Wednesday, March 02, 2011

2010 in Review: The Monkey I Have Been Told of - Part 1

2010 in Review: The Monkey I Have Been Told of


Part 1



(Presented in 2 Parts, given its length, in hopes of not choking blogger, my IP or you…)




I'm not really sure where to begin with this one, which is probably just as well, since I seem to've outdone myself with my natural tendency to say too fucking much. I tried to edit, cut down, etc., but let's face it: it's March 2011. This list is supposed to be a retrospective of what happened to me in 2010. I think we are in danger of losing our perspective here. So I'm just gonna shut the fuck up and give you what I got as it is. I'm sorry! It's a mess! But I hope you can make sense of it, if you feel so inclined.


The drill, if you don't know it is: a list of music that was significant to me in 2010. Not all of it is "the best" music, in my estimation, but I had significant moments with all of it that marked part of 2010 for me. At the same time, I love new music--that is, music that's new to me--and I am usually on the look out. There is some of that here. It's not the newest, as I am not either, but I liked it, and it gave me some hope for the future to find that people were making it.


One last note: This is the 11th list I've done. For the last decade, I've limited them to 80 minutes, as I wanted friends--or whoever--to be able to burn them to a disc if they wanted to--and so I could foist discs off as "gifts" if wanted to. With the death of the CD at hand, it seems ludicrous to stick to the 80 minute format, so next year, I'll probably come up with something else. This year would've been more appropriate, since it's the beginning of a new decade, I guess, but I didn't think of it till I'd nearly finished the list, if you can believe that.


I said I'd shut up. I didn't. I am. Now. Here it is:









1. The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness - The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms:


I really couldn't think of a better place to start this playlist than "The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness." It builds from such a subtle, intriguing opening--one that, if you've never heard it before, will probably insinuate itself into your environment before you even realize the song has started--into this irresistible, passionate groove. The song is always controlled, despite the jitteriness its title implies. There's no real distortion to speak of and no tough-guy guitar muscle-making. In fact, for a rock record from the 70s, there are scant signs of either classic or punk rock conceit. If you haven't heard this, I won't lie and tell you that it sounds utterly unique, however. There are obvious parallels to kindred spirits like Talking Heads and R.E.M.--and to the entire "college rock" trend--itself a wellspring of a lotta that alternative rock stuff you kids like or did like. So by extension, that means that Vampire Weekend and Cage the Elephant are spiritually if not literally descended from alla these guys. OK, who's ready to join my angry mob? I got dibs on David Byrne!


OK so I'm making it sound like a really obscure record, and it isn't really, and you knew that. But for a very long time, Crazy Rhythms was out of print. Music critics salivate over it alla time. Strangely, no one I knew had it. Even used, the fucking thing was nearly impossible to get for less than, like, $35, at least if you are as unsavvy/-lucky as I am. A few times, I almost bought it. It's just, y'know, there are a lot of records, and usually $35 can buy you at least 3. At least. Finally, for the lazy asses in the house--here here!--it's available for digital download. And... it's as good as most (not all) of the critics said it was. So let me throw my endorsement in there! Go download it, buy it, whatever! If you don't already have it. I did. And it really has been a good listen throughout its residency in 2010.



2. She's Lost Control - Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures:


Was I just saying I was unsavvy? Ha!


Ha!


Ha!


That's me imitating the opening beat of this song, which is strikingly similar to the beat that opened the last song. These beats are carried forward through the songs, but they are--one could argue must be--slowed down and elaborated to establish the songs. Why? Well, to give me a cool transition from first to second track of my playlist, obviously. Whateryoo, stoopid?


Seriously, there may be a reason why, tho I am not the songs' makers and can't say for sure. The rhythm has to come first here, and it does, literally. The groove has to come first. The mood has to come first. With both songs, it's something like a trance state that's sought, I think. Ian Curtis, Joy Division's vocalist began suffering epileptic seizures when the band performed live. At times, bandmates and audience couldn't distinguish his dancing from his seizures. Increasingly, mild seizure disorders are being identified less as the classic thrashin' around, frothin' at the mouth, etc. and more as someone slipping into a quiet wordless daze. As I'm doing while I write this................................



