Walking through paradise: the best music of 2016, part two

(Continued from part one. The list is immediately followed by actual writing/ blogging, I promise.)

Single of the Year
1. Regina Spektor, “the Trapper and the Furrier”
2. Shearwater, “Quiet Americans”
3. Esperanza Spalding, “Good Lava”
4. Saul Williams, “Burundi”
5. Aesop Rock, “Blood Sandwich”
6. Xenia Rubinos, “Mexican Chef”
7. Deerhoof, “Criminals of the Dream”
8. Anderson / Stolt, “Knowing”
9. Emma Pollock, “Dark Skies”
10. Anna Meredith, “Taken”

Single honorable mention(s)
Aesop Rock, “Dorks”
Aesop Rock, “Rings”
Beyonce, “Formation”
Birdeatsbaby, “Mary”
Blackpink, “Whistle”
David Bowie, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”
Dear Hunter, "Gloria"
Death Grips, “Giving Bad People Good Ideas”
Dowling Poole, “Rebecca Receiving”
Everything Everything, “Distant Past”
Field Music, “the Noisy Days are Over”
4Minute, “Hate”
Jesus Jones, “How’s This Even Going Down?”
Julie Ruin, “Mr. So-and-So”
King Gizzard + the Lizard Wizard, “Robot Stop”
Knifeworld, “High / Aflame”
Let’s Eat Grandma, “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”
Marching Church, “Heart of Life”
Melt Yourself Down, “Jump the Fire”
Momus, “Fuck This Year”
New Model Army, “Devil”
Overlord, “Mission to Mars”
Sleigh Bells, “I Can Only Stare”
Esperanza Spalding, “Unconditional Love”
Regina Spektor, “Small Bills”
Kate Tempest, “Europe is Lost”
Tribe Called Quest, “We the People”
Kanye West, “Ultralight Beam”
Jane Zhang, “Dust My Shoulders Off”





Regina Spektor emerged this year as one of our great protest songwriters. The “protest” is surprising. “Great” shouldn’t be, yet
I think she gets overlooked, because her whimsy and quirkiness are an easy excuse to dismiss her as childish, as Tori Amos likely would be if she hadn’t gotten “You can make me cum, that don’t make you Jesus” on record first.

Spektor’s “Trapper and the Furrier”, “Small Bills”, and “Sellers of Flowers”, each with varying doses of playfulness or myth, correctly diagnose our country as under internal attack from the forces of wealth addiction. Unlike how we regard too much cocaine or too much alcohol, or even too much sex (whatever that might mean), we shower those with a bottomless craving for personal wealth with respect, power, and the keys to our electoral system.

For thousands and thousands of years, we’ve treated animals as pinatas that we whack and food/ fur/ blubber comes out; trees as something we demolish so that houses and heat leap out for us; the earth as something we slice into and coal or diamonds emerge. Our overlords, sharing the same convenience-loving DNA we have but with an extra heaping of power, instinctively treat the rest of us humans the same way. Democracy was an experiment in collective resistance, in saying “No, that’s not acceptable”. The 1980s and beyond have been a retreat to “Never mind, we are in fact Human Resources, and gosh we are kind of expensive and whiny compared to those inanimate sorts”.

The Republican elite opposes spending on the hoi polloi’s health care, education, and food because it’s spending: it costs them money, it reduces their score in the game, and there’s nothing more important than the next score. Their voting public opposes it, as best I can tell, from the wounded pride of no longer being treated as the *best* exploitable resources, and from the eagerness to grasp promises that soon, the foreign barbarians will be sent away, and they can resume their pride-of-utility again. All the while, “those who got, get given more, more, more, more”.

******
My singles list engages some with our major black pop stars -- there's much to love in Beyonce's merger of lush dance-pop with alien electric blues transmitted by mis-aligned UFO beams, and Kanye's sparse, nervous take on gospel, and the Tribe Called's slightly awkward stab at a populist pop-rap anthem -- but not with our white ones. At some point this century, white-person “pop” moved far enough away from how I still use the term that it became slightly off-putting to me. I can recognize that “Boyfriend” and “Closer” are good songs, but I liked Tegan & Sara the folk-pop duo, and when they started infusing that with lean New Wave pop for So Jealous and the Con, I thought those albums *were* their Big Pop Move (and thoroughly enjoyable). Their new production obviously strikes a chord with quite a few listeners, but to me the layers of gloss sound cushioning, a bit stifling, muffling the impact and putting the personality of their voices through the echoes of distance. Taylor Swift’s 1989 felt that way too, and probably Carly Rae Jepsen although I never knew her to record anything different. For that matter, I didn’t like Liz Phair “going pop” because I thought she’d already done it marvelously on the (still somewhat raw and eccentric) Whitechocolatespaceegg.

