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 2023 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). 

With the run-up to the NBA season and the final stretch of the presidential election, I fell off the podcast-reduction wagon, but now I’m back to my non-chronological year-by-year trip through pop music’s past.

1988, time to set it straight … This list features a really strong Big Three: The Greatest Rap Album Ever, the Greatest Post-Punk Guitar Album Ever and the greatest female singer-songwriter/folk-rock album ever (so sayeth me, absent acclamation).

After that, the year sounds more muddled to me. Some great afropop aftershocks from 1986’s Graceland/Indestructible Beat of Soweto breakthrough, a classic year for hip-hop singles yielding more good but few great albums, the full-fledged debut of alt-rock’s essential ’80s-to-’90s bridge band (Pixies), and lots of veteran prestige artists doing good work that’s not quite at their best (Prince, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, the Traveling Wilburys conglomerate, U2, R.E.M., Talking Heads, Richard Thompson, Robert Cray). There were also some Big Statements that haven’t aged that well (Tracy Chapman, Midnight Oil, maybe U2/R.E.M. apply here) and shocks of the new that aged even worse (Living Colour, Sugarcubes, Fishbone).

But I probably can’t intro my 1988 lists without talking about what might be the two most retroactively lauded albums of the year, neither of which factor prominently for me. N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton and Guns N Roses’ Appetite for Destruction are in many ways the same record.

Both are essentially hits-and-filler records and, as such, both are better represented on the singles list.

There’s more than a little self-conscious epater la bourgeoisie, one more strategically righteous than the other, the other a little more consistent and enduring as a total piece of music.  (Another historical hits-and-filler comp, but better: Never Mind the Bollocks … Here’s the Sex Pistols.) Both are (pock)marked by misogyny, with N.W.A.’s problems in this area both more transparent and also more (unintentionally) instructive: “I Ain’t Tha 1” is the best non-hit on either album, not just because it sounds incredible, but because Ice Cube’s resentful attack on a would-be romantic partnere instead turns on itself; it’s a portrait of male loserdom made all the more grand for its lack of self-recognition.

Both bands fell victim to artistic bloat and internal chaos that made follow-ups less worthwhile and their careers — as bands, at least — short-lived. These are definitely two of the most culturally momentous albums of 1988. But this isn’t a list of bands or cultural eruptions, it’s a list of records, and Straight Outta Compton and Appetite for Destruction are both “classic” albums for people who don’t really listen to albums, each with highpoints, each better as an idea of a record than as a listening object.

ALBUMS:

1. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back – Public Enemy: Definitely one of the albums I’ve listened to most, and would be on the short list if I only concluded spins from 1988-1992. Despite how thoroughly I know every beat, hook, sample, exhortation, and aside, it still thrills. The perfect vocal contrast of bullhorn and court jester. Avant-garde and accessible, relentless and funny. Packed with detail (sound and sense) and sometimes a little full of shit. A Top Five all-time contender.
2. Lucinda Williams – Lucinda Williams: Her 1998 follow-up-once-removed Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is more widely considered Williams’ masterpiece, and I used to feel that way, but I’ve come back around to this not-actually-a-debut. It’s a less perfect record, and maybe that’s partly why it cuts deeper. Car Wheels may peak at the very beginning, but every song is of a piece. Lucinda Williams is comparatively uneven. Half the songs are brilliant; the rest offer companionable support. The breathless, yearning opener — “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad” — rushes by in 21 lines, nine of them a repetition of the title refrain. “Changed the Locks” is a love-gone-wrong song that builds steadily toward the cosmic, managing to be horrified and funny all at once. “The Night’s Too Long,” a fictional story of a small-town girl moved to the city, and “Crescent City,” an autobiographical sibling song, are sketches so precise you can feel the cool moisture coming off the beer bottles in the bars where one song ends and another begins. And then there are “Passionate Kisses” and “Side of the Road” — twin titans about the imperatives and limits of romantic love that are at once visionary and also grounded in the everyday. Throughout, Williams’ breathy, marble-mouthed vocals — her signature, if anything is — are just a little more naked and open than they’d ever be again. The simpler secondary songs — the straight country “Price To Pay,” the alt-country Velvet Underground “Like a Rose,” the lonely lament “Am I Too Blue” — give the album some room to breathe, and they grow more lovely all the time. The closing Howlin’ Wolf cover? A turf grab. Not just a declaration of artistic support but one of artistic equality.
3. Daydream Nation – Sonic Youth: I’ve tended to disagree with consensus (to the degree there is one) on Sonic Youth. Give me relaxed late career hookfest “Rather Ripped” over pre-Daydream insurgency or Nirvana-era alt-rock breakthroughs. But I agree with pretty much everyone that this was the peak of their powers.
4. Paris-Soweto – Mahlathini & the Mahotella Queens: Captured in a Paris studio during a European tour after the success of Graceland spurred a reunion, this is the classic mbaqanga sound (West Nkosi producing, the Makgona Tsohle Band playing) updated for state-of-the-art recording. The gritty quality of the earlier recordings is missing, but the beauty is all there: the shimmering, swirling guitars, the open-hearted vocals, the impossible brightness. (In fact, I often think that the second track, “Awuthule Kancane,” is among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.) There’s even a healthy dose of English lyrics, and, sung in these voices, they don’t embarrass.
5. Strictly Business – EPMD: Two barely distinguishable voices intertwined around a scratched-up post-disco groove that never lets up. Hip-hop reduced to the verities.
6. Virgin Beauty – Ornette Coleman & Prime Time: Part of this list-making exercise is relistening to and reevaluating records I know well, but part of it is seeking out contenders I’ve missed along the way, and this is my best discovery so far. A dabbler in the realm of jazz, I mostly just know what I like. I like this. A lot.
7. Surfer Rosa – Pixies: The bridge from Husker Du/Sonic Youth to Nirvana/Pavement is … um … paved with sugar-rush guitars and obscurantist screaming.
8. The Heartbeat of Soweto — Various Artists: As ’80s mbaqanga comps go, this is a folkier, more wide-ranging alternative to The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, duplicating only Amiswazi Emvelo on the artist list. It’s more rural-sounding, with almost country-blues equivalents such as Mlokothwa’s “Thathezakho” and Armando Bila Chijumane’s “Kamakhalawana.” The result is a record with a more relaxed pace and possibly a calmer spirit — less of a joyous rush but perhaps just as rewarding.
9. Follow the Leader – Eric B & Rakim: Similarly elemental as Strictly Business, but more personalized: Eric B’s beat and Rakim’s mind-to-mouth continuum engaged in private conversation as perpetual musical motion.
10. Folkways: A Vision Shared – Various Artists: Woody’s rock-era inheritors Dylan, Springsteen and even Mellencamp all sound better here than they would elsewhere for a while and Sweet Honey in the Rock and Taj Mahal more than earn their keep. Not quite as fine as Mermaid Avenue or A Tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, which would come a decade later, but a fine stage-setter.
11. Thunder Before Dawn — Various Artists
12. Thokozile – Mahlathini & the Mahotella Queens
13. Black Album – Prince
14. Land of Dreams – Randy Newman
15. Straight Out the Jungle – Jungle Brothers
16. I’m Your Man – Leonard Cohen
17. By All Means Necessary – Boogie Down Productions
18. Critical Beatdown – Ultramagnetic MCs
19. 16 Lovers Lane – Go-Betweens
20. The Tenement Year – Pere Ubu
21. Jive Explosion — The Soul Brothers
22. Heartbeat Soukous — Various Artists
23. Volume One – The Traveling Wilburys
24. Appetite for Destruction – Guns n Roses
25. Old 8X10 – Randy Travis
26. Isn’t Anything – My Bloody Valentine
27. Tracy Chapman – Tracy Chapman

SINGLES:

1. “It Takes Two” – Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock
2. “Sweet Child O Mine” – Guns n Roses
3. “Paid in Full (Seven Minutes of Madness Mix)” – Eric B & Rakim
4. “Don’t Believe the Hype” – Public Enemy
5. “It’s My Beat” – Sweet Tee & Jazzy Joyce
6. “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’” – Big Daddy Kane
7. “Fast Car” – Tracy Chapman
8. “Potholes in My Lawn” – De La Soul
9. “Microphone Fiend” – Eric B and Rakim
10. “Fuck Tha Police” – NWA
11. “Runaway Train” – Rosanne Cash
12. “Bass” – King Tee
13. “Teenage Riot” – Sonic Youth
14. “Go On Girl” — Roxanne Shante
15. “Strictly Business” – EPMD
16. “Da Butt” — EU
17. “Shake Your Thang” – Salt-n-Pepa
18. “(Nothing But) Flowers” – Talking Heads
19. “You Gots to Chill” – EPMD
20. “Straight Outta Compton” – NWA
21. “Talkin’ All That Jazz” – Stetsasonic
22. “Because I Got It Like That” – Jungle Brothers
23. “Handle With Care” – Traveling Wilburys
24. “Birthday” – The Sugarcubes
25. “Follow the Leader” – Eric B. & Rakim
26. “Joy and Pain” – Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock
27. “Welcome to the Jungle” — Guns and Roses
28. “Anchorage” – Michelle Shocked
29. “Beds Are Burning” – Midnight Oil
30. “Plug Tunin” – De La Soul
31. “My Philosophy” – Boogie Down Productions
32. “DJ Innovator” – Chubb Rock
33. “Paper Thin” – MC Lyte
34. “Colors” – Ice T
35. “Alphabet Street” – Prince
36. “Hazy Shade of Winter” – The Bangles
37. “My Prerogative” – Bobby Brown
38. “Going Back to Cali” – LL Cool J
39. “Whoever’s in New England” – Reba McEntire
40. “Parents Just Don’t Understand” – DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince