

“Phantom Thread” feels like the great private movie of its era, a darkly comic glimpse into the ineffable mysteries of one courtship and marriage. 

Top 40 Movies of the 2010s

  1. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
  2. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)
  3. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
  4. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)
  5. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018) 
  6. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) 
  7. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)
  8. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
  9. Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)
  10. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)
  11. Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)
  12. Francis Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)
  13. Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013)
  14. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
  15. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
  16. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019)
  17. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)
  18. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)
  19. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron, 2018)
  20. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
  21. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)
  22. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2014)
  23. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)
  24. Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, 2017)
  25. The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017) (AM)
  26. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) 
  27. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) 
  28. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
  29. Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010) 
  30. Inside-Out (Pete Doctor, 2015)
  31. Manchester By the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)
  32. Leave No Trace (Debra Granik, 2018)
  33. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
  34. Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)
  35. Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, 2018)
  36. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)
  37. Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)
  38. Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)
  39. Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011) 
  40. Uncut Gems (Benny & Josh Safdie, 2019)

Best of the 2010s: Albums
Revisited

Best of the 2010s: Albums

singallkinds1 Comment

After debating how many records to list and how much if any to write, I decided on a Top 40 — to mirror the yearly “revisited” lists I’ve been doing on this site too occasionally — and stream-of-consciousness notes rather than contained write-ups for each album — or no writing at all. If you only want to look at the list, you can scroll to the bottom of the post. (And it was so hard to find the time for these scribblings that the companion film list will probably just be a list.)

It was not my intent to have zero 2019 albums on a best of the decade list. Is it me or was it 2019? There are six records from 2018 here. That wasn’t so long ago. Maybe it’s not me? 

I set only one ground rule for myself: No more than two albums per artist. In practice, this only impacted two names, my choices for the pop artists of the decade.

The first tops the list. Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city (No. 1) is a portrait of an artist as a young man, a Compton coming-of-age story packed with different characters, stories, and perspectives without being overpacked with guest stars. With only space for one more Lamar on the list, I went against what’s probably consensus in preferring the direct, masterful Damn. (No. 11) over the deep, difficult To Pimp a Butterfly.

My other artist-of-the-decade candidate didn’t place an album in my Top 10 and remains highly underrated despite her commercial success. Maybe if Miranda Lambert had a dick and some facial hair she’d get the kind of modern-outlaw respect the likes of Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson do, but as is, the Miranda Lambert Diaspora placed six albums on this list, and it would have been seven had I not decided that doubling up her girl-group Pistol Annies would mean tripling Lambert herself.

The Annies’ debut Hell on Heels is pretty perfect, but I think their third album, Interstate Gospel (No. 20), takes the collective songwriting/singing of the project into more profound places, especially on “The Best Years of My Life” and “Milkman.” Lambert’s own Platinum (No. 31) isn’t her best solo album — that would be the prior decade’s Crazy Ex-Girlfried — but it’s a commercial blockbuster whose stylistic and emotional range shows off. My favorite Annies-related album, though, is Angaleena Presley’s American Middle Class (No. 14), the decade’s orneriest and most perceptive look modern small-town life. 

Kacey Musgraves and Brandy Clark co-wrote the Lambert hit “Mama’s Broken Heart” before breaking out as solo acts. Clark’s 12 Stories (No. 28) is a little bit Tom T. Hall and a little bit Rosanne Cash, a cycle of precise character sketches, many of which spin out of small moments in the lives of female protagonists. Musgraves’ Golden Hour (No. 17) is a roots-pop-disco tour de force that updates the countrypolitan ideal in a way that feels like self-discovery. 

Lori McKenna has written songs with or for all three Pistol Annies (the third member is Ashley Monroe, whose solo “Two Weeks Late” is one of the best country songs of the decade), and just about everyone else in mainstream country music with any taste at all. Tim McGraw had a massive hit with McKenna’s “Humble & Kind.” But when McGraw sings it, he sounds like what he is: A pro gifted a great song. When McKenna sings it — on her own career-best album The Bird & the Rifle (No. 24) — she sounds like what she is: A mother singing her own words to her own children. It might not even be the album’s best song. That might be “Halfway Home.”

Two other great 2010s albums from female country singers that exist fully outside the Lambert/Annies sphere of influence: Was veteran Lee Ann Womack’s career-best The Lonely, the Lonesome and the Gone (No. 18) modern country or (so-called) Americana? Answer: Lee Ann Womack is a grown-ass woman and is above your petty genre distinctions and squabbles, which are irrelevant. Here she pulls a bunch of Nashville pros off the assembly line and off to her own personal promised land. They respond like it’s 1968 at American Studios and Chips Moman is behind the board.

Another: Margo Price’s Memphis-recorded All American Made (No. 30). On this even-better follow-up to Price’s breakthrough Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, I first worried political songs with titles such as “Pay Gap” and “American Made” would be too on the nose. Instead, they aim lower: A knife to the gut. The former renders its title phrase a deeper metaphor en route to a bilious, plainspoken climax. But the latter is a Song of the Decade candidate, both specific in its laments and mystical in a way (“I’m dreaming of that highway that stretches out of sight”). 

There was one dude in the country/roots vein who made my list, and he made it twice. There are debut albums and there are rebirth albums. Jason Isbell’s Southeastern (No. 4) is the latter, and while he got more directly political later, this intensely personal album is tethered to a wider awareness that deepens its personal gratitude. Seeing Isbell touring behind it, in the South, felt very much like seeing Lucinda Williams touring behind Car Wheels on a Gravel Road in the late 1990s. It felt like a whole people coming together to say: We choose you. You can’t really follow up a record like that, but Isbell did it pretty well and then even better with The Nashville Sound (No. 22), which peaks very high on the hushed “If We Were Vampires” and the defiant “Hope the High Road.”

Isbell was the solo singer/songwriter/guitarist of the decade, but didn’t quite release my favorite album in that vein. That would be Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (No. 3). The one bit of pure fiction (“Elevator Operator”) opens the album and is perfection. The rest is a more diaristic collection of often visionary songs about everyday stuff: Mulling pesticides in her vegetables and the nickel-and-dimed-to-death of her latte habit. Going for a swim at a public pool and reluctantly bungalow shopping in the burbs. She’s a material girl. This is a material world. Statement of principles: “Give me all your money and I’ll make some origami, honey.” Introvert’s anthem: “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party.” Favorite song of the decade, maybe: “Depreston.”

Barnett’s sister in alt-rock of the everyday: Elizabeth Morris. On Allo Darlin (No. 38), her band’s eponymous debut, Morris’ recipe for modest good living includes making chili with her sweetie, swimming on vacation, arguing about movies and listening to Johnny Cash and the Chiffons. Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose: “Though I’ve got no money to burn/I’m gonna burn what I’ve got/And though this band is awful/I like them an awful lot.”

Barnett’s an Aussie and Morris is a Brit, but nine different actual American rock bands (they still exist!) made my list, two of them twice. No band since Steely Dan is as much smarter than their critics as Vampire Weekend, but the latter is so much more open-hearted. They’re above it all, and if Contra (No. 15) is a cryptic, lovelorn travelogue that took them off campus and out into the world, Modern Vampires of the City (No. 2) marshalls their immense melodic and expressive gifts for a transition-to-adulthood album that’s broader and deeper but no less knottily personal. 

Vampire Weekend are sorta stars. Chances are if you aren’t a rock critic or a Rust Belt barfly, you have no idea who or what Wussy is. Chuck Cleaver writes wry, self-deprecating songs and puts them across in a distinctive Appalachian Neil Young whine. Bandmate Lisa Walker writes bemused but hopeful songs and puts them across with a yearning yelp that hits me harder than any voice in music this century. Attica! (No. 6) is their most ambitious album and also their best. Unless Funeral Dress II (No. 12) is. An obscurity even in the context of an obscure band, it’s a limited release (in physical form) acoustic re-recording of their previous-decade debut that strips away the bar-band blast to push these two voices and their ineffable songs to the fore. 

On Out in the Storm (No. 7), Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield says everything she needs to say about a relationship in her rearview mirror in 10 songs and not much more than half an hour. Pop music’s greatest thrill might be hearing someone say the exact right thing in the exact right way, hearing someone born in the moment. I’ve listened to this album since its 2017 release perhaps more than any other, and Crutchfield still sounds born anew each time. 

Southern California’s No Age and Texas-via-NYC’s Parquet Courts both could have made multiple appearances on this list, but I’m sticking with respective career peaks that came in the same year. Parquet Courts’ Wide Awaaaaake! (No. 35) is a kind of embattled post-punk manifesto, drawing from arty forbears such as Gang of Four and the Minutemen, but deeply in its own political moment.  Sample lyric: “Collectivism and autonomy are not mutually exclusive/Those who find discomfort in your goals of liberation will be issued no apology/And fuck Tom Brady.” Also: “Get love where you find it/It’s the only fist we have to fight with.”

No Age’s Snares Like a Haircut (No. 19), named for an instrumental track that delivers exactly what the title says, is a more insular, more formal album. Drummer-singer Dean Spunt bashes out tunes with his hands, vocal chords, and heart, and guitarist Randy Randall turns them all into a kind of one-man guitar-skronk symphony. More than any album on this list, I don’t assume anyone reading this will like it. I love it. 

Patrick Stickles and his crew of unruly punk-Springsteen Jerseyites Titus Andronicus mix up their mythologies on The Monitor (No. 25), named after the Union Navy ironclad and launched with a pre-presidential quotation from Abraham Lincoln. For Stickles, the recurrent Civil War imagery ties into his own personal advance into and retreat from Southern territory, but he gets off on the era’s intersection of elegant language and righteous anger, and the band evokes the enormity of that historical moment as something of a rebuke to their own generational torpor. Like abolitionist hero William Lloyd Garrison, also quoted, they do not wish to think, speak, or write with moderation. And they will be heard. Loudly. 

Consider The Monitor a companion piece of sorts to Southern rock lifers the Drive-By Truckers’ most political record (so far), American Band (No. 26), whose greatest song is a deeply loving, deeply conflicted, fully lucid consideration of home: “Ever South.” 

The dream of the Nineties was alive in the 2010s with a roaring comeback — Sleater-Kinney’s No Cities to Love (No. 32) — and a charmingly navel-gazing never-left — Yo La Tengo’s Stuff Like That There (No. 21) — from two of that decade’s greatest bands. 

I guess I probably can’t wait much longer without admitting Beyonce is not on this list. To me, Lemonade works best as soundtrack to a brilliant long-form music video from a major cultural force. But as a self-contained listening unit — what this is a list of — I find that it’s a (great) singles-and-filler record that drags a little. I prefer the earlier, eponymous Beyonce, and it’s only missing here because 40 records is a short list. But the wilder, freer vocal monument of Rihanna’s Anti (No. 8) is the R&B album of the decade for me. 

Runners-up: I thought Frank Ocean’s alienated R&B hit hardest the first time out, on the homemade Nostalgia, Ultra (No. 30). Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer (No. 36) is where her musicality finally catches up with her persona for a full album that’s worthy of its Prince comparisons. And where Beyonce and Rihanna can come across as forbidding goddesses, Elle Varner is more around-the-way girl. Her wildly underrated Perfectly Imperfect (No. 27) is funny, sexy, smart, grounded, conversational and, finally, righteous. Varner’s daydream of domesticity makes reasonable demands: A fridge full of food, “someone to forgive me when I’m so wrong,” “brown-eyed babies and all.” 

As a fan of the lucid — “voice, verbiage and beats,” as critic Robert Christgau described it in a Danny Brown review this month — a lot of recent hip-hop has trended in a direction (mumbly and/or druggy) that’s mostly not for me. But the genre still takes nearly a quarter of the list. After Kendrick, my favorite hip-hop album of the decade is The Roots’ How I Got Over (No. 5). If Kanye West’s previous-decade Late Registration was hip-hop’s Songs in the Key of Life, this is hip-hop’s Curtis Mayfield opus. Speaking of Kanye, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (No. 9) is a masterpiece of sorts, a relentlessly self-focused, black-comic and belligerent opus that earns every adjective in its cumbersome title. Its world-view makes me miss “the old Kanye,” but as a piece of music it never quits. 

A Tribe Called Quest’s unlikely comeback/Phife Dawg farewell We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service (No. 23) is fierce and beautiful in confronting an uncertain future. I gather Chance the Rapper is now passe? Whatever. All of his records were contenders here, but the blessed blend of hip-hop, soul and gospel of Coloring Book (No. 16) captures his affability and generosity of spirit best. Honorable Mention: Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s Surf, aka Chance the Rapper’s Block Party. Related entry: Room 25 (No. 33) by light-on-her-lips Chance cohort Noname, which just edges unintentional 2018 companion piece Invasion of Privacy by Cardi B. I like all three Run the Jewels records, but R.A.P. Music (No. 40), Killer Mike solo, edges them all. 

Is Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording (No. 10) hip-hop? More hip-hop adjacent, but it works better as recorded pop music than any show music I’ve ever heard. It’s also a truly momentous piece of popular art. On the stage, yes, but if you can fully absorb it, also just in audio form. 

I slipped my two favorite Memphis records of the decade on the list: Julien Baker’s Sprained Ankle (No. 34) and Mark Edgar Stuart’s Blues for Lou (No. 39). Both are personal singer-songwriter albums, but are also marked by true craft. Baker writes with the precision of a good page poet and her voice can break your heart, because it sounds like she’s breaking her own anew on every song. A bass player by trade, Stuart’s Americana moves and he writes about big stuff (and little stuff too) with humor and wisdom. (Memphis honorable mentions: Harlan T. Bobo’s Sucker, Cities Aviv’s Digital Lows and Amy LaVere, both solo and alongside John Paul Keith and Will Sexton.)

Finally a couple strays: Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What? (No. 37) isn’t his final album but will likely be his last testament, evoking previous career peaks (1972’s Paul Simon, 1986’s Graceland) while looking toward the eternal. And Tune-Yards’ whokill (No. 13), the second album from Merrill Garbus and her merry band of studio helpers, evokes such left-field sound savants as Captain Beefheart and Tom Zé while being more accessible than either. 

Top 40 Albums of the 2010s

  1. good kid, m A.A.d city – Kendrick Lamar (2012)
  2. Modern Vampires of the City – Vampire Weekend (2013)
  3. Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit – Courtney Barnett (2015)
  4. Southeastern – Jason Isbell (2013)
  5. How I Got Over — The Roots (2010)
  6. Attica! – Wussy (2014)
  7. Out in the Storm – Waxahatchee (2017)
  8. Anti – Rihanna (2016)
  9. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West (2010)
  10. Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording (2015)
  11. Damn. – Kendrick Lamar (2017)
  12. Funeral Dress II – Wussy (2011)
  13. Whokill – Tune-yards (2011)
  14. American Middle Class– Angaleena Presley (2014)
  15. Contra – Vampire Weekend (2010)
  16. Coloring Book — Chance the Rapper (2016)
  17. Golden Hour – Kacey Musgraves (2018)
  18. The Lonely, the Lonesome and the Gone – Lee Ann Womack (2017)
  19. Snares Like a Haircut — No Age (2018)
  20. Interstate Gospel – Pistol Annies (2018) 
  21. Stuff Like That There — Yo La Tengo (2015)
  22. The Nashville Sound – Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit (2017)
  23. We Got it From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service – A Tribe Called Quest (2016)
  24. The Bird & the Rifle – Lori McKenna (2016)
  25. The Monitor – Titus Andronicus (2010)
  26. American Band – The Drive-By Truckers (2016)
  27. Perfectly Imperfect – Elle Varner (2012)
  28. 12 Stories – Brandy Clark (2013)
  29. All American Made – Margo Price (2017)
  30. Nostalgia, Ultra – Frank Ocean (2011)
  31. Platinum – Miranda Lambert (2014)
  32. No Cities to Love – Sleater-Kinney (2015)
  33. Room 25 – Noname (2018)
  34. Sprained Ankle – Julien Baker (2015)
  35. Wide Awaaaaake! – Parquet Courts (2018)
  36. Dirty Computer — Janelle Monae (2018)
  37. So Beautiful or So What? — Paul Simon (2011)
  38. Allo Darlin – Allo Darlin (2012)
  39. Blues for Lou – Mark Edgar Stuart (2013)
  40. R.A.P. Music — Killer Mike (2000)

1979 Revisited
Revisited

1979 Revisited

singallkindsLeave a comment

Two of my top three albums of 1979 come from white male classic rockers hitting peak form a little bit later than might have been expected at the time. 

Into the Music isn’t as singular as 1968’s Astral Weeks or as perfect as 1970’s Moondance, but arrived as Van Morrison’s third best album and arguably his last great one. 

Rust Never Sleeps probably wasn’t Neil Young’s last great album, but is his greatest, so says me and plenty of others. 

Half acoustic, half electric, it’s all the best of the Seventies’ greatest rock artist in one place, lifted up by visionary songs about punk rock, Southern fatalism, technology, and Pocahontas. Young & Crazy Horse were so peak of powers in ’79 that a live reprise nearly makes my Top 10.

Live albums are rarely the best way to engage a recording artist, and Live Rust is certainly no exception. But it serves as a nice career overview to this point. And Side 4 is the shit.

Additionally, two of my top five albums of 1979 — The Pretenders and Squeezing Out Sparks — are trad-rock hookfests informed and elevated by the urgency of punk. (You could also put Rust Never Sleeps in this category.)

And yet if 1979 has a story, traditional rock informed by punk comes in second. Rather, I’d point to a few other related entries: Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall (#4 album), “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” (#6 single), and “Rock With You” (#13 single), Chic’s Risque (#6 album) and “Good Times” (#2 single), Prince’s Prince (No. 11 album) and “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (#4 single), Donna Summer’s Bad Girls (#20 album, #13 single) and Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (#5 single).

