Listening to "Homogenic" in 2017

The Author poses a retrospective appreciation of Björk’s Homogenic, a seminal electronic record sure to enrich western pop culture if more people would listen to it.

We Did Some Research Into Spotify, And Here Are The Five Worst Hate Bands That Came Up

You probably won't believe who's #1.

"Hail to the Thief" – The Pro-Trump, Alt-Right Protest Album We Needed, But Didn't Deserve

Wrongly dismissed and called outdated by fans, Hail to the Thief is Radiohead’s most prescient work, both anticipating and celebrating the populist rise of Trump.

2016 Music In Review: Top Ten Socially Necessary Albums that Were Pretty Good Overall

In which the Author counts down the ten albums he least disdained in 2016 that didn’t happen to be “old music”, which Millennials define as anything predating the current year.  In preparation for this list, the Author didn’t listen to anything that was exclusively jazzy or soulful and skipped a bunch of rap albums that were probably overhyped by his peers who don’t listen to anything but rap albums.  Albums he appreciated parts of but couldn’t really get into as a whole included The Altar by Banks, Heads Up by Warpaint, Scum Without Boundaries by the I.L.Y.’s, Puberty 2 by Mitski, Nine Inch Nails’ latest, A Hermitage by Jambinai, Boy King by Wild Beasts, The Hope Six Demolition Project by PJ Harvey, Prima Donna by Vince Staples, SVIIB by School of Seven Bells, My Woman by Angel Olsen, and the soundtracks to Doom, The Neon Demon, and Jackie.

10. Blackstar

This is a pretty good album undermined by too much saxophone for my tastes which I foresee myself enjoying more on the second or maybe third listen if I make it that far.  Blackstar and Lazarus are obviously the standout singles, though I also like the brooding beat of the “Where the f___ did Monday go?” song.  ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore is crude and lame and I don’t have much to say about the last two tracks.  The overall aesthetic of Blackstar kind of reminds me of the Blade Runner soundtrack, which may be owing simplistically to the relaxed jazzy instrumentation, but I can’t really knock it for sounding like something awesome.

This wasn’t a bad note at all for David Bowie to go out on, and music fans the world over have him to thank for providing several great albums over several decades.  I distinctly remember discovering Outside through the end credits of Se7en and being enthralled by his ability to operate within the then-popular industrial genre while still putting his singular stamp of artistry on it.  You could say I was deranged by him.

Not from Blackstar, but maybe my favorite Bowie song.

9. We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service

I don’t agree with any of the political sentiments expressed on this album, which is near constantly political.  At times I find it too juvenile and ridiculous for the age of the people involved in it, as when Q-tip bemoans the lack of “women with wisdom leading the way”, or, in the album’s most insipid hook, when he sardonically monologues, “Muslims and gays, boy we hate your ways.”  In spite of its bitterness, or because of it, it’s still the most sonically engrossing, witty, and sharp-tongued rap album I’ve heard in a long time, so bravo to A Tribe Called Quest for making a pouty left-wing “protest album” that even the Author can enjoy, you know, like a James Cameron movie.

8. Nonagon Infinity

Probably the most straightforward and self-explanatory album I heard all year, Nonagon Infinity consists of nine fiercely energetic, similarly paced rock tracks that flow into one another and loop, endlessly, for as long as you can stand to listen to them.  It’s kind of ingenious, and slapped a big grin on my face as soon as I realized that, yes, That Just Happened.  King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard allegedly have five albums lined up for release this coming year, and if all of them exhibit the inventiveness of Nonagon Infinity, then 2017 is bound to be, literally, the best.

7. Preoccupations

More melodic but less consistent and audacious than Preoccupations’ previous record Viet Cong, their self-titled sophomore venture nonetheless offers an enjoyable batch of densely mixed post-punk, post-rock, whatever you want to call it.  Although I could play the 11-minute Memory and Degraded repeatedly, the presence of a couple undeveloped, 1-minute half-songs and a limp-footed outro makes the whole thing less appealing for regular listening.  I still have to thank them for Viet Cong, which was the best album I heard for about three months straight and would definitely have a spot on 2015’s list were I to revise it today.

6. Bottomless Pit

It’s Death Grips’ annual album, which means you either love it already or just don’t get it.  I second Anthony Fantano’s opinion that this is a conglomeration of sounds the trio has previously explored, but that doesn’t lessen its merits whatsoever and it’s certainly the catchiest Death Grips record behind The Money Store.  Giving Bad People Good Ideas and Eh obviously speak to me on a more personal level than any other music this year, as they should to most anybody who has participated in a Creative Writing workshop.  Others like Spikes and Three Bedrooms In A Good Neighborhood lack the same profundity of truth-speaking from MC Ride but soar on some of the best hooks yet created by Zach Hill and Andy Morin.

5. Arrival

After my second time watching Arrival, my friend remarked that he was often unsure which sounds in the film were diegetic and which were linked to the soundtrack.  That is precisely what makes the Arrival soundtrack so singular and brilliant: evoking the mechanical whirring of helicopters and ominous humming of heptapods even without the film’s visuals.  The percussion and electronics and choral elements alone on here put almost every other wide-release score this year to shame, and it’s the first sci-fi soundtrack in ages that dares to sound truly alien.  Between this and Sicario Johann Johannsson has proven himself one of the most visionary and flexible composers working now, and with any luck studios will keep on letting him do his thing without interference.

4. The Glowing Man

This has to be my least favorite out of Swans’ unofficial trilogy of albums, but one of them had to be.  Even being well acquainted with roughly half of the band’s multitudinous other albums, this is one of the eeriest, most inaccessible, yet also spiritual works I’ve heard, a gargantuan 2-hour wall of music that contents itself with getting under the beholder’s skin at the possible expense of memorable tunes or lyrics.  Gone are the instantly gripping, head-bobbing singles of To Be Kind or more exciting, protracted sequences of The Seer, replaced mostly by the soul-shaking, instrumental drone the band has been perfecting since Soundtracks For the Blind.  Frankie M is the closest thing to a banger out of the eight tracks, and it’s 21 minutes long, so I can only perceive myself listening to The Glowing Man again at home or on a long, probably solitary, roadtrip, and even then only when I have no other mentally taxing activities that would divide my attention from the experience.

3. A Moon-Shaped Pool

Many said this was one of Radiohead's grower albums, not as unwelcoming as The King of Limbs but still too moody to love immediately.  I liked most of it at first, though certain tracks have called me back more than others (Daydreaming, Ful Stop, and Present Tense) and I've only bothered to hear the whole thing through twice.  Burn the Witch, while fine by itself, doesn't work well as a kicker into a block of largely mellow tracks, and the snoozer True Love Waits really was better in acoustic form 15 years ago, which leaves me baffled why critical consensus seems to consider it the best track.  As for the politics of the album, I don't get why people think the lyrics of Burn the Witch are pro-illegal immigration, and while I appreciated the subtle callback to the B-side Talk Show Host in The Numbers, once I realized it was a thinly veiled Global Warming protest anthem I never went back to it, because that's just, like, embarrassing.  Maybe this would have been acceptable for a Pablo Honey-era Thom Yorke, or even Kid A-era Yorke if we're pushing it, but at 48 the guy is getting rather old to be singing unironically about Global Warming.

Overall, though, if you're more drawn to Emotional Radiohead than Political Radiohead, you've probably already relished this many times over.  Daydreaming continually entrances me with a genius music video to accompany it, Ful Stop is ready made for blowing out subwoofers, and Idioteque once again proves the band’s skill at crafting songs with multiple movements that sound organic to the whole.

2. Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks

Is exactly what it purports itself to be, although you may not know what that is.  Having never delved into Twin Peaks or Xiu Xiu prior to hearing this, I was astonished by just how thrilling the crossover of the two was, the only downside being my subsequent disappointment that the band hasn’t made anything else quite like this.  Though it’s difficult to describe in terms of its musical components, the album certainly has a good mix of atmospheric mood pieces (Audrey’s Dance and Harold’s Theme) and hard-hitting, frightening rockers you can visualize being played in some seedy bar (Packard’s Vibration and Blue Frank/Pink Room).  Heavily distorted throughout and magnificent at its peaks (Falling being the most “normal” and moving song), it’s a decidedly filmic soundtrack that more than compensates for its lack of an accompanying source, one I’d recommend unreservedly to anyone who seeks out weird and esoteric music.

1. Ritual Spirit

When I first realized back in January that Massive Attack had put out some new music and it was the darkest, most intoxicating four-song set they’d produced since the opening of Mezzanine, I floundered for an effective way to communicate this pressing information to my comrades in the dorm room, who were fixated on a game of 2K or “The Flash” or something and who still looked forward with keen anticipation to whatever Drake or Kanye would be dropping yet.  Given the less than ideal circumstances, it’s little surprise I didn’t succeed in this, but hopefully these Files can avail more people to check the EP out.  Whereas the featured artists on past Massive Attack projects didn’t always suit the tone of the whole album (Damon Albarn’s appearance marked the early demise of Heligoland, for instance), all the ones on Ritual Spirit feel judiciously connected, culminating in the band’s triumphant reunion with Tricky on Take You There.  The closing track in particular sounds like a demented evolution of Radiohead’s A Wolf at the Door, escalating from a trembling piano loop into full-blown, hypnotic nightmare fuel that perfectly closes out, in my opinion, the most cohesive release of the year.  On top of being all-around excellent trip-hop, it also introduced me to Young Fathers, who have more than a couple catchy songs under their belt and don’t sound like any other experimental rap group working.

Spotify Is Bad For Civilization – on Genre, "Music Discovery", and the Decline of Taste

I don’t often learn anything new in liberal arts classes, but when I do, it’s a revelatory experience.  Such an awakening occurred during the 5-minute break of a literature class when the conversation turned to one student’s musical tastes, or deficiency thereof.  “I’ve been listening to a lot of EDM,” remarked the three-year student of epic poetry, theology, and philosophy.  “EDM when I wake up, when I shower, when I drive…”  Everybody laughed, except for the Author.

As a somewhat avid listener of most kinds of music except for jazz and soul, which – let’s admit it – are horrible by themselves, and as the sole curator of a 177-hour-long list of hand-picked songs, I’ll confess that I, more so than other people, am predisposed to hate the implications of this statement.  Most people in this situation wouldn’t think anything of the student listening to EDM, and they certainly wouldn’t make it as far as passing judgment on that lifestyle.  “Live and let live,” they would say, or, “You do you,” or, most heinously, “It’s good that you’ve found something you’re really passionate about.”  I, conversely, found nothing whatsoever celebratory in it, and spent the rest of the class period mulling over such questions as, “What kind of EDM?” and “Who’s your favorite artist?” and “What the hell do you appreciate in EDM that’s any way artistically redeeming?”

Putting aside the banalities I associate with EDM (which is a euphemism for electronic dance music, which is itself an even more vapid incarnation of electropop music), the tendency of Millennials and consumers in general to blindly seek out and wolf down types of music based upon their disposition suggests a regrettable indifference towards the artistic process used to bring the music to them in the first place.  It’s easy to boast about your generation receiving arguably the worst pop music in the history of the world; I had thoroughly convinced myself of this dark reality back in 2014, a year that introduced and continued to feed us such innovations of musical gayness as Sam Smith, that Beyoncé album, Macklemore, One Direction, and so on.  Yet one could make this case for just about any year in music; if you only listen to whatever plays on radio, you will probably end up thinking yours is either the greatest or the worst era ever, depending on your temperament.

However, there can be no dispute that the youth of today, beyond producing and consuming the worst music of all time, have additionally assumed the worst methods thus far pioneered of discovering, listening to, and critically dissecting music.  This is on account of many things, some technological, others sociological, but music as an art form is undoubtedly declining as a pillar of our culture.  Whereas music formerly could only be experienced in public performances eagerly sought out by the middle-class, and later through radio and individually purchased physical records, the advent of the internet and of streaming services has enabled nearly everybody living in 1st-world countries to access untold stores of albums from every era and movement.  In theory this should come as a boon to musical literacy and – dare we say – diversification, but in effect these platforms have proven cancerous to their users’ acumen and mentality, systematically connecting them with whatever they already like and nothing else.  People develop an addiction to EDM, to metal, to Top 40, to whatever gets them “turnt up”, and gladly stay in ignorance of real music.  Their musical intake has backslid into something like Starbucks coffee or cafeteria chicken tenders: courses they consume just to sustain themselves, not knowing of or not having any better options.

“What kind of music do you like?” is a common icebreaker among Americans, one that has the potential to reveal a fair amount about an individual’s personality.  Of a man who says he listens to Kendrick Lamar or Public Enemy, one might induce he fancies himself an intellectual, politically conscious and keen to the demands of African-American neighborhoods.  Maybe he’s just like me and appreciates music that tries to say something, anything of pertinence to society.  Of a man who exalts the U2 of the olden days (before they totally sold out), one could presuppose a certain degree of spirituality and segue from that into a conversation about faith, the afterlife, or something as corny and poetic as the oneness of humanity.  Of a woman who says she likes Radiohead and thinks The King of Limbs is severely underrated, one could judge she’s either a tranny or a keeper, because women don’t listen to Radiohead.  Of a man who says that he likes Radiohead and believes Thom Yorke to be a messenger for our times, one could guess he’s probably a liberal male, and deal with that accordingly.

One’s favorite musical artist can be as telling a characteristic of one’s identity as one’s favorite author, city, pastime, historical leader, etc.  Bradley Nowell, Lou Reed, Fiona Apple, Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Tupac Shakur: these were more just content creators happy to make a living entertaining the masses.  These were (and continue to be) cultural icons, even idols who shaped minds and inspired hundreds to hone their craft, their voice, their style, or their sex lives.  At the mere mention of these names, one could form a mental picture not only of the artists’ outer bearing but of what traits or virtues they symbolized to their fans.

A collage of extremely wealthy and popular EDM “artists”

What could one possibly assume about people who admit to “listening to a lot of EDM”, except that they probably don’t have great taste in music?  What distinguishes a Kygo from a Skrillex or a Calvin Harris or a Tiësto or a David Guetta, artistically or as celebrities, and would an EDM fan be able to blindly source a new track by any of them?  Such a person would be a blank slate from their EDM taste alone, as would a majority of my generation, which has all but disavowed the celebration and disciplined study of idols in the arts.  Yes, there are the Beyoncés and the Kanyes and the Lady Gagas of the industry, people respected in most circles less for their music than for the ideals they represent (women’s liberation, not caring what others think about you, and being gay), but by and large Millennials have exported the rock god in favor of the pop star.  What do Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Drake, Ariana Grande, J.T., Rihanna, and Taylor Swift mean to those who play their music?  What does the music mean to them, and could they explain the meaning to someone not acquainted with the record?  Would they listen to the record front to back more than once?  These, alack and alas, are dying practices in the 21st century.

This is not to call the pop star a strictly Millennial invention.  Indeed, every generation has had its share of safe and featureless junk that rapidly fades into obsolescence, only to be resurrected in a hastily made Totally 80s playlist and exposed to a whole new batch of suckers who think they love the pop music of their parents but wouldn’t bother themselves to buy or listen to any older album in its entirety.  This is the paradox of claiming to love music from the 80s or any other decade: by the very denotation of “80s music”, one both demarcates said music to a separate category from contemporary music, suggesting it’s less relevant or pure as art, and subtly dehumanizes the authorship of the older music by attributing its genesis to cultural trends instead of individual composers and performers.  Talking Heads, e.g., were not an amazing “80s Music” band; they were a very influential and creative band who were known for working in the new wave and art pop genres, who happened to flourish in the 80s, and whose lead singer went on to have a semi-successful solo career.

Nor do I wish to say that genuine musical artistry has expired; quite to the contrary, the internet, self-publishing, and crowd-funding have parted the floodgates to a deluge of artists who in past days may never have reached an audience outside their own town.  The sphere of music at our disposal has compounded in volume over the last decade, and yet Millennials have somehow conceived more and more efficient means of homogenizing everything that reaches their ears. Instead of listening to artists, stories, or sonic landscapes, we listen to genres and “moods”, effectively screening out any music that doesn’t match our spirits at a time or that we don’t already find pleasing.  We have music for pumping iron, music for hitting the beach, music for drinking fake, expensive coffee, music for getting drunk and upsetting the neighbors, music for spiting male conservative friends, and according to Spotify, even music for having sex.  Wired has an interesting article examining how exhaustively the company has wrapped itself around the lives of its customers, but this should already be apparent to anybody who has used the program more than once a day.  While music as a mindless supplement to other activities steadily proliferates, we see music for music’s sake increasingly regressing into an intimidating, alien concept, and not the kind that European leaders welcome into their society.  This is detrimental to any thriving culture.

A collage of song collections that are only good for one distinct occasion

For a service that seems ready-made to facilitate musical branching out and learning, Spotify habitually reassures users that they needn’t branch out or come in contact with anything they don’t immediately like. From its thousands of specialized playlists to its automatically generated personal recommendations to its front-page pop music advertisements (VIEWS by DRAKE available now, CLICK HERE!) to its archaic, Pandora-inspired radio functionality, which prioritizes or buries artists based on the user’s input, Spotify offers a wide assortment of tools to connect its paying subscribers with a decidedly narrow selection of music, and to shield them from most everything else.  This makes perfect sense from a strategic standpoint, as most businesses depend on satisfied, returning consumers, and most consumers want a fairly similar experience every time they visit a business.  In promoting such user-friendly systems, streaming providers like Spotify and Apple Music follow rather surefire regimens for building consumer trust, but in so doing they also undercut the very advantages of their existing at all, that being the freedom to listen to any album on demand.

Spotify bombards users of the free version with advertisements enticing them to subscribe and “skip away” until they find a song that’s just right for their current company or state of mind.  In the dark ages predating the internet and ADD streaming services, skipping away was not a viable or easy option, requiring one to record a mixtape or burn a CD in order to jump between several unrelated songs in a row.  Alternatively one could fumble through a collection of physical media to sate one’s longing for a radically different song, but the hassle involved in this exchange intrinsically motivated the listener to focus on one artist for 40 minutes at a time.  Certain LPs, such as The Dark Side of the Moon, played out as two unbroken, sweeping pieces of music, defying anyone twitchy enough to skip around and achieve the same emotional high encapsulated in the whole.  Pink Floyd’s albums, and others’ to a lesser extent, rewarded those who listened intentionally and persevered through the slower instrumental sections.  They were theatrical exercises in balance and contrast and bombast, ones that deserved to be heard in whole even by those who didn’t take to the band’s style.

The media distributors of today, in contrast, reward impatience and lackadaisical listening at every turn, encouraging people to downvote and hide away whatever uncomely, dissonant, or boring sounds accidentally pop up and disrupt their studying or cleaning or cooking.  If you don’t like that one song in Afternoon Acoustic, fret not and flip it over to Indie Chillout, where you may have better luck.  Are you really not digging the first 40 seconds of that weird 23-minute song called “Apostate”?  Skip that self-indulgent rubbish and never listen to another Michael Gira song again.  And by all means don’t try to make it through the last David Bowie album when you can just put on the “This is David Bowie” list for dummies that Spotify scraped together after he died.  Why would you run the risk of hearing a song you don’t instantly like when you could limit the breadth of your playlist to songs that millions of other like-minded people have already sanctioned?  Why would you bother finishing a 300-page novel either?  You’re a busy full-time employee or college student, most of the inspiring/poetic/so-true quotes are on Buzzfeed or Sparksnotes, and you’ll be able to watch the Hollywood adaptation in six months anyway.  And do you really have to stand for all those plodding, arty scenes of setup in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Surely there are hundreds of better entertainment options you could stream instead, and when those outwear their welcome too, you can change the show again.

As the shrewd guys at Red Letter Media noted in one of their 100-something Half in the Bag movie reviews (I remember not which one), modern men get DVDs out of magical grocery store dispensers, and in like manner they also get their vinyls out of magical thinking phone apps that know exactly what they want and when.  Somewhere along the line, frequenters of the Redbox became so numbed to what they were paying for that they forgot the films were even made by humans, that they could be viewed and evaluated critically as art.  Art films like It Follows and Goodnight Mommy would appear right next to franchise movies like Insidious Chapter 3 and Paranormal Activity 5, and at $1.50 each (or a paltry quarter with coupons), nothing was ventured or lost on any of them except a little gas and free time in the evening.  The element of risk removed from the equation, the layman’s perception of DVD rentals degenerated into an inexpensive form of momentary sensual stimulation, one release being as good as any other so long as it didn’t confuse or bore him.

The same principle applies to Netflix streaming, which highlights so many scores of B-movies on the front page that most people don’t feel burned if they waste 90 minutes on a made-for-TV presentation.  People could dig a little further into the app and find meaningful, visionary films by Park Chan-wook, Lynne Ramsay, Gaspar Noé, Bong Joon-ho, Stanley Kubrick, or P.T. Anderson, movies including Victoria, Upstream Color, The Shining, Nightcrawler, Risky Business, Oldboy, and those are just ones I already know to be good.  Nonetheless, whenever my friends fire up Netflix in the dorm lobby, we end up watching something like “Kung Fu Dunk” or “Timerunners” or “School of Rock”, because those are what show up first and they don’t really care what they watch for free on somebody else’s account.  We have more – and more varied – written entertainment sources within our reach than any other people in history, but we’ve lost the will to get anything other than entertainment out of them.

The same principle applies to digital music providers, which throw heaps of junk at unversed, probably busy listeners and congratulate them on “discovering” “new” music, when in fact they couldn’t put a name to what they’re hearing or differentiate it from the artist who played just before, and when they may have suppressed or skipped a bunch of truly different music to arrive at the cuts they tolerated right away.  The instant gratification model of Spotify (and Pandora, and Netflix, and any other Orwellian media assistant) is one that virtually precludes the user from learning to love any of the better artists working today.  I would not have become as big a fan of Bjork’s music if I had taken Spotify’s word that she was not for me.  Ditto with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, an album that repelled me on first listen, didn’t grab me on the second, and utterly enthralled me on the third, so much so I now agree it’s one of the seminal rock records of all time.  For others, this difficult album may have been Radiohead’s Kid A, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Swans’ Soundtracks for the Blind, Grimes’ Visions, Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra, or King Crimson’s debut LP, but following the recommendations of Spotify wouldn’t have led one to any of them. Then there’s the matter of Death Grips, an avant-garde electronic/hip-hop trio so musically abrasive and violent that I had to force myself to listen until, ten tries later or so, the separate layers started to feel harmonious, exhilarating, and frankly brilliant.  They are one of many groups that deserve to be heard despite the discomfort they initially instill, and that demonstrate how music can deliver terror and anxiety in equal measure as joy and reassurance.  Yet with the possible exception of some crossover Grimes tracks, streaming services do little to expose these bands to the uninitiated.

A collage of albums that wouldn’t benefit from skipping away

It’s often generalized that ordinary art comforts the disheartened while extraordinary art challenges the comfortable.  Liberals especially love to invoke this bromide in praise of whatever semi-fictional social-justice film is currently making the rounds at festivals, glibly passing off narrative flaws or distortions of truth under the façade that it’s a movie “ripped from today’s headlines” that “demands to be seen”.  If only these poseurs, and the streaming platforms they utilize, heeded the same guidelines of great artistry in their musical preferences.  When I told one of my Beatissima friends that I’d finally listened to The Life of Pablo and wasn’t all that impressed (along with many one-time fans of Kanye West), his response was something like, “To be honest, Cote, I really don’t give a ____ about your taste in music.”  And I don’t really blame him; after all, most of the people he grew up with didn’t give a second thought to “white people music”, erecting a kind of protective wall around the urban artists they most respected.  Likewise, the county and the homeschooled community in which I grew up never listened devotedly to rap music unless it came from Eminem or Lecrae, and the pop-ridden airwaves largely reflected stereotypes of Southern Californian superficiality.  My peers and I didn’t partake of much of any “black people music” as traditionally understood, but we didn’t partake of the best white music either.  As with 99% of Americans, we bonded over what the radio cycled ad nauseum and what our friends deemed cool, which in my case was a lot of film and video game scores.

Everyone is influenced by their surroundings, and one could argue that the bonds forged in these shared surroundings form the backbone of our culture.  Radio, paradoxically, has played a principal role in both reinforcing and poisoning the culture, uniting millions in enjoyment of certain artificially catchy hits while severely degrading the quality average people come to expect from music.  What differentiates and sets radio above streaming sites is that FM stations don’t attempt to lie to those who still make use of them. Enthusiastic radio listeners have always had a 1 in 12 chance of guessing what they’ll hear when they get in the car, and if they use that medium more than any other, they probably don’t mind the repetition and would freely admit to liking most mainstream music.  Spotify, on the other hand, sycophantically seduces listeners into thinking that they’re taking strides to explore new musical voices, when almost every feature of the program is modeled on pampering consumers with music guaranteed to comfort, never challenge them.

Streaming services, it goes without saying, don’t care about introducing listeners to extraordinary art, and most of their signature practices are antithetical to the promotion of extraordinary art.  Hipsters love to rag on Pitchfork and its slavish fanboying over certain rappers, but Pitchfork at least recognizes the expressiveness of music and endeavors to call readers’ attention to artists they would normally turn off or ignore.  The only thing that music streamers respect is the monthly fee they cash from all their users, and the EDM that keeps the money flowing.

Björk's Amazing "The Voice" Audition Must Be Seen to Be Believed

Article written by George Stefano Pallas, of course.

Monday night’s episode of The Voice was as riveting and inspirational as ever, proving once again why we tune in twice a week for four hours to hear people sing karaoke versions of popular songs and receive unconditional praise from a panel of four artistically suspect judges.  A transgendered lesbian father of two chihuahuas wowed Christina Aguilera by singing Stay With Me by Tom Petty, from which she claimed that she deduced that he was gay before he even saw her, and that was why she wanted her on his team.

Other standouts in the season 10 premiere included an EPA student intern who did a stripped-down cover of the classic pop song Burn Burn Burn Burn, a 4-year-old ballet artist who brought the house down with Born In The U.S.A., and an African-American police officer who has used the pacifistic, masturbatory anthems of Justin Bieber to make it through times of extreme internal dissonance.  By the end of the night the coaches retired with a roughly equal number of soul and country singers, while Adam Levine took one delicate coffeehouse pop singer who pretended to play guitar under his wing.

The most surprising audition of the night came completely out of left field, in a spunky Icelandic woman whose giant voice and spirit more than compensate for her diminutive aspect.  Björk Guðmundsdóttir has been a singer, songwriter, and producer on nine weakly-selling studio albums, seven live records, five remix collections, two experimental film soundtracks, an ironically titled Greatest Hits album, and even a questionable collaboration with Death Grips, which CMT dubbed the Worst Band in the World.  That’s not even counting all the vocals she contributed to side-projects with K.U.K.L., The Sugarcubes, and a bunch of other now retired bands.  But Björk’s days of fooling around and making self-absorbed music for her own indulgent pleasure are over.  Now she’s aiming to hit it big time and become a serious, chart-topping artist.

“All my life has felt like a succession of commercial failures and almost, not-quite breakthroughs,” said Björk to the camera before her audition.  “It’s like the industry only ever wants to make room for women who start on the Disney Channel, don’t stand up to the studio heads, and act like f***ing strippers.  That’s why I’ve decided to go on The Voice, a show where nobody cares where you come from or what you look like.”

Not that that matters, because Björk looked absolutely stunning going into her blind audition, decked out in a gorgeous r**skin-themed eagle dress and sleek, science-fiction-themed eye makeup.  Facing the backs of the four notorious chairs, she later said she was so overwhelmed in the presence of her elfin woman-child adulthood idols that she wanted to disappear.

“I was about to embarrass myself in front of Blake Shelton, who’s done so much for the progression of music he’s not even funny.”  When the spotlight fell on her, though, she fearlessly rose to the occasion, and soon the whole audience was transfixed, completely lost for words and thoughts that weren’t related to how scary they find Donald Trump.  For a moment Björk was worried she wouldn’t get anybody to turn, but when Christina pressed down firmly on her button and spun around with a look of utter bafflement, that was all the confirmation she needed to carry on and knock it out of the park.

Christina was struck immediately by the appearance of the singer, jumping out of her chair and exuberantly applauding, as they do.  “OK, OK, OK.  I can do something with this,” she said.  “I don’t know what these guys to my left and right were thinking, but with your girl power and my coaching, I know the two of us have got this.”

With such a widely documented shortage of strong female and international performers on the show, which remains the most watched and influential karaoke singing competition in America, it’s a miracle that the two white male judges and obligatory diverse one didn’t act more enthusiastic to welcome Björk to their teams.  “You obviously have a lot of potential,” said Adam Levine, “And I think that this show can do amazing things for you.  That’s the magic of The Voice and having such an incredible network of teachers at your beck and call.  But I think another song would have been much more fitting for your voice as well as popular with the audience.  When we get to the live performances, you need to have them singing along and not even listening to what you’re doing, because then you’re screwed.”

Björk had opted to sing an original composition called Human Behaviour, the melody of which she wrote as a teenager.  “I wanted to sing an original song because many of my favorite artists from The Voice have done so on at least one point or another, and I wanted to carry that mantle for my predecessors,” said Björk.  “Javier Colon, Cassadee Pope, Tessanne Chin, Dia Frampton, Josh Kaufman: all of them not just major inspirations to me but indispensable forces of creative passion who are revolutionizing music as we know it.  Whereas people like Claire Boucher and Brian Eno, Michael Gira, you know, freaking Thom Yorke, Jason Pierce, and M.I.A. have been making really stale, boring, and unimaginative music that’s basically screaming Awards Bait, contestants on The Voice have been at the forefront of changing and advancing what we think of when we think of music, and I think that’s really important.”

In atypical fashion, Human Behaviour isn’t about a failed romantic relationship or normative modes of sexual communication at the club or sensations induced by the consumption of hallucinatory drugs.  Rather, the indefinable tribal dance beat depicts a universe governed by chaos from the view of an animal who’s observing and musing on the actions of higher mammals.  The line “There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behavior” encapsulates Björk’s atheistic philosophy that humanity is bound to irrational animalism and amorality.  This is driven home by the wailing refrain, “And there is no map, insanity!”  In a world without Deus, even the instinctive actions of animals make more sense than the behavior of humans trapped in a delusional mindset that they’re acting with some sort of reason.

When she heard Adam’s advice about the inexpediency of her esoteric song choice, Björk laughed out loud and agreed wholeheartedly.  “That’s literally not even my best song.”

Pharrell also had mixed feelings on Björk’s risky performance, adding, “I wouldn’t say you knocked it out of the park, and I wouldn’t quite claim you brought the whole house down, and I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the bomb, and I definitely wasn’t blown away, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that you killed it – sorry, Christina.”  Ultimately, though, he concluded on a positive note, calling hers “one of the best performances I’ve seen all night” and saying, “I think this is going to be the most talented season of the show we’ve ever had.”

Blake on the other hand encouraged her to branch out in the future and utilize her full range of abilities while performing.  “If you maybe played or convinced us you were playing two or three chords on an acoustic guitar for the first half of the first verse, it would make the whole thing so much more impressive and authentic.  You’ve proven you can sing the crap out of any song and in your own style, but we’re looking for a person who has the complete package, if you know what I mean.”

As per usual, Christina was overjoyed and had few constructive criticisms, though she encouraged her new team member to find the human connection in the lyrics and address the words to somebody in particular. “There’s so many cute boys out there in the crowd who’d love to be with you.  Just pick one out at random, imagine that you’re singing this to him, and I promise it’ll do wonders for your self-confidence on stage.  I’m not a sexist, it’s just true.”

Björk is definitely a different kind of vocalist, but if we’ve learned anything from the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, it’s that being different isn’t always a bad thing.  With a little lipstick and the collective brainstorming of the world’s most accomplished songwriters, producers, and mentors, The Voice may finally hammer this young woman of 50 years and about 20 albums into the pop star she was always meant to be.  Her competition will be extremely fierce, but as we know, the beauty of The Voice is that no artist – not even one as singular as Björk – leaves unchanged.  Or unimproved.

“I’m not going to come out and brag that I’m training any of the greatest singers who’ve, like, ever lived,” Christina humbly explained to Entertainment Weekly, “But I definitely have high hopes for Björk and what we can turn her into.  Possibly maybe she might just be America’s next Voice.”

Watch Björk's incredible blind audition below, plus an interview with a useful asshole.

2015 in Music: More Top Ten and the Inadvertent Individualism of Grimes

Continuing the Author’s purposely disordered summary of the ten least worst albums he heard come out of 2015, which also happened to be the year in which he courageously started identifying hipstelf as hipstgender.  Pound Sign Dumb Wins.  For part one of hipst countdown and the other sections of this year-end recap, links have been helpfully appended at the bottom.

BØRNS, Dopamine –

Borns with a slashy thingy through the O isn’t the most original dude to leave a mark on indie pop this decade; he is basically aping Lorde’s singing and production style while swapping out the pessimistic teenage brooding for sappy love lyrics (“She’s sweet like candy in my veins.”  “Baby, baby, baby, baby... I’m thirsty for your ecstasy / so open up your heavenly gates.”) and more uptempo electronic beats, which people have gravitated to in the absence of any new Lorde LPs on the horizon.  While I want to knock him for veering too close to an innovative artist I’ve enjoyed much more for slightly longer, he’s still a decent, barely male substitute I have no difficulty recommending to Lorde, Glass Animals, Carly Rae Jepsen, Taylor Swift, or maybe even Kanye fans until the inevitable day he gets discovered by distributors and passes into the overrated club.

I do have some problems with Dopamine that have yet to be addressed.  First of all, when I said I’d recommend this to Taylor Swift and Lorde fans, I meant I’d recommend portions of it to people who want to hear almost exactly the same thing as portions of a Taylor Swift or Lorde album.  Take American Money, for example, which is an aggravatingly familiar copycat of Wildest Dreams, I Know Places, and Glory and Gore all in one. Maybe this is more indicative of the interchangeability of Taylor Swift’s melodies than anything, but it still bumps me how unoriginal this tune is.  Secondly, why did he take out one of the more fun songs from his EP (Seeing Stars) and replace it with some stinkers like Dopamine and Fool?  Thirdly, why is he staring at a naked girl on the hideous cover picture?  Is this supposed to indicate that he’s a big boy or a serious, grown-up artist now or something?  I give up, like I can’t even.  I’m just going to listen to the pools song or Dug My Heart again and forget the rest of this album’s nonsense happened.

Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, & Sometimes I Just Sit –

If Lou Reed was still alive and kicking but in a woman’s body, he would probably be making music like Courtney Barnett’s.  Barnett has a knack for grafting humorous lyrics and noisy guitar tracks that recall the best of The Velvet Underground’s regrettably short discography.  Sometimes she gets a little carried away in the clatter and the album becomes too brash for its own good.  Pedestrian At Best happens to be the most popular and most annoying single on the record simultaneously.  Just as Heroin, Venus in Furs, and All Tomorrow’s Parties were among the longer and finer cuts off of Velvet Underground & Nico, the better songs on I Sit Blah Blah Blah are those moderately paced enough to escalate to a point where the grandeur and clamor have been fully earned (Small Poppies, Depreston).  Anyway, even the songs that don’t make much of an impression musically still succeed in stringing the listener along with clever and unorthodox lyrics.  “Jen insists that we buy organic vegetables / And I must admit that I was a little skeptical, at first / A little pesticide can't hurt,” she muses on Dead Fox.  I should also note that the gayness level of this album is relatively high on the lyrical side of the equation, somewhere between Coldplay and Macklemore on the spectrum of heteronormatism, but I don’t like it strictly on account of that. It’s just good rock and roll.  Plus, that’d be pretty gay.  

Blur, The Magic Whip –

If you don’t know who Blur are, they’ve been around for quite some time, but you can excuse your own ignorance in this case seeing as how they took a 12-year break between The Magic Whip and their last venture Think Tank, which was perfection.  Blur are comprised of Gorillaz’s real-life founder Damon Albarn, who has brainstormed three additional bands on the side, insane guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree.  The British band certainly has better albums under their belt than The Magic Whip, but their latest sticks within their traditional style of not having a style that carries over from each album to the next.  As the neon-lit cover might suggest, there are some video gamey, Nintendo-like loops speckled throughout, and I’d say the album as a whole has a poppier, more funky sound than past Blur projects, which depended more on Coxon’s aggressive guitar work.  It doesn’t veer as closely to the Gorillaz aesthetic as Think Tank did, but it’s still a good crossover point for Gorillaz fans to acquaint themselves with the rest of Albarn’s astonishing volume of composition.  As always, Albarn’s buttery, precise voice is a reassuring companion in what can be an off-putting, eccentric musical wilderness.

Elle King, Love Stuff –

If you listen to the radio or go out in public, you’ve probably heard the lead single from Elle King’s debut album Love Stuff, and you might just even hate it by this point.  It’s still bad-a.  The surprisingly gifted daughter of Rob Schneider first entered the music scene in 2012, with an EP that included both the bluesy Playing For Keeps and a frankly awesome live cover of the dirtiest song ever written, My Neck, My Back. Her first LP scales back the grime and sexy stuff to a radio-friendly proportion of innuendo (“They always want to come, but they never want to leave.”), but it retains a lyrical maturity and credibility that evades a lot of alternative rock releases.  Even saying nothing of Elle’s unique and powerful voice, the music represented here features a wide range of influences, from rock to bluegrass to R&B to actually bearable country, especially on later songs like Make You Smile.  Contrariwise, Under The Influence sounds like the James Bond theme that never was, and would have made a much better choice for opening Spectre than freaking Sam Smith, while the gloomy folk rocker Ain’t Gonna Drown with its dramatic aesthetics could have been pulled straight from True Detective, season one of course, because the second totally messed it up.  The album’s not without its weaknesses:  Kocaine Karolina rips off Bon Iver’s Skinny Love almost chord for chord and I find America’s Sweetheart rather irritating and trite.  For the originality and catchiness of her album, though, Elle King more than earns a spot on George Stefano Pallas’ still relevant 10 Mean Old Things To Watch list.

Grimes, Art Angels –

Up until this entry, I feel I’ve taken careful pains to avoid coming across as a mindless, undiscriminating sheep a la others in the hipstgender community, but I’ll probably be dispensing with all that discretion hereon out.  To listen to Grimes for the first time (or maybe second or third, all variables not being equal) is to experience an epiphany, one that hits you like a brick and a stolen kiss at once; in that moment you will realize just how shallow and bland and lame the rest of the music you’ve been indulging really is, but you will also see the reason for music’s being, the material, formal, efficient, and final cause, and it will incapacitate you with joy.  Going straight through Art Angels from beginning to end with headphones or the loudest home theater setup you can manage short of upsetting the neighbors is positively euphoric, there being not a single stumbling block in the 50-minute endeavor aside from maybe the finisher Butterfly, which sounds a tad generic after everything else until the guitar kicks in at the third minute.  This is an astonishing collection of music, one in which each unit not only works on its own but works in conjunction with the rest of a well kept machine, where all the songs draw inspiration from some different source yet masterfully adapt it to the central vision of a brilliant mind who knows exactly what she’s doing and how to do it.

How much grander does this feat appear when one recognizes that Art Angels was written, sung, played, and produced by one person who was working, for all intents and purposes, in creative isolation; who then conceived of, edited, colored, and directed all the music videos accompanying the lead singles, handing only cinematography duties over to her brother; who crafted not only 13 perfect songs but verily the 13 most enthralling and blissful songs of the year; who accomplished all of this and more without the interference of record label forces or collaborators trying to coerce a familiar, broadly marketable and “popular” sound?  It’s kind of a shame that Claire Boucher is such a Canadian eco-leftist in her private life, because she’s arguably created the quasi-Randian, individualist record of our times.  Some of her older fans have greeted this fourth LP’s “poppier” tone with cynicism and nostalgia for her stranger, dreamier landmark Visions, but Art Angels essentially does to pop music what Sandman did to comic books, what Myst did to 1st-person adventure games, or what Descent Into Hell did to fantasy novels, taking something widely celebrated and pushing it so far into the realm of uncorrupted, inexplicable sub-creation it sheds whatever made it knowable and archetypal – whatever made it popular – in the first place.

Those who admire Grimes admire her music intensely, but they know they’ll always be a small minority of the population, and I doubt the wiser of them would have it any other way.  If Grimes had made the professional connections and executive compromises necessary to produce a true and proper pop album that could gain traction in the mainstream market, Art Angels would be ruined.  The more people Grimes could theoretically have piled onto this project, the more the opportunities would have emerged for someone to neuter a once expressive, interesting piece of art into something soulless, safe, and dull.  Look at the sobering artistic nosedive that Maroon 5 have taken over their career, from the entirely self-written and enduring Songs About Jane, produced by two people, to the vapid dance-pop pablum that’s defined their last three unavoidable records, built by hordes of unassociated co-writers, instrumentalists, programmers, and producers like Sia, Ryan Tedder, Max Martin, Shellback, etc.  Again, what has Gwen Stefani made in her “solo” career that can rival the glory days of No Doubt and Sublime?

We could go on, but for the sake of time I’ll close it here: socialist pushover and millionaire elitist John Green would probably insist that an album of this stature shouldn’t exist without a team of hired editors and helpers – other writers to provide a different perspective, experienced producers to cut back on all the superfluous layers that Grimes naively puts in her initial drafts, maybe even backup vocalists to lessen the load on her of recording dozens of tracks all by herself –, all of them working in concert towards the utilitarian goal of making an album that the group as a whole finds pleasing and market-ready.  I don’t think a group of music industry professionals could have given us Art Angels as it exists today, nor do I think a team of 50-something animators in Activision could have made a better Portal game than the ten developers in Valve who did, nor do I think it’s better to marry multiple spouses than one, nor do I think that diversity and/or inclusion invariably enhance the product of one or a couple people’s imaginations.  I think Art Angels more than proves this point, and I think it proves that Mr. Green is full of stuff.

John Green and his New Castrati associates, posing as proponents of free expression and stronger “artistic” awareness in education (that being awareness of their own commercial dreck, which kids can buy for $15 on paperback at Barnes & Noble or $20 at their local cinema), remind me of a pivotal scene in Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, in which Emperor Joseph II tells Wolfgang, “There are, in fact, only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of anything… Just cut a few and it’ll be perfect.”  “Which few did you have in mind?” answers Mozart.

Who moves the world?  Is it the John Greens and their YA death porn groomed by editing cosmetologists to pristine bestseller condition, or is it the Grimes, the Mozarts, the Ayn Rands, the Lars Von Triers, the doers, the makers, the shakers, those who write and direct and sing and orchestrate not because society needs to hear them but because they need to do it for themselves, to carry out their own purpose?  History will show.

Fast-travel to other parts:

Part 1 – Not Worth The Effort 2015

Part 2 – The Problematic Influence of Kendrick Lamar on Art Criticism and Society Generally
Part 3 – Top 10 Part 1 and Honorables

2015 In Music: The Author's Top Ten, Like, Albums

This being the third part of a year-end recap of the best and worst music that 2015 imparted to us.  As always, links to other sections are appended at the bottom.

Before I get to the meat of this post that you’re all dying to see (and can if you just cheat and skip to it), I want to honor some albums that by one or another stupid, technical rule weren’t allowed to make the cut.

First up we have the two-disk collector’s issue of Spoon’s classic Gimme Fiction.  I don’t think I can include this because it’s technically a re-release from 2005, but if you haven’t heard this or much of anything from Spoon’s decades-spanning catalog, then let shame fall on you from high!  It’s time to take a trip down non-memory lane and hear one of the more epic releases from one of the last truly epic years in entertainment.  The anniversary edition of this album comes with an extra disk of home demos and rejected tracks that’s well worth the extra whatever you’d pay for it because most are stripped down to just a guitar and occasional drums or piano (though not in a lazy ACOUSTIC COVER Youtube sense) and offer a distinct experience that’s just as affecting, energetic, and smooth as the recorded versions.  I don’t pay much attention to the lyrics in most Spoon songs, but the way they layer instruments, chants, and claps is so entrancing, especially on Was It You? They Never Got You, or the hit I Turn My Camera On, that the lack of angsty Kendrick-esque Poetry doesn’t matter.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to the live EP David Crowder released called Neon Porch Extravaganza, which is a takeoff of last year’s album Neon Steeple and which he was recording on his porch when it unexpectedly escalated into an extravaganza.  I don’t think the rap verse on Lift Your Head, Weary Sinner really fits with Crowder’s vibe, but the man somehow wormed in a cover of Drake’s awful Hold On, We’re Going On without totally destroying the project with cheese, so that wins Respect.  Crowder’s music generally doesn’t receive its proper resolution unless it’s performed live before a crowd of riled-up worshippers, so I’m glad he took the initiative to put out some official, high-definition renderings of Come As You Are and I Am.

2015 was also a pleasantly surprising year for movie soundtracks.  None of the tentpole franchise blockbusters delivered in my opinion on the heightened expectations people set for them, especially not Star Wars – the first in the series to have no standout musical moments after the titles crawl –, Jurassic World, Mission Impossible, etc., but a smattering of independent or less notorious films more than made up for what the big boys failed to do.  Though I don’t know if I’d listen to Tom Holkenborg’s score all by itself, Mad Max’s use of tribal drums, blaring guitar, and thick electronic thwoms elevated almost every scene they accompanied.  It Follows’ score by Disasterpeace was repetitive and harsh but likewise suited the inescapable horror of its film.

The simple but ominous strings of Ex Machina lent to the atmosphere of intrigue and doubt and ambiguity that pervaded probably the best, certainly the most thought-provoking film of the year.  One of the reasons the ending works so well is Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s haunting fusion of organic and computerized sounds, perfectly mirroring the theme of the cold, unsentimental alien assuming human form.

Despite originating from an overall mediocre film, the original score and lyrical selections from the Man From U.N.C.L.E. soundtrack were pure musical adrenaline, excellently paying homage to classic spy shows while capturing a thrilling, contemporary sound.  Not only did it suit the setting of the film but it also excelled as a boundlessly creative stand-alone album, phenomenal for studying, car rides, or really any occasion.  The interplay of the bass flute, furious strings, and bongo-driven percussion never fails to get my blood pumping, and I literally cannot sing its praises highly enough.  I don’t even know what that would sound like.  If Daniel Pemberton loses an Oscar nomination to John Williams or Alexandre Desplat or whatever dummy did the soundtracks to Spotlight or Brooklyn – which the 90-year-old Academy voters will shoo in for that category because they don’t remember any other movies and it’s easy just to blindly nominate the same five titles for all the technical awards –, there is no justice in showbiz.  And lose he shall.

