The Usual Year-End Music Geek Type Thing

A week or so ago, Eric Boehlert claimed in Salon that the week of December 20, 1969 (my eighth birthday - woo-hoo!) was the best week ever for rock'n'roll, at least as measured by the Billboard charts. Without quibbling over Boehlert's claim, I found the following remarks, buried on the second page (past the annoying "Salon Premium" ad barrier), far more provocative. Boehlert asks why today's charts aren't as diverse (or as high-caliber) and offers two possible answers: "First, there were simply fewer records released back then, so the odds of having success were better. Also, far fewer people were buying records, so it took fewer sales to hit the top 10. By the end of 1969, only 20 albums in the history of rock had ever sold 1 million copies.... By contrast, this year alone nearly 50 albums sold 1 million copies or more." What Boehlert doesn't do is the obvious next step: where would these top sellers of 1969 place on today's charts, if they sold the same number of copies? The answer might go a long way toward addressing the persistent perception that music today "just isn't as good" as it once was (clearly a subtext of Boehlert's article). If Abbey Road (the number 1 record that week) would place, say, at number 5 now, maybe an argument that there just isn't as much good music today as in 1969 might be plausible. But if Abbey Road would place only at, say, 170 in today's charts, then the better comparison might be to look at albums at that level in the charts - at least if the argument is that public taste is degraded. My reasoning, briefly, assumes a few things: (1) quality is a matter of distinctiveness, among other things; (2) the more distinctive something is, the likelier it is that fewer people will like it; and therefore (3) it's harder to sell something distinctive in large numbers. If a number 1 album now needs to sell ten or twenty times as many copies to chart as it did in 1969 (a reasonable assumption: the album era began about five years before then, so that'd be about four million-sellers per year, versus fifty now, with some adjustments for Boehlert's other factor), both those first two points and the sheer quantity of competition for people's ears (not to mention blockbuster-oriented marketing) means that today's Abbey Roads are going to have a harder time even being heard by the same raw number of people.

All of this chart talk got me to put together my usual grudging year-end ranking of favorite albums. The very exercise increasingly is likely to mark me as an old fart: the iPodding of music means the very concept of "album" is becoming more and more outmoded. The "grudging" is because I'm not, by nature, a listmaker - particularly when I'm keenly aware that there are many CDs I'd probably like that I either haven't heard or haven't heard enough of to fairly judge. If I were more of a listmaker, I'd probably go back and append alterations to my previous year-end best-ofs - because I know for sure they're very different now than they were when I made them. I'm not, however. But about that not hearing: I blame the internet (why not?). Not that I'd ever stoop to filesharing songs that dumbass record companies have seen fit to put out of print, or add as single new tracks to double-disc sets of previously released material, oh no. But between the perfectly legit E-Music (despite its changes, still the best) and the raft of excellent music swelling my to-buy list courtesy of the estimable Matthew from Fluxblog, there's way more music surrounding me than I have time to listen to.

So here's my favorites so far. My usual rules exclude compilations, live albums, and EPs. I've divided them into categories of roughly equal rank, with the best coming first.

The Caribbean History's First Know-It-All
Ted Leo/Pharmacists Hearts of Oak
The New Pornographers Electric Version
Wire Send
The Wrens The Meadowlands

The Wire album is a good argument, by the way, that the album is not, and should not be, a dead artform. Most of its tracks were previously released on the band's two Read & Burn EPs, but Send's sequencing recontextualizes those songs, in some cases enough to have made me suspect a remix on first listen (not the case with most tracks).

David Bowie Reality
Broadcast Haha Sound
The Fall The Real New Fall Album, Formerly "Country on the Click" (yes, that's its title...)
Lilys Precollection
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks Pig Lib
Radiohead Hail to the Thief
The Shins Chutes Too Narrow
Richard Thompson The Old Kit Bag

Bowie, I think, is on an underheralded resurgence. Yes, last year's Heathen got decent enough reviews...but actually, I'd argue his work has been at the very least interesting, and consistently intriguing even in its failings, since Black Tie White Noise. Even his much-derided eighties work - with the exception of Never Let Me Down - had at least three or four good songs per album.