Oh. Yeah. But this beat is a harsh pulse too. So it's a trance that'll bash you up one side of the street and down the other--more like one of those seizures that causes you to crack the back of your head and bite of the tip of your tongue. And that's something that people tend to forget about Joy Division: They were a band that kicked ass live. The most recent re-releases of their albums include tons of extra live material--reason enough to pick them up if you don't already have 'em, 'tho the studio stuff is transcendent and worth investing in as well. A passing note: One thing I love about Joy Division is the way in which the bass carries the melody, while the guitar is more like this ugly, noisy textural element. It's a sound that got imitated later, but was abandoned by the band, when they became New Order. After Curtis's suicide, they felt it would be uncool to go on this way. Fair enough, but they never sounded remotely as interesting again.



3. Every Day - AFX - Hangable Audio Bulb:


If you follow my playlists--and, like, who doesn't?--you can probably guess that AFX is yet another alias adopted by Aphex Twin a.k.a. Richard James, since you know that I spend a lotta time listening to him every year. If you have a better guess as to why this guy feels he needs another alias aside from sheer perversity/paranoia, you're ahead of me, and you should let me know.


Atmospherically, what you have here strikes me as a bit paranoid and perverse--tho not overly so. As techno-inflected electronica goes, it's not very aggressive, but it does feel cold--a bit like the theme song to a really cool video game that you are, nevertheless, playing completely alone at 3:30 a.m. on a Wednesday night. And for me, the wicked humor of the distorted vocal really does nothing to dispel this feeling either. This (we assume) privileged limey wife bitching about her hubby bitching at her to get him another tie, etc., really only conjures a weak little grin at her expense. This song really isn't much fun at all, now that I think about it. Maybe you'll feel differently. But it has a sorta enthralling texture, and it rises nicely out of the Joy Division number and leads well into Ween, especially given that domestic bitching is about to be turned on its distaff ear...



4. Piss up a Rope - Ween - 12 Country Classics:


Ween exerted a huge influence over me this year. When I wasn't "down," their music was the music I was most commonly listening to--which is not to say that I didn't listen to other stuff--only that if you had to choose a single artist on the "up" side, it would be Ween. (On the "down" side, it would be Elliott Smith, but that's a matter best considered later, like in the next song.) Considering Ween's ubiquitousness this year and their staggeringly diverse body of work, I found it difficult to narrow my choice down to 1 track, so you get 2 Ween songs here. I tried to space 'em out, for what it's worth.


First, "Piss up a Rope": The diversity and success of Ween's music is due not to the degree of their chameleonic gifts, but to the deftness with which they employ them. Calypso, funk, Philly soul, 70s classic rock, and punk rock thrash are all played out equally convincingly. It wouldn't work, I think, if Ween didn't respect each kind of music enough to really listen to it, to explore its nuances, to figure it out thoroughly enough to understand what really makes it tick.


That doesn't mean that they don't pack each song with outrageous lyrical conceits to turn everything on its head. If the words here--a raunchy sendup that are only a slightly bizarre extension of New Country macho bluster--don't make you laugh then I don't know what's wrong with you. ("2% milk?" Do we even want to know what that really means?) They're also wildly inventive enough to throw an occasional musical detail out of left field that, improbably, works, like the synthesizer freakout that stands in for a guitar solo here. This album was recorded with a bunch of seasoned Nashville session men, who later toured with Ween as "The Shit Creek Boys." I would've loved to've heard what they thought of this keyboard alone, never mind the rest of the equally messed up stuff on this album.



5. New Monkey - Elliott Smith - New Moon:


If I had a theme song this year, this was easily it. No competitors.


It hits so many of the major issues that rose up in front of me that it's what... eerie? Humorous? Depressing? I don't know.


Want me to catalogue 'em for you? I'm not really sure that it does anyone good to do so. Maybe the most important concern involves the creative process--how if you spend a lot of your time digging your feet in and trying to do something creative, you may find yourself questioning the value, not just of the venture, but of yourself and... heh heh heh... of a lot of the stuff and people around you. Does that make you a prick? Probably.


Worse, once you start to feel that your time is empty, well you gotta do something with it, right? It's kind of a frightening proposition. What do you do if you suspect that nothing you're capable of doing really has any value? Sound like a pussy? A malcontent? Should someone like that be out distributing food to the homeless? Are you? Didn't think so.


I admire that Elliott Smith could portray all of these feelings with such humor. So many musical artists are committed to mythologizing themselves as these heroic figures--if not noble, then strong or charming. Elliott Smith gives you his humanity--his struggle with his ugliness and weakness, which, sometimes is a losing battle. Fortunately, he was able to use it as the basis of the "images of hope and depression" that you find in his music.



