Ranking 1985 Pazz and Jop winners: 1985

The name of this band in the photo is Talking Heads. At the start of the High Eighties they earned their highest P&J placement and strongest American sales with Little Creatures, an album that purported to hearken back to their pre-polyrhythmic days, down to David Byrne taking most of the songwriting credit. I hear “And She Was” more often in the wild than any other Heads song, and “Road to Nowhere” and “Television Man” remain successful attempts to use a transparent mix (care of E.T. Thorngren) to make Byrne’s skewed visions of the American (ab)normal even stranger, like David Lynch going from Eraserhead to Blue Velvet. The theory worked better for Lynch. Abbreviated and underwritten, the beginning of Byrne’s regrettable attempt to sing like he expects rock singers do, Little Creatures is a second-tier Heads album which I nevertheless like more than fans.

The best final films

Whether it was Orson Welles proving how filmmaking and prestidigitation are species from the same genus, Bob Fosse pointing out the rot in the cultivation of a public persona, or Douglas Sirk shoving Americans’ noses into the cake of their polite racism, these final films incarnated what made these directors watching; but only one of them made my list of last films that rank at or near the top of their director’s canon. Because it’s getting warmer, John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s grandest short story set in a bleak Dublin winter looks most relevant; because we’re living in a permanently altered landscape, The Sacrifice looks most frightening.

Ranking Pazz & Jop albums: 1983

At last we get resistance: the first list of Meh entries, populated by a rogues gallery of bizzer vets, one of whom scored his best-selling album in seven years. Although I love Murmur and Power, Corruption and Lies, I’m not enraptured, making 1983 the weakest year I’ve ranked to date. It will worsen. I would’ve included Kashif, Womack & Womack’s Love Wars , Heaven 17’s The Luxury Gap, John Anderson’s All the People are Talkin‘, and, well, the debut by the biggest star of the next two decades, not counting the guy whose 1982 album conquered 1983 and 1984.

Alice Munro — RIP

If my readers understood an Alice Munro story before 25, let me know. Not read — understood.

History repeats the old conceits: Ranking 1982 Pazz and Jop winners

Studying the thirty albums I ranked this year, I see no organizing principle beyond offering bouquets to boomer icons (Reed, Fagen, Richard and Linda Thompson, Gaye, even McCartney below my sights) who recorded solid or better material after punk and disco retreated to subbacultcha. If the unexpected top ten triumph of Joe Jackson’s Night and Day was proof of anything, it’s that boomers were already getting soft in the knees about the music of their youth breaking them in two.

As for the Elvis Costello Question, I’ll aver that Imperial Bedroom boasts a wonderful first side. “Beyond Belief” is my favorite of his excellent, dense accumulations of nothingness, and after the stumble of “Tears Before Bedtime” the rococo string colors and Cole Porter affectations don’t offend and are often moving; it’s the second side that’s rote.

‘The Fall Guy’ needs Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt

The bass chords of KISS’ meathead-disco hit “I Was Made For Lovin’ You.” pound over the opening credits. In the next 130 minutes of The Fall Guy the audience will hear it rearranged as an electronic anthem with Nine Inch Nails overtones, in classical symphonic form, and as a whispery Billie Eilish-indebted tone poem. As stuntman Colt Seavers, Ryan Gosling scales his performance in similar fashion. Taking a moronic premise for a movie, he plumbs the schmaltz, owns the melodrama, and exploits the humor. Here’s an actor who after his series of increasingly glum turns a decade ago understands that after Barbie and his third Oscar nomination he’s having another imperial moment. Ryan Gosling wants you to know he is a star, and this goofball’s having a great time.

I gave up looking for a reason: Ranking 1981 Pazz and Jop winners

In a rather docile if not narcoleptic pop year, these albums represent a exotic island of sorts where popular entries (Tattoo You, Ghost in the Machine, Street Songs, Beauty and the Beat), semi-popular entries (Sandinista!, Controversy) and the dawn of the college era’s signposts (Talk Talk Talk, Wha’ppen?) compete with X, The Blasters, the Neville Brothers, and Yoko Ono. The singles lists, should I get around to it, are a new peak. It’s a relief that the Nevilles, Prince, and Black Uhuru impressed white voters in a non-disco phase.