Now, I’ve also got songs by Korean girl groups (4Minute and Blackpink) up there. Those are pop — deep into the tens of millions of YouTube views — equally processed, and existing entirely as product. Their nine singer/ rappers each seem to have been chosen, whatever emotional or creative or intellectual or musical depths they may later display, for reasons of “Wow [low whistle], she’s cute”. But they sound great: on Korean (and Japanese) pop records, all that artifice is there to hone, and sharpen, and serrate, until there’s nothing but hooks, and they’re shiny and perfect. Often even in a pretty strange way: the tune whistled in "Whistle" is a bit eccentric, as are the plaintive background cries of mechanical birds. Plus who the heck wrote that brass melody on “Hate”, and how did they realize they could get rich instead of writing for Melt Yourself Down or Renaldo & the Loaf?

I’m old. I remember when Heartbeat City was a commercial sellout, and Little Creatures: excellent stuff. I can’t remember when Tom Wilson recorded a folk-rock band playing Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” so it would sell,  but I grew up knowing both versions and appreciated the extra electricity. To me, pop should be immediate, and to me all that gloss and reverb isn’t. I’m an outnumbered American; maybe in ten years I won’t be, but more likely I will.

Or, maybe I’ll have adjusted. But probably not, because I’ve got the world’s most populated continent telling me hey, why bother, come have fun the way you are.

******
Jesus Jones’s new single makes me happy not because it’s exceptional, but because it’s Jesus Jones’s first new music in 16 years, and it’s the sound of them remembering what they do well: pleasant tunes, creative sounds made from creative sample-play, likable philosophical reflection. They will go down in history as a one-hit or two-hit wonder, and sometimes those are deceptive — I bet very few people listening to “the Way It Is” or “Mandolin Rain” would guess how loose and funny Bruce Hornsby’s new songs about Franz Kafka and about TSA agents are, for example.  And sometimes one-hits are solitary triumphs because the artist had exactly one good song in them (there was also a new Animation album in 2016, apparently. Why?).

But sometimes, as with Jesus Jones, there’s the song(s) radio loved, and then years and albums full of stuff just as good for basically similar reasons, except the spotlight moved elsewhere. I didn’t blame Mike Edwards and company for deciding that the world didn’t need their continued output. But I’m not the world, and I’m delighted they finally felt in the mood to rummage through their cupboards and figure out where they left their magic.

******
Momus’s “Fuck This Year” got a lot of shares in my Facebook circle, although that seems to say more about my friends than about its YouTube view count. It’s worth hearing, and cathartic; it’s also childish. 2016, in the US, was a pretty decent year. The economy had a genuinely good year, with unemployment down and wages starting to recover. The crime rate probably went down for the 26th year in a row. Even polls of “Are you satisfied with your life right now?” showed unusually high numbers.

We had a good president all year: that’s been unusual in my lifetime. A loud but incompetent businessman ran a campaign to become a loud but incompetent fascist president, and was solidly rejected by the voters (fine, I’m lampshading my own argument, but he was).

Some famous and semi-famous people died, but we have an incredible number of aging famous and semi-famous people to choose from, so it only seems exceptional because of Facebook. I’ve started to assume that people who died before Facebook hit mass popularity are probably still ready to reveal themselves alive, since their “deaths” were not ratified by reverse-Tinkerbell-style clapping.

Farmers learned that using a tiny amount of seaweed in cattle feed could lead to dramatic reductions in methane emissions: some of the best global warming news we’ve had. Genetic splicing technology made huge advances that might well lead to dramatic improvements in our abilities to grow drought-resistant food plants and find new antibiotics: not necessarily anything that'll pan out, but potentially some of the best coping-with-the-crisis news we’ve had. Years are made of the actions of billions upon billions of people, not to mention cats, radio-controlled cockroaches, and gusts of wind: years are too complex to be a proper focus for our venting.

But Momus wrote one of the best drunken-conservatory grooves ever, surrounded it with eerie live-instrumentation sound effects, and throatily cussed an oligarchy and a surveillance state that — while in no way special to 2016 — are well worth cussing about at some point. Blaming a year is an excuse, but you know what? So is making a year-end music ballot, and I'm a-ok with that.


(continue to part three)