Hip-hop was just then bubbling up from block parties and clubs (Funky 4+1, Tanya Winley and Sugarhill Gang singles), but those artists collectively were concocting a kind of tough, modern black pop drawing from soul, rock, funk and disco. A few years later, Prince and Michael Jackson would make it the biggest music in the world. 

Right, the Michael Jackson is a little “problematic” now. This is not the space for an endless essay on the complicated relationship between art and artist. I’ll only say that I would no longer play Jackson were I DJing or programming on the radio or in any public spaces. He should be someone people choose to listen to, not someone you encounter without intention. 

But I’m not playing any music here, only noting the best albums and singles of 1979 and Off the Wall and its big singles are most certainly among them. 

(One note: The original 1977 version of The Clash was my #1 album of that year. The U.S. version came out in 1979 and is pretty different. If I had included it here, it would have probably been #2. I decided not to double up on different versions of the same album.)

Without further commentary, the lists … 

Albums

  1. Rust Never Sleeps – Neil Young & Crazy Horse
  2. The Pretenders – The Pretenders
  3. Into the Music – Van Morrison
  4. Off the Wall – Michael Jackson
  5. Squeezing Out Sparks – Graham Parker & the Rumor
  6. Risque – Chic
  7. Singles Going Steady – Buzzcocks
  8. Lubbock (On Everything) – Terry Allen
  9. Forces of Victory – Linton Kwesi Johnson
  10. Fear of Music – Talking Heads
  11. Prince – Prince
  12. Live Rust – Neil Young & Crazy Horse: 
  13. Tom Verlaine – Tom Verlaine
  14. Armed Forces – Elvis Costello & the Attractions
  15. B-52s – The B-52s
  16. Damn the Torpedoes – Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
  17. Dub Housing – Pere Ubu
  18. The Roches – The Roches
  19. Eat to the Beat – Blondie
  20. Bad Girls – Donna Summer
  21. Labour of Lust – Nick Lowe
  22. Tusk – Fleetwood Mac
  23. Cut – Slits
  24. Truth n Time – Al Green
  25. In Style – David Johansen

Singles

  1. “Dreaming” – Blondie
  2. “Good Times” – Chic
  3. “Cruisin’” – Smokey Robinson
  4. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” – Prince
  5.  “We Are Family” – Sister Sledge
  6. “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” – Michael Jackson
  7. “Hey Hey My My”/“My My Hey Hey” – Neil Young
  8. “Heart of Glass” – Blondie
  9. “There But For the Grace of God Go I” – Machine
  10. “Rappin’ and Rocking the House” – The Funky 4 +1
  11. “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” – McFadden & Whitehead
  12. “Why Can’t I Touch It?” – Buzzcocks
  13. “Rock With You” – Michael Jackson
  14. “Bad Girls” – Donna Summer
  15. “Family Tradition” – Hank Williams Jr.
  16. “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” – Buzzcocks
  17. “Rock Lobster” – B-52s
  18. “Stop Your Sobbing”/“The Wait” – The Pretenders
  19. “Bright Side of the Road” – Van Morrison
  20. “Oliver’s Army” – Elvis Costello
  21. “Mind Your Own Business” – Delta 5
  22. “Cruel to Be Kind” – Nick lowe
  23. “Life During Wartime” – Talking Heads
  24. “Reunited” – Peaches & Herb
  25. “Vicious Rap” – Tanya Winley
  26. “Kid”/“Tattooed Love Boys” – The Pretenders 
  27. “Money Changes Everything” – The Brains
  28. “One Way Or Another” – Blondie
  29. “At Home He’s a Tourist” – Gang of Four
  30. “Rapper’s Delight” – The Sugarhill Gang
  31. “Girls Talk” – Dave Edmunds
  32. “Tusk” – Fleetwood Mac
  33. “Someone is Looking for Someone Like You” – Gail Davies
  34. “1-2 Crush on You” – The Clash
  35. “Boogie Wonderland” – Earth, Wind and Fire
  36. “Hot Stuff” – Donna Summer
  37. “(Not Just) Knee Deep” – Funkadelic
  38. “Money” – The Flying Lizards
  39. “You/U” – Kleenex
  40. “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” – Ian Dury & the Blockheads

Movies

Per usual, I don’t have time (or the inclination with the time I have) to rewatch movies for listmaking purposes. So the movie lists are really more of a hunch about what I would think now based on my memory of when I did see them. 

  1. Real Life (Albert Brooks)
  2. Richard Pryor — Live in Concert
  3. Breaking Away (Peter Yates)
  4. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
  5. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
  6. The Brood (David Cronenberg)
  7. Alien (Ridley Scott)
  8. Mad Max (George Miller)

1969 Revisited
Revisited

1969 Revisited

singallkindsLeave a comment

Dylan, Beatles and the Stones, though none quite at their best. Three CCR studio albums, which I think is a record on the lists so far. The best single-disc, single-artist collection in pop history … coming in at #2. That’s all the preamble I can muster this time around. To the lists …