The Aislers Set How I Learned to Write Backwards
Death Cab for Cutie Transatlanticism
Guided by Voices Earthquake Glue
Tris McCall Shootout at the Sugar Factory
The Oranges Band All Around
Pernice Brothers Yours, Mine & Ours
Sun Kil Moon Ghosts of the Great Highway

Plus, I'd offer a special mention for the Magic Band's Back to the Front. I'd have to asterisk it on the main list, since it's entirely old material - but the skill and enthusiasm with which the re-formed Magic Band plays Beefheart make that material sound fresh, and John French's vocal performance jawdroppingly channels the Captain.

A couple of disappointments, though: Consonant's Love and Affliction just hasn't connected with me the way their debut did, and Grandaddy's Sumday is sunk by lack of rhythmic variety (that same straight eighth-note beat) and poor sequencing (putting all those songs near the beginning). If your favorite release isn't here, it's probably because I'm too lame to have heard it yet.

(Also, a mix CD featuring tracks from the top twenty releases listed here is at the Art of the Mix site.)

slides too narrow?

David Byrne vs. Edward Tufte vs. PowerPoint: I'd say both are correct. I particularly like Byrne's notion that "software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they're intended to be used for ." Very Eno-esque. But surely, no one should be surprised that software oriented to business is guilty of dumbing-down. In a real-life Office Space moment, my brother-in-law worked with a guy who, for nine months, got paid for "working" two jobs...by the expedient of showing up at one office in the morning, laying his jacket over his chair, turning on the computer...and then leaving for the office where he actually worked. He'd return in the evening to collect his coat and shut down his computer, muttering to anyone who'd see him about "pointless meetings eating up the day." Efficiency!

what color is your panic chute?

Apparently Bush's approval rating must have fallen a few points in the last few days...

exclusively

First, a sidebar: So it comes out that Strom Thurmond fathered a daughter by an African-American family servant when he was 22 and she was 16. He never acknowledged his paternity to anyone but his child. So for the majority of his career, he was advocating policies that ensured his own daughter second-class public accommodations. Oh, and that makes him at least a statutory rapist - and how likely, under the circumstances and at that time, is "consent" a real possibility (what choice did the young woman really have?) - so I'd have to say he was a rapist plain and simple. What a prick.

Anyway, in case anyone was thinking such racial arrogance was interred deep in our past, here's a story. We were at an old-line Italian restaurant the other day (you know: red-and-white checked tablecloths, candles in wicker-wrapped wine bottles encrusted with melted wax, lotsa Sinatra and Bennett...), and sitting in the waiting area was a copy of a local magazine aiming at wealthy, elderly suburbanites, Exclusively Yours. As a bit of a joke, Rose said, "let's play 'count the white people.'" We figured, this being the 21st century, that even in such a magazine, there'd be some sort of token representation of the fact that the Milwaukee area, even the burbs, isn't entirely white - but amazingly, every last person depicted in the magazine, from subjects of articles to models in ads to business owners, was white. This included a two-page spread from Shorewest Realtors with pictures of more than seventy real estate agents. Only one person in the entire magazine looked as if they might have some Asian heritage; one other person had what might have been a Hispanic surname. I find it hard to believe this exclusion was an accident - pretty damned sad.

a mighty wind

Dictionaries are dangerous and addictive for me: I look up one thing, and find myself wandering from cross-reference to cross-reference, or just randomly, curious about odd words or their etymologies. (I'm intrigued by the concept of distraction - so's this famous guy.) Every once in a while, though, I'll discover something more lasting (one of which is found in the URL of this site), such as the entry in an addition of a Merriam-Webster dictionary defining the Beaufort Wind Scale, which characterizes wind velocity in terms of the phenomena the wind causes. It actually has two registers, one for sea and one for land, but the land scale fascinates me as a superlative example of accidental poetry. (I used it in the "quiz" I made a few days back as well.) Here it is (each line designates a wind force ranging from 0 through 10):

Calm, smoke rises vertically
Smoke drift indicates wind direction, still wind vanes
Wind felt on face, leaves rustle, vanes begin to move
Leaves and small twigs constantly moving, light flags extended
Dust, leaves, and loose paper lifted, small tree branches move
Small trees in leaf begin to sway
Larger tree branches moving, whistling in wires
Whole trees moving, umbrellas are used with difficulty
Whole trees in motion, difficulty walking against the wind
Slight structural damage occurs, chimney-pots and slate removed
Seldom experienced on land, trees are broken and uprooted

I Meme Mine

Yet another in the wave of odd little trendlets cresting across the web periodically, those pseudo- Myers-Briggs quizzes - even when their writers actually manage to have a mental age higher than ten - too often frustrate me in my all-too-typical drawing-outside-the-lines, circling-between-the-numbers way. For instance, both this "20th Century Theorist" quiz and this "Indie-Rock Subcategory" quiz fall down by often failing to allow multiple answers (what, I can't accessorize or maintain my coolness in several vectors simultaneously)?

But, as they say, if you can't say anything nice under a bushel, light yourself silently on fire - so here's my attempt.

waiting for the sleighbells...

Parody Christmas songs usually fail either because they're not all that funny, or because no attention is paid to how well the parodic material matches the source material. Bob Rivers sometimes gets it right - "I Am Santa Claus" (to the music of "Iron Man") is pretty near perfect, especially the "ho ho ho" at the beginning - but he's too often tempted into crudeness for its own sake. But this song not only matches the original's music almost exactly, the parody narrative is a perfect fit with the original's. Plus, the writers (Tim Walters and Steve Rosenthal) cleverly work in musical references to several Christmas songs - even that mysterious little number sung in Whoville.

but the reindeer was too weird!

It's the most annoyanceful time of the year, as one can't walk anywhere in public without being hit over the head by bland, muzakified Christmas music. Fortunately, I don't have to continue at any length on this subject; someone else has already done a much better job than I would have (and at praising some worthy Christmas music as well). You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll throw things at people who think Elf is funny. (You'll probably also strain your eyes - but you can always turn off the colors or download the text and read it offline.) Police navidad!

they've given me a number, and they've taken away my name

I've often thought it's ironic that people refer to feeling anonymous, generic, or as one of an interchangeable horde as being treated like a number: there is (as this post notes) more than one person with my name, but my SSN is unique. The real issue, of course, is that anonymity feels like lack of emotional contact and context, and numbers convey that more than names. There's no texture to a nine-digit number, no train of associations, no affectionate or rude shortenings or alterations. Names, though, being part of the language, are inextricably woven with our culture and our experience. And the further irony, then, of the number-as-anonymity trope, is that its uniqueness - i.e., its isolation, its lack of those connections language inevitably offers - is that which makes it seem cold and anonymous, whereas the "individuality" a name supposedly bequeaths us is actually a heritage in common and in connection with others. So the notion that numbers mark us as identical cogs in a machine, while names are expressions of our unique personalities, is exactly backwards - or would be, if we too quickly apply ill-fitting definitions of "unique" and "personality."

it could make a million for you overnight

A few days back, I wrote a bit about conspiracies; my own low-level theory involves paperback best-seller lists. How is it that the titles lining the racks of the grocery store book area, filed beneath their rankings proclaiming them best-sellers, seem invariably to end up there before I've seen them anywhere else at all? Is there a claque of fans who haunt the bookstores, waiting for the new John Grisham the very day it's released in paperback, sufficient in number to propel it that same day to the top of the charts?

I suppose there could be, for all I know or care...but I suspect somewhere there's some manipulation of what paperbacks are counted, what sales are counted. Me, I'm too lazy to do any research on it...but someone probably has the dirt.

sincerity expressed by metal wires held in tension

Over Thanksgiving we drove to visit some friends in Columbus, Ohio. As I mentioned before, car trips, especially longish ones, make excellent opportunities to listen to music. I'm too distractible to focus intensely on music alone for too long in my daily life, but somehow driving is just enough other activity to allow the rest of my concentration to rest on the music without my getting restless.