6. Pilots - Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain:


As I've grown older, I've noticed that summer has become more important to me. This change surprises me, not in the least, because I used find the endless bitching of others concerning the variance of the seasons to be tiresome. If there's one thing you can bank on people talking about when they have absolutely nothing to say, it's the weather. By an even more irritating extension, if there's something you can guarantee that people will complain about when they have absolutely nothing to complain about whatsoever, it's the slightest variation of the temperature from a mean of about 80 during the day and 75 at night!


What the fuck?


Let me reveal myself as a heretic and say that once in a while I like a day where the high is 45 or 95 or whatever--just to shake things up. I'm OK with a little snow once in a while. (Though as I write this on Xmas Eve, lemme say that I fucking hate Xmas, white or otherwise.) And I fucking love rain--especially thunder storms.


That all said, winter hits me harder than it used to I don't know why. Every year, it seems to stretch on longer, and it I find myself wishing there were fucking leaves on the trees and shade and satyrs scampering about or something. Shade. Quiet. A different color pallet. I don't know. That silver gray shit is killing me somehow. And it just goes on. The plows. The sludge. The ice. It feels like... death.


But then, what is this, Ragnarok? And more to the point, what's it have to do with Alison Goldfrapp?


Well, I'm glad you asked.


As early as June this year, I felt summer getting away from me. Maybe it's a function of turning 40. Maybe I could see there weren't as many of 'em ahead. It hadn't even started, calendar-wise, & it seemed summer was receding already. Under the shade of the trees, the leaves hissing like I was in Antonioni's Blow-up, and already, the gold was white and gray. And I felt fucking crushed.


And I thought OK, I gotta make it be summer. It's dangerous to try to construct a mood, because you run the risk of foregrounding how clearly absent something you need is. But I was desperate. I was thinking of "Jane Says," 2 years ago, & how the ipod had summoned it up in the sunlight to bail me out. (See 2008's playlist, if you feel like it.) And I thought back to this Goldfrapp record. It has this sopoforic, sunny feel. Sure, maybe it's a little bit like escapism, a narcotic even, but it helped, and thereafter I listened to this record and enjoyed the summer a lot more.



7. Cool Out - King Midas Sound - Waiting for You:


If you aren't high yet, this may get you there. I sincerely doubt tho that it will put you to sleep. It's a woozy sound, but huge. Enormous in its sense of emotional isolation and of physical space. Music never sounds so big as it does when it's recorded like Jamaican dub reggae. This ain't Jamaican dub reggae. It's a collaboration between a vocalist from Trinidad, who understands the traditions of Carribean singing and has the personality and authority to carry them forward, and an American producer of electronica, who loves dub reggae and clearly understands how to isolate some of its technical aspects and make them do something that is both prototypal and new simultaneously. These guys are making fucking exciting music, as you can hear in this song and in the entire album that follows it. It's a new sound that is thoroughly informed by some rock solid ideas. Haunting and tough. It's one of those records that reminds me that people are still making really good new music and thereby uplifts my hopes for humanity or some such silly shit.



8. Neverland - The Knife - Silent Shout:


The Knife are hip. Or they were. I guess. I found out about them at the end of 2009, a year in which they had apparently consolidated their hipness and at the end of which lead singer/sister side of this Swedish brother/sister act Karin Dreijer was already wowing the indy press with her solo project Fever Ray. I was stumbling after the hip train. Sometimes I can see it up there on its smooth, lean, gleaming monorail tracks. Sometimes it's worth it. In this case it is.


I could give a rat's ass that this chick's outfits made Lady Gaga look like Minnie Pearl from Hee Haw. (Now that's hip for ya!) What I care about is they twist up electronic textures, wicked humor, irresistible beats, real pathos and utterly unexpected musical twists into one of the most unique albums I've heard in a while--one that manages to be fun without being shallow, which is more than I can say for most rock and roll I've heard coming down the line for some time. Menacing, danceable, (probably--I can't dance,) and full of life. This song leads you into an album full of shifting ideas and emotions that never gets dull. (And it provides the playlist with it's title, in case you didn't notice.)



9. Fake Tits/Real Beer - David Cross - Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!:


I listen to standup comedy on occasion--I think, in part, because I'm fascinated by good writing, and good standup is demanding as a form of literary expression. It requires that the comedian hone his or her ideas to a very fine edge as the audience is right there in the room. (Also, it necessitates an ability to improvise that a print writer will never have to develop--except at the rare live reading, where stultifying adherence to procedure insures that nothing unscripted usually happens anyway.)