This brings us finally to the Author’s Top Ten Least Worst Albums of 2015.  At first he thought he’d rank them, having a pretty firm idea in mind which ones he liked the most, but then he thought that if he pitted them against each other he’d only be encouraging impatient readers to skip right through his comments, look at the numbers, check out the top two artists, and flatly disregard the rest.  It also occurred to him that maybe, despite his efforts at comprehensiveness, he hasn’t yet heard all the albums he’d like from the year and could be setting himself up for someday having to re-arrange his list, which would be a pain.  In no particular order, then, here are five of his favorite current-day albums until the still unknown but fast-approaching day we get new Radiohead and Gorillaz.  Here’s to 2016, to making America great again, taking the country back, all that cal.

Lord Huron, Strange Trails –

I had the chance to watch Lord Huron live at Beatissima for free no additional charge some time earlier this year, but I’m afraid the value of this chance encounter was completely lost on me, as I left about three songs into their act from a combination of harmonica and mediocrity fatigue (Best Coast had just preceded them with what sounded like one continuous hour-long song).  After retroactively listening to some of the finer cuts from Strange Trails, I kind of hated myself for not sticking through the boredom to hear the deafening, western-evocative epicness of The World Ender live in the park.  Your experience with the recorded versions of the Huron Jam will probably be much the same, as you sit through a slog of really similar-sounding, reverb-heavy folks songs to occasionally feel a rush of unadulterated excitement, preferably transmitted and received at maximum volume.  If you want the abbreviated, boredom-free edit – or the GPV, to put it in a more positive context – condense it down to Until the Night Turns and tracks 5-8, or maybe 9, if you favor incorporating at least one slower, grittier tune.  Darkness, no parents.

Lil Dicky, Professional Rapper –

If this website had a bigger following among hip-hop-heads, the statement I’m about to make would cause a bit of a stir, but since it doesn’t I can make it with impunity.  Lil Dicky is the best rapper working today.  He is the best because he has the humility and brains to acknowledge that his profession, even more so for a wealthy, college-educated Jewish guy, is really kind of stupid, and so he tries to have a little fun with it.  He is the best because in 2013 he wrote a song called White Dude in which he monologues over the outro about how much he loves being a white dude, knowing full well this would cause a furor in the media even though black dudes have written thousands of songs about how much they love being black.

“First off I’m a dude, so there was a one-in-two chance of that sucking. But now I can run a seven-minute mile, I can defend myself adequately, I can be logical, I can get along with my roommates, watch serious movies without being scared by them. And on top of that I’m white, which is like amazing because…”

He is the best because in 2015 he followed up that song with an original, ironically menacing beat called White Crime, in which he humorously slides through all the low-risk, unsung “dirt” that well-to-do people commit on a daily basis without incurring the judgment of other people.

“Walk in to the movie with my pants full / Twix, bag of chips, plus a Snapple / Stealing all the shampoos, from the hotel’s pretty bathrooms / Cheating, I’ve been peekin’ in the classroom / Looking like a nice guy, ‘til I take your mother_____ Wi-Fi / And torrent every single song in my library.”

He is the best because the album’s pinnacle, the braggadocios, lyrically unstoppable Bruh, utilizes nothing but drumsticks for the underlying beat but sounds more staggering than 99% of other rap beats.  He is the best not only because he managed to shoot the music video of his biggest hit to date, $ave Dat Money, for basically no money whatsoever, but also because he caps said video off by haggling a waiter over the value of the ice in his coffee and the bacon in the cheeseburger that he purchased on the side.  In speed or wit or wordplay or sheer verbal dynamism, no other rapper aspires to the awe-inspiring messiness of LD.  More importantly, he cracks me up.

Micachu and the Shapes, Good Sad Happy Bad –

This is without a doubt the least accessible of all the titles in this list; I don’t even like it that much, but I don’t like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey either.  If you’ve seen the movie Under the Skin, which you probably haven’t unless it was your job to see it, you’ve already heard one of Micachu’s members even if you weren’t aware of it.  Mica Levi’s score to that film hinged on two or three extremely repetitive themes that were chopped and screwed and scrambled through as many variations as could fill an hour-long tape, evincing mixed reactions from your own Author.  Good Sad Happy Bad was significantly easier to endure, if not enjoy, without the baggage of any overwrought 7-minute tracks or ambient filler and a largely different timbre to each song, even the weaker ones.  On an album such as this, though, the greatest thing on which one can compliment it is its fidelity to its title.  At its best, this is a really fun and futuristic brand of fuzzily produced, experimental pop that nonetheless appeals to almost no one.  At its worst, particularly on Unity, which loops a sound of human gasping that makes me think of that one scene in Deliverance, it revels in a kind of defiant self-absorption that’s extremely abrasive and alienating.  If you’re looking for a trippy, emotionally disjunctive, err, trip with an emphasis on weird noises and disarming, childlike vocals over traditional melodies and relatable lyrics, look no further.  If you want the Almost Normal Parts Version, then preview Sad, Oh Baby, Relaxing, and Suffering, then come back and berate me in the comments for recommending weird stuff just for the sake of looking nonconformist.

Carly Rae Jepsen, Emoticon –

I already tasked my buddy Dom Forke last August with writing 12 or so unbelievable thoughts he thought on the new Carly Rae Jepsen album.  Five months later Emotion still holds up, especially Making the Most of the Night, LA Hallucinations, Run Away With Me, and, well, the rest I suppose, because there’s hardly any variation in it at all.  Sky Ferreira’s album and Ghost EP are ten times better, but at least this doesn’t bore me.

Alabama Shakes, Sound and Color –

Sound and Color isn’t consistently great, but when it is, it soars.  More musically eclectic than their debut album, this sophomore effort is based half on mesmerizing guitar riffs and half on lead singer Britanny Howard’s indescribably raw, transfixing voice.  The presence of the former always works to the album’s betterment, complementing Howard’s vocal intensity and making for a much more entertaining, replayable sound.  Consequently I think the album loses steam in the last four tracks when it foregoes its rock-and-roll edge, but if you’re drawn more to more soulful, vocally driven than instrumental music, you’ll probably enjoy Sound and Color throughout.  One can’t deny the singularity of Howard’s singing style: now masculine and harsh, then delicate and soothing, always raspy and impassioned.  Don’t Wanna Fight, Future People, and Guess Who would all be instant hits from their distorted guitar lines alone, but the entrance of the vocals takes them from merely good to hypnotizing.  I don’t feel I have the musical acumen to give a very useful or scientific explanation of the Alabama Shakes’ innovation, so you should just go and listen for yourself if you want something unique as well as catchy (at least most of the time).  I can neither create nor define what I understand to be good music, but I know it when I hear it, and the Alabama Shakes are it.

Fast-travel to other parts:

Part 1 – Not Worth The Effort 2015

Part 2 – The Problematic Influence of Kendrick Lamar on Art Criticism and Society Generally
Part 4 – Top 10 Part 2 and the Inadvertent Individualism of Grimes