Albums

  1. The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground: If the second side matched the first, it would be my favorite album ever. As it is, the second side opens with maybe my favorite Velvets song (“Beginning to See the Light”) and ends with maybe their best album-closer (Moe Tucker on “Afterhours”), so it’s pretty close anyway. “I met myself in a dream, and I just want to tell you everything was alright.”
  2. Aretha’s Gold – Aretha Franklin: Single-artist compilations are a judgement call on these lists. I tend to avoid them — and never a boxed set — unless it collects music mostly experienced as singles and from a narrow and relatively contemporaneous period, and if it feels like it functions as a de facto “album.” Aretha recorded for nearly 60 years and navigated the evolution of black pop over those decades better than a lot of casual listeners probably know. The 14 songs on Aretha’s Gold were all released as singles between February, 1967 and July, 1968, a small moment in the context of her career and an enormous one in the history of recorded music. Most of it was cut in New York and Aretha grew up mostly in Detroit, but these are the peaks of her “Southern soul” period. It doesn’t have quite the comp-as-album rep as The Immaculate Collection or Singles Going Steady or Sly & the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits, and you can find all the same songs collected in other configurations, but I don’t know if there’s a better single album collection of music anywhere. Docked a notch — but only one — for being a comp.
  3. The Band – The Band: The closer you get to most of the lyrics, the less they mean, though without quite the gravity or mystery of Music From Big Pink. This follow-up is lighter on the surface and the surfaces are plenty deep. It’s about that union of voices, a deep shared musicality, and interest in tradition that’s never stodgy.
  4. Let it Bleed — The Rolling Stones: Their most mammoth opener (“Gimme Shelter”) and closer (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”) bracket a seven-song transitional hodge-podge (some Brian Jones, who died while it was being made, some Mick Taylor) that leans into country and blues. But that’s a hodge-podge from the world’s best rock and roll band at peak of powers.
  5. Willy & the Poor Boys – Creedence Clearwater Revival: This great CCR singles-and-filler album of 1969 gets the edge over the other great CCR singles-and-filler album of 1969 (and a pretty big advantage over the merely really good CCR singles-and-filler album of 1969) because I like the filler a little better, especially “Don’t Look Now,” which expands the class-consciousness of the preceding “Fortunate Son,” and their version of “Cotton Fields,” which is probably my favorite CCR album track.
  6. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere – Neil Young with Crazy Horse: Young is atop the short list of people I want to hear epic guitar jams from, and that side of him starts here with “Down By the River.” I don’t know that they got any better. But the best guitar sound here is on the comparatively quick title cut, also one of my favorite Young songs.
  7. II – Led Zeppelin: I’ve gone back and forth with Zeppelin over the years and this re-listen put me firmly in the “back” category. A key was no longer paying any attention to lyrics or attempts at meaning. Play loud.
  8. Trout Mask Replica – Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: I listened to this so much in high school, and I think I can credit it with opening up my ears. Relistening start to back (though in segments) for the first time in a long time, I was surprised at how well and warmly I remembered every single song or fragment. If I put all the albums I like on a continuum from “most likely to be agreeable to the most listeners” to “most likely to be actively hated by the most listeners,” this might be at the farthest end.  
  9. Unhalfbricking – Fairport Convention
  10. Green River — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  11. Abbey Road — The Beatles: Most will probably think this is way too low but I wonder if it’s still too high. (Would I really rather listen to Abbey Road than From Dusty in Memphis?) It’s an album I greatly admire but every time I revisit it I confirm all over again how much I just don’t care about it. The less perfect Sgt. Pepper’s and White Album feel (alternately) more alive in the culture and more alive to itself.
  12. Dusty in Memphis – Dusty Springfield
  13. From Elvis in Memphis – Elvis Presley
  14. The Original Delaney & Bonnie — Delaney & Bonnie
  15. Stand! — Sly & the Family Stone
  16. The Gilded Palace of Sin – Flying Burrito Brothers
  17. Nashville Skyline – Bob Dylan
  18. Soul 69 – Aretha Franklin
  19. In a Silent Way – Miles Davis
  20. Hot Buttered Soul – Isaac Hayes
  21. Together — Jerry Lee Lewis and Linda Gail Lewis
  22. Bayou Country — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  23. Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin
  24. The Rod Stewart Album – Rod Stewart
  25. Make a Joyful Noise – Mother Earth
  26. The Stooges – The Stooges

Singles

  1. “I Want You Back” – The Jackson Five
  2. “Fortunate Son” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  3. “Making Love (At the Dark End of the Street)” – Clarence Carter
  4. “Life’s Little Ups and Downs” – Charlie Rich
  5. “Bad Moon Rising’ – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  6. “Suspicious Minds” – Elvis Presley
  7. “I Wanna Be Your Dog” — The Stooges
  8. “Up on Cripple Creek” — The Band
  9. “Green River’ – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  10. “Honky Tonk Woman” – The Rolling Stones
  11. “Proud Mary’ – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  12. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – The Rolling Stones
  13. “Born on the Bayou” — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  14. “Only the Strong Survive” – Jerry Butler
  15. “Get Back” – The Beatles
  16. “Lodi” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  17. “I Want to Take You Higher”  – Sly & the Family Stone
  18. “Hot Fun in the Summertime” – Sly & the Family Stone
  19. “Down on the Corner” — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  20. “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” – Neil Young
  21. “Hungry Eyes” – Merle Haggard
  22. “Love Man” – Otis Redding
  23. “Homecoming” – Tom T. Hall
  24. “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby” – Marvin Gaye
  25. “Whole Lotta Love” – Led Zeppelin
  26. “The Chokin’ Kind” – Joe Simon
  27. “Down By the River” – Neil Young
  28. “Soul Deep” – The Box Tops
  29. “War” – Edwin Starr
  30. “I Can’t Get Next to You” — The Temptations
  31. “A Week in a Country Jail” – – Tom T. Hall
  32. “It’s Your Thing” – The Isley Brothers
  33. “Okie from Muskogee” — Merle Haggard
  34. “Kick Out the Jams” – MC5
  35. “Polk Salad Annie” – Tony Joe White
  36. “Israelites” – Desmond Dekker
  37. “Oh What a Night’ – The Dells
  38. “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” – William Bell
  39. “Workin’ Man Blues” – Merle Haggard
  40. “Something in the Air” – Thunderclap Newman

1998 Revisited
Revisited

1998 Revisited

singallkindsLeave a comment

It’s been a bit, but my little re-listening project returns. I was done with 1998 a while ago and am currently working my way through both 1969 and 1979. All of the years done so far are now compiled to the right.

The goal was, and is, 1965-2014, 50 years beginning with the dawn of the modern album era. Lately, though, I’ve yearned to listen to older stuff and spent a couple hours recently reading about while listening to Louis Armstrong and zipping through some Roy Acuff (alphabetical linkage not accidental). At some point during this project, I might start peppering in some singles lists from pre-1965, going back as far as recorded pop music takes us.