To my way of thinking, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, (when he was doing standup,) and many others were artists and deserve recognition as such. If nothing else, they deserve inclusion on my playlists, so they're gonna get it! Enough defensiveness... I think this bit fits really well here. What's more, I've listened to the album it comes from a lot the last couple of years. I have this unfortunate habit of putting it on headphones when I'm out in public and then having to fight the urge to burst out laughing while complete strangers give me weird looks. Of course, the shit becomes even funnier under those circumstances, so that routines that might only draw a smile under normal circumstances, suddenly become uproariously funny.


David Cross's humor is often not of the laugh-out-loud sort, though it certainly does have its moments. There's a routine I'd love to put on here that's 16 minutes long that always makes me laugh, but, well, it's 16 minutes long, y'know? This one gets me at exactly one point--when he says, "It's me... you!" (Don't think that's giving anything away if you're reading before listening.) Almost every time I hear it, I laugh.


Nevertheless, whether I laugh out loud or not, I always find him funny. He's spot on with his observations--usually--clever in the way he expresses them, and imaginative in the way he visualizes things. Morally, I usually line up with him--tho sometimes, I think he's kinda an elitist dill hole and maybe a dash tad hypocritical.


Anyway, he's pretty cool overall, and this bit seemed extremely relevant at one point this year, when Beloved Female Acquaintance started complaining at length about people mis-using the word literally. She noticed I was amused and asked me why, and I said, "You gotta hear something..."



10. Zumbie (featuring Andy Milonakis) - Major Lazer - Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do:


For some months now, I've been thinking about whether or not I should include the song. At first, it seemed like a gimme. I loved it. I thought the minimalistic approach to a Jamaican groove was both ingenious and rocked. I thought the lyrics and the delivery--by American comedian Andy Milonakis, who acknowledges his lack of cultural credibility with the throwaway "me a fake Jamaican"--were hilarious... But then I noticed something else about the lyrics--that is something that sounded like "...because me don't like the HIV..."


Dig if u will a picture of me playing back that section of the song around 5000 times, trying to pick up the surrounding context--in particular, the line before, because I determined that it's the only one that'd explain why this undead rude boy is discussing HIV. I mean, let's face it: there can't be too many reasons, esp. when you're dealing with Jamaican culture, which however much you want to romanticize it, offers about the most virulent strain of homophobia on the planet. It runs through the very dancehall music celebrated on the very brilliant pan-cultural multi-artist album Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do. But I guess we might've hoped it could've been… uh… weeded out of the fun here, right? Or would that have ruined the authenticity?


Wow! This got complicated, didn't it? Am I an imperialist? Or a homophobe? Must you be 1 or the other? I definitely ain't Jamaican. And not all dance hall music is homophobic, of course.


Well, I did eventually determine that the line is probably "and me don't eat gays, 'cuz me don't like the HIV..." so that may or may not be confirmation. Of something. I've heard it argued that maybe Milonakis is ridiculing a tough guy stance. Y'know, like the Beastie Boys used to. Poking fun at a b-boy stance by adopting a sorta cartoonish version of it. Thus the deflating bits like "me a fake Jamaican, etc." Could be. Beasties eventually pussed out, expressed remorse, and started making real boring music. Does anyone listen to their music anymore? I sure don't.


Buuuutttt… I'm also pretty leery of songs where the line between irony and bigotry gets too blurry these days, kinda cuz somehow I got attached to stupid sentimental ideas about people being human and therefore being due some sorta dignity or something, which, I know is counter-productive. Sorry. Anyway, here's the song. It is pretty great. Read the stuff in the 1st paragraph as to why I think so, but consider how many paragraphs I spent on the rest, if you care, as an indication of my ambivalence otherwise.



11. Baby (featuring Prince Zimboo) - Major Lazer - Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do:


This is just a ridiculously fun "extra," riding on a ridiculously fun track. Here at least, you get a real Jamaican vocalist... and an Autotune baby! Gotta wonder what's gonna happen to that kid as he grows up, am I right? Is it a curse or an affliction? I think we all have a real good idea what he/she'll sound like if he/she decides to become an R&B vocalist anyway. My only concern for the little waif is that given the ephemerality of pop music modes, Autotune may be yesterday's diapers by the time he/she is outta swaddling cloths, let alone old enough to drive. No one ever said life was gonna be easy, but I think we should all resolve to be extra nice to the person taking our order at Burger King in 16-18 years--you know, the one with built-in Autotune--just in case.





TO BE CONTINUED