I prefer “Blood” Ulmer and Augie Darnell’s follow-ups to the selections here, and The Blasters’ rockabilly careening to Joe Ely’s (never mind Stray Cats). The popularity of David Lindley and, further below the interests of this list, Lindsey Buckingham suggests that the Dave Edmunds ethos of boho singer-songwriter-guitarists proved less resistant to voters than disco performers. However, I continue to prove resistant to Rick James’ oleaginous vocals and monotonous songwriting beyond the hits.

Ranking Pazz & Jop 1980 albums

Peak post-punk, peak rock-influenced-by-post-punk, 1980 represents another P&J apex. At least a dozen of the best category are culminations, unsurpassed debuts, and miracles of sleekness and rhythmic smarts. I won’t say much because the albums speak for themselves. Listening to Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest and his delight that he married a Good Woman, though, I thought, “Fucking John Lennon.”

Singles Jukebox 5/10

On one hand I love the return of the hip-hop diss and instinctively recoil from lamentations posted on social media speculating on the damage to our culture. On the other hand if the hip-hop diss is to exist in 2024 must it still incorporate stale avowals of manhood? It’s not that Kendrick Lamar is too good a writer for them, it’s that unlike the good material on Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers he doesn’t grapple with the staleness and the ugliness: in “Meet the Grahams” there’s no sense in which the wretched Aubrey Graham who should never have been born is or could be Kendrick Duckworth.

As much as I dislike Drake’s music, I give him credit for abjuring the grand postures: here at last is a dickhead of mixed race and of no special distinction except an erratic ear for samples. Young women like him because they’ve dated or been attracted to dickheads; young men like him because they recognize the dickhead in them. Kendrick Lamar meanwhile is in a grand hip-hop tradition: the storyteller with a prodigious talent for imitations and stresses. Kendrick positions himself as a member of a lineage; he looks over his shoulder and sees Rakim, Chuck D., Nas. I remember when he was conflicted.

I should’ve been praising “Espresso,” which many colleagues are willing to become the Song of the Summer.

The best double-sided singles

So! This category is bound to create confusion. According to the rules (draw your own conclusions), a double A-side is a single in which both sides are designated the A-side; the B-side counts as much as the A-side. The problem, of course, is that 45 rpm singles and cassingles only have two sides: you can flip them any way you like, you’re going to play one side more than the other. Radio stations did this too. The following singles, though, record companies promoted together. Looking up this data online, though, gets spikey.

But this shit’s confusing. So I’m prepared for any corrections. I include one per artist because otherwise Fats Domino, Elvis, Ricky Nelson, and Sam Cooke would own this shit.

The best albums of 2024: Part 1

I’ve played the top three albums with greater pleasure than the rest on this list, which I would not consider definitive in placement and preference. With her recombinant coo and commensurate talent for inhabiting several subgenres of Latin rhythms, Kali Uchis is on a helluva run; every time I play Orquídeas in the office people stop to ask, “Who is that?” I get similar pleasure from Tyla’s debut. Four Tet’s most memorable album since the Obama years and Mdou Moctar’s guitar orchestra stand as facing poles: the former soothes while the latter strafe. The Niger-born musician who constructed his first guitar from bicycle brake wires has plenty to say about the way in which Western powers have plundered Africa, and his liquid runs call to mind Sonny Sharrock as much as Eddie Van Halen.

Making a virtue out of surfeit, Cindy Lee offer 32 songs that as many critics have pointed out evoke half-heard melodies from AM radio gold and vaporously experienced bits from the Fall, Guided By Voices, Magnetic Fields, and Chris Isaak. Listeners will figure out themselves how to face this sprawl; I break Diamond Jubilee down into seven or eight bundles at a time so that even the less realized bits create a recognizable gestalt. As for the “hypnagogic” chatter: one morning last week I awoke as I often do with a song in my head. The song: “Glitz.”

I wish I had country albums to savor. Gimme recs!

Ranking #70 hits, U.S. edition: 1