Among the new and old stuff we listened to was the most recent Sam Phillips album Fan Dance. When this came out a couple of years ago, I remember a critical consensus that it was a "return" to Phillips' "folk" roots. Whatever - I never have checked out Phillips' explicitly Christian recordings under the name Leslie Phillips, and the first two Sam Phillips albums are very much under a Beatles spell: I guess the critical logic is that a woman who sometimes plays acoustic guitar absolutely must have folk roots. The most annoying aspect of that consensus was those critics who, by contrast, derided the "inappropriate" and "overproduced" nature of her previous record, 1996's Omnipop. Now, at the time, I ranked that record very highly indeed - one of my best of that year - and even though the filler-esque quality of one or two tracks is more evident to me now, the caliber of the rest of the songs is what allowed me to overlook the filler in the first place. So I suppose my objections to criticisms of Omnipop might be personal - except that they're also, and too typically, flimsy and lazy. (Details here.)

I'm not sure who decided that it's more "natural" or "organic" for a singer to be accompanied by acoustic guitar, bass, and drums than by marimba, bass clarinet, and congas: the latter combination is surely less common, but if natural or organic imply acoustic rather than electronic instruments, well, there you go. It's also true that unless you're listening to one of those recorded-direct-to-acetate-master LPs that enjoyed a brief audiophile vogue a few decades ago, the music you hear is electronic regardless of whether the instruments themselves incorporate electronics.

That may seem a technical point - but every step of the recording process, from choice and placement of microphone to EQing to mixing, colors the sound of the instrument and voice, and most of that coloration is essentially electronic in nature. We're so used to listening to such recorded effects that we let the most absurd and outrageous alterations to "organic" acoustic space pass us by in silence. Put on a typical recording - go ahead, find one featuring primarily voice, acoustic guitar, bass, and drums. Find an uptempo track. The acoustic guitar might well be as loud as the drums: is that "natural"? And where are we, physically, in relation to those drums (never mind the other instruments)? Are the different components of the kit spread across the stereo image? Are we supposed to imagine ourselves "naturally" so close to the drums that we can hear the spatial distinction between the position of the snare and the hi-hat - yet without any one component of the kit (to which we're "closest") dominating the sound? Or let's add a piano to the mix: is that acoustic guitar really as loud as the piano?

The point, of course, is that we're so used to particular kinds of unnatural, inorganic sound manipulation that they sound natural to our ears. But at a certain level, describing any kind of music in such terms is an absurdity. A piano is a tremendously complex machine: people have to train for years to be able to properly tune one. We think of a synthesizer as a machine, as a product of technology - it is - but forget that, with the exception of the human voice, every instrument is an instance of mechanical technology. And that voice: sure, it comes from a body, and if we're in the same room with a singer, and she's casually singing without a microphone, it's hard to think about technology being involved...but technique surely is, and not just on the level of singing the right notes with the right phrasing. Our notion of a "natural," untrained but melodic voice is completely culturally bound (i.e., socially manufactured): just listen to some other culture's notion of what a natural voice is, or even better, compare its notion of a trained, musical voice with ours.

True, one can use the recording studio to make an ensemble sound as if it's playing acoustically in your living room - but the resemblance of the results to acoustic sounds in air by no means erases the technological know-how and equipment that went into rendering that acoustical space. To return to Sam Phillips' Fan Dance, one of the irritating aspects of "back to basics" descriptions is that such writers clearly didn't actually listen to the recording. They may have heard it, but they show no evidence of having listened to it. Even when the album's songs are arranged primarily for common, acoustic instruments, they're seldom recorded naturalistically: instead, instruments tend to have odd little acoustical spaces to themselves, or the balance among them is shifted from the expected (the cello-heavy string parts on "Wasting My Time," for example).

Of course, none of the above denies the cultural associations we have with certain musical arrangements: if you want to connote sincerity and directness, voice and acoustic guitar will cement that association with far more people than an arrangement for flanged tuba, seven electric guitars, and backwards glockenspiel will. But that can change: again consider the piano, what an unwieldy, complicated, expensive machine it is, and yet over time it became associated with a kind of emotionally transparent intimacy.