Since I ended up with plenty of album-specific notes, I’ll limit the preamble. I did cut the singles list down from the usual Top 40 because I really struggled to get to 40 singles (not album cuts technically released as singles) I actually cared about. 1998: Not the greatest year for pop music.

Albums

  1. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road — Lucinda Williams: It leads with its two best songs-as-songs, both concrete yet still mysterious depictions of the mundane. The first is about masturbation (listen closely), the second about divorce (ditto), both, right, about longing. From there she dedicates her poet’s eye and marble-mouthed drawl to a celebration of her home region, the one that you see and the one you imagine, which are sometimes one and the same. Inspirations include Birney Imes photographs, Robert Johnson legends. Howlin’ Wolf records, the pleasures of singing “Opelousas,” “Pontchartrain,” and “Nacogdoches,” and the novel idea of finding one’s joy in West Memphis. The one with her name as a title, from a decade prior, still has my heart, but this is her masterpiece.
  2. Aquemini — Outkast: In retrospect, the most culturally momentous album of the year and not quite the best by my count only because it’s overstuffed in the manner too-common to CD-era rap albums, where Car Wheels is pretty much perfect. (I wonder how frequently people make it through the closing 15 minutes of “Liberation” and “Chonkyfire.”)
  3. Mermaid Avenue — Billy Bragg and Wilco: Jeff Tweedy has fronted two (mostly) good and (increasingly) popular bands over a nearly 30 year career, and this one-off (that became a two-off) assignment to bring some unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics to life is the best record he’ll ever be a part of. That’s no shame really. Ostensible frontman Bragg has nearly a decade on Tweedy and it’s true of him too. If we’re being honest, it might be true of Guthrie.
  4. Whitechocolatespaceegg — Liz Phair: Five years can be a long time when it takes you from your mid-twenties to your early thirties, and so she goes from an epic/classic that really digs into a specific post-collegiate life/scene to an epic/closer-to-classic-than-the-world’s-allowed that takes in marriage and parenthood and marriage after parenthood and plenty of fictional or fictionalized scenarios (at least a couple with male narrators) on which her cool detachment is virtue.
  5. Life Won’t Wait – Rancid: Mohawked Clash fanatics exceed artistic expectations just in time for it to not really matter much commercially. A kind of alternate version of the rock-and-roll story, one where punk and reggae/ska replace country and blues, one that’s urban and international rather than rural and Southern, one where class politics are spelled out rather than implied, one where the Clash is Elvis and Buju Banton is Muddy Waters (though this is where the chronology gets muddled). Right, it’s not London Calling. It’s not that smart or that fierce. But as a Cali-centric but globe-trotting simulacrum, it gets damn close to that touchstone’s expansive musicality and look-what-we’re-doing-we’re-really-pulling-this-off self-delight.  
  6. A Thousand Leaves — Sonic Youth: Maybe it’s a product of my own advancing age, but I’ve increasingly found the urban-pastoral/domestic portion of the Sonic Youth continuum (Skronky Middle Age?) more compelling than their culturally assaultive sonic youths. At its best (“Sunday,” “Wildflower Soul,” “Hits of Sunshine”), A Thousand Leaves is the summation/pinnacle of that part of the story, perhaps as much as Daydream Nation is a summation/pinnacle of those first chapters.
  7. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill — Lauryn Hill: Hill wasn’t a great singer by the exalted standards of R&B, but she tops good albums, then and now, from Aretha and Mary J. via her fluid shifts from rapping to singing and back again, great background vocal arrangements, beautifully organic production, and a sense of purpose that could come on a little strong (maybe her baby boy wasn’t the messiah) but still deepens the already plenty deep musicality.
  8. Hello Nasty – Beastie Boys: Gratefully back to where they once belonged.
  9. Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star – Black Star: Two great MCs with great chemistry at peak of powers. Still stirring but on reacquaintance a little less so than I’d remembered.
  10. A Rose is Still a Rose – Aretha Franklin: A voice for all ages settles into a new one with ease. Her first major album in more than a decade and maybe her last.
  11. The Music in My Head – Various Artists: This (mostly) West African comp spans more than three decades and draws from at least four countries (primarily Senegal, but with Mali, Gambia, and the Congo represented). The handpicked listening companion to an eponymous novel I’ve never read, it’s essentially a not-quite-mass-released mixtape. Not in my personal top tier of Afropop collections, but probably in the next tier down.   
  12. Some Things I Know – Lee Ann Womack: The Dixie Chicks’ debut (or, I guess, reboot) was the most momentous straight-country record of the year, but Womack’s less crossed-over sophomore album holds up better.
  13. Steal This Album – The Coup: A hip-hop original, Boots Riley, takes a leap. There would be a couple more to come.
  14. On the Floor at the Boutique – Fatboy Slim: Spinning the hits in his head, juicing the volume and speed. My favorite artifact of the late 1990s sue-me-I-still-call-it-techno boom.
  15. Pack Up the Cats – Local H: Sounds like Nirvana, Everyman version. Includes the best song ever written about being a rock musician (see singles list below). Said single doesn’t even include this matter-of-fact album-track quotable: “I’m in love with rock and roll, but that will change eventually.”
  16. The Tour – Mary J Blige: Ok, so it’s not exactly Bill Withers’ Live at Carnegie Hall or James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, but it is a rare case (like Withers, not quite Brown) of an R&B singles artist’s most satisfying album being a live one.
  17. Introducing Cadallaca – Cadallaca: Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker going soft, with a organist/singer partner (Sarah Dougher) rather than a guitarist/singer partner (Carrie Brownstein).
  18. The Glass Intact – Sarge
  19. Middlescene — Amy Rigby
  20. Nature Film – Scrawl
  21. Moment of Truth – Gang Starr
  22. The Singles – Bikini Kill: Three songs from 1993 as exciting as any rock and roll from any time or anywhere. Six more from 1995 that are mostly pretty hot too. Run-time: 18 minutes.
  23. Still Standing – Goodie Mob
  24. He Got Game – Public Enemy
  25. What is Not to Love – Imperial Teen

Singles

  1. “Rosa Parks” — Outkast
  2. “All the Kids Are Right” — Local H
  3. “Are You That Somebody?” — Aaliyah
  4. “Celebrity Skin” — Hole
  5. “The Rockafeller Skank” — Fatboy Slim
  6. “Too Close” — Next
  7. “Hard Knock Life” — Jay-Z
  8. “A Rose is Still a Rose” — Aretha Franklin
  9. “Doo Wop (That Thing)” — Lauryn Hill
  10. “Definition” — Black Star
  11. “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a 79 Granada Last Night’ — The Coup
  12. “Together Again” – Janet Jackson
  13. “I Will Buy You a New Life” — Everclear
  14. “Wide Open Spaces” – Dixie Chicks
  15. “Intergalactic” — Beastie Boys
  16. “He Got Game” — Public Enemy
  17. “Music Sounds Better With You” — Stardust
  18. “Body Movin” – Beastie Boys
  19. “Ha” — Juvenile
  20. “A Little Past Little Rock” — Lee Ann Womack
  21. “Buckaroo” — Lee Ann Womack
  22. “Waltz No. 2 (XO)” — Elliott Smith
  23. “Malibu” — Hole
  24. “Gangster Trippin’” – Fatboy Slim
  25. “Father of Mine” — Everclear
  26. “Stall”  — Sarge
  27. “Second Round KO” — Canibus
  28. “Ruff Ryders Anthem” — DMX
  29. “Closing Time” – Semisonic
  30. “The Boy is Mine” — Brandy and Monica

Movies

Usual caveats apply. I’ve relistended to every piece on music on both album and singles lists. I haven’t rewatched any movies. This isn’t my Top 10 as it would have been in 1998, but rather my Top 10 as I guess it would be today. Chances are, rewatching would actually yield a slightly different result.

  1. Rushmore (Wes Anderson)
  2. There’s Something About Mary (Farrelly Brothers)
  3. The Big Lebowski (Coen Brothers)
  4. Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh)
  5. Dr. Akagi (Shohei Imamura)
  6. Small Soldiers (Joe Dante)
  7. He Got Game (Spike Lee)
  8. The Newton Boys (Richard Linklater)
  9. Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller)
  10. Primary Colors (Mike Nichols)

Best of 2018
Revisited

Best of 2018

singallkindsLeave a comment

Albums

This is, I think, the second year since 1998 that I haven’t had a ballot to fill out in the Village Voice’s once-annual Pazz and Jop national critics poll. The other year I missed was due to a work email change. That might have been a problem this year too, except that the Voice, and its venerable poll, went kaput around the same time I was changing venues.

This further diminishes whatever meager professional connection I still have to music criticism. I still voted in the Nashville Scene’s annual country music critics’ poll, but most of my writing is now on other subjects and my favorite piece of music writing I did in 2018 was the one non-listy thing I wrote on this site, strictly out of personal compulsion. It’s also the reason I’m not doing a singles list this year. 

I’m still adding the Pazz and Jop scoring (100 points for 10 albums, max of 30, minimum of 5) to the Top 10 of my Top 20 albums below, because it better conveys what was, for me, a year of five tightly bunched favorites followed by lots of other records I liked, but a little less.

And those five favorite albums happen to include a couple of twinned pairings.

Parquet Courts (New Yorkers with Texas roots) and No Age (a SoCal duo) each have catalogues now half-a-dozen albums deep without a single misstep, something I’m not sure any other ongoing indie bands can say, though No Age have stretched theirs over a little more than a decade while Parquet Courts’ headlong rush didn’t start until 2013. Both bands established new career peaks this year, I believe, on albums that come from the same corner of the culture but engage the broader world differently.

For Parquet Courts, that means aggressively, passionately. For No Age, that means hardly at all.

The former’s Wide Awaaaaake! is a kind of embattled post-punk manifesto, drawing from arty forbears such as Gang of Four and the Minutemen, but deeply in its own political moment.  Sample lyric: “Collectivism and autonomy are not mutually exclusive/Those who find discomfort in your goals of liberation will be issued no apology/And fuck Tom Brady.” Also: “Get love where you find it/It’s the only fist we have to fight with.”

No Age’s Snares Like a Haircut, named for an instrumental track that delivers exactly what the title says, is a more insular, more formal album. Drummer-singer Dean Spunt bashes out tunes with his hands, vocal chords, and heart, and guitarist Randy Randall turns them all into a kind of one-man guitar-skronk symphony. Of every album listed below, it’s the one I’d be most reluctant to recommend to others. And yet it’s the 2018 album that was my most constant companion. My favorite driving album. My favorite writing album.

I don’t know if any 2018 albums expressed individual personalities as fully as Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy and Noname’s Room 25, two hip-hop thesis statements from two black women who see the world differently but with an equal fierceness and their own individual brands of smarts and good humor. One’s a pop blockbuster, the other a cult item. Cardi B is the more familiar figure, if still fresh, her striving taking a combative form. “Pussy’s so good I say my own name during sex,” she boasts. Quick-thinking, light-on-her-lips, but musically understated, Noname answers from the other end of hip-hop’s cultural spectrum : “My pussy teachin’ ninth-grade English/My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism.”

In hip-hop now, as in most of the rest of things, women are where it’s at. That’s one story of music in 2018. I’d add hip-hop-adjacent Janelle Monae, rounding out my Top 10 with what I think is her best album, the one where front-to-back musicality finally catches up her long-fetching concept. And while I admire 2018 newcomers Tierra Whack and Cupcakke, they’re topped by a couple of 2017’s I was late getting around to: Princess Nokia and Rapsody. (Years are, per usual, arbitrary cultural distinctions.) Pusha T, as always, raps his ass off, and the shortened form of Daytona only heightens the impact. Kendrick Lamar presided over a soundtrack that might have been even richer than its blockbuster host. But when it came to hip-hop in 2018, I mostly wanted to hear women. (Drake? As always, no thanks.)

In this regard, hip-hop caught up with country, which has been dominated by women for years now, at least artistically, if not on the charts or on the radio, and as much as I like Kacey Musgraves’ pop breakthrough (which is indeed her mostly fully realized album), that means my personal chart-topper-by-a-nose, the third and best album by three (Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, Angaleena Presley) of the half-a-dozen-or-so most important women in country. If Musgraves’s roots-pop-disco Golden Hour was a great country album for people who don’t much like country music, Pistol Annies’ Interstate Gospel is a great country album for people who do. The Annies work their titular concept with a few high-concept songs that are high-end country craft, but this is an album about collective songwriting and collective singing that goes deeper than before, especially on Song of the Year candidates “The Best Years of My Life” and “Milkman.”

My real Song of the Year, though, might have come from another of those half-dozen-or-so country women, Lori McKenna’s “People Get Old,” even if the fine album it’s from, The Tree, couldn’t quite make the Top 20 cut. Ones who did: Roots-rockin’ Becky Warren, folkie Mary Gauthier, wild woman Linda Gail Lewis partnering with Robbie Fulks, and Bettye Lavette rewiring Bob Dylan, joined by a couple of national monuments (Willie Nelson, John Prine) whose easeful, good-humored takes on age and mortality in 2018 should be an example for all lucky enough to last so long. People get old, right. But some age like wine somehow.

With the 75-percent dude Superchunk cracking the Top 10, my indie-rock faves were pretty white guy this year, but they were followed by Courtney Barnett, a great artist who made a good album, and a coterie in the form of Lucy Dacus solo and with pals as Boygenius. (I’m assuming a double-review of Pistol Annies and Boygenius has been done.)

Incidentally, my other favorite song of 2018 from an album non-finisher: Wussy’s “Aliens in Our Midst,” a righteous cover of a regional punk obscurity unknown to me. The album list:

 

  1. Interstate Gospel — Pistol Annies (15)
  2. Snares Like a Haircut — No Age (13)
  3. Room 25 — Noname (13)
  4. Invasion of Privacy — Cardi B (13)
  5. Wide Awaaaaake! — Parquet Courts (13)
  6. Daytona — Pusha T (7)
  7. Golden Hour — Kacey Musgraves (7)
  8. What a Time to Be Alive – Superchunk (7)
  9. Rifles and Rosary Beads — Mary Gauthier (7)
  10. Dirty Computer — Janelle Monae (5)
  11. 1992 Deluxe — Princess Nokia (2017)
  12. Historian — Lucy Dacus/Boygenius EP — Boygenius
  13. Last Man Alive — Willie Nelson
  14. Things Have Changed — Bettye Lavette
  15. Black Panther — Kendrick Lamar/Various Artists
  16. The Tree of Forgiveness — John Prine
  17. Undesirable — Becky Warren
  18. Tell Me How You Really Feel — Courtney Barnett
  19. Wild! Wild! Wild! — Robbie Fulks and Linda Gail Lewis
  20. Laila’s Wisdom — Rapsody (2017)

Movies

It was a decent year for the union of art and commerce as blockbusters Black Panther, Mission Impossible: Fallout, A Star is Born, and blockbuster-to-be Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse were also really good movies. I enjoyed and admired all four.

Roma was the most impressive 2018 movie I saw, and for a second time on the big screen over the holidays (thanks Twin Cities). It’s far from a bloodless technical feat, but it didn’t quite grip my heart as much as the other four movies it joins in my Top 5. Roma seemed like one of those big international cinema masterpieces of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, like some midpoint between Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Fellini’s Amarcord. Not every “masterpiece” is a masterpiece, but I’d say Roma is closer than most. I still think Y Tu Mama, Tambien and Children of Men are Cuaron’s best films. 

Roma didn’t slay me like Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s portrait of a makeshift family — a bunch of small fish swimming together —  on Tokyo’s economic margins. I also saw it for a second time on the big screen thanks to a Minneapolis trip and its tumbling third-act revelations, close-up testimonials, and final triptych of small moments accrued power on repeat viewing. Its visual artistry is far more subtle than Roma, but that too became more apparent on repeat viewing, especially its birdseye view of its six subjects gazing up at the sound of fireworks.

Support the Girls, Andrew Bujalski’s day-in-the-life workplace comedy set at and around a suburban Houston Hooters knockoff, works as well at any size, but requires an attentive eye and especially ear. Modest on the surface, its every visual and aural cranny is packed with sharp but good-humored social observation. No 2018 film that I saw has as much to say about American life circa right now. Maybe Minding the Gap, a years-spanning documentary about three Rockford, Illinois skater buddies navigating adulthood, comes close. These two small films both debuted in Memphis at the Indie Memphis Film Festival and are further united by defiant, righteous endings.

My biggest filmgoing regret of 2018 was not seeing Leave No Trace, director Debra Granik’s follow-up to Winter’s Bone, about an Iraq War vet and his 13-year-old daughter as they try to live undetected in the Oregon woods, on the big screen when I had the chance. The movies list:

  1. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
  2. Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski)
  3. Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)
  4. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
  5. Minding the Gap (Bing Liu)
  6. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
  7. First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
  8. The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)
  9. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller)
  10. Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
  11. Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley)
  12. Paddington 2 (Paul King)
  13. BlacKKKlansman (Spike Lee)
  14. Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)
  15. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rotham)
  16. Wildlife (Paul Dano)
  17. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)
  18. A Star is Born (Bradley Cooper)
  19. Mission Impossible: Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie)
  20. Game Night (John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein)

TELEVISION

Per usual, this isn’t a list of favorites but a list of everything from 2018 I ended up watching in full. Only the first two are things I would tout without reservation. (I liked season one of Atlanta a little more, but the show remains wondrous.) I have no idea why I actually watched all of Westworld. I won’t make that mistake again.

  1. Atlanta
  2. The Americans
  3. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
  4. Better Call Saul
  5. The Deuce
  6. Ugly Delicious
  7. Sharp Objects
  8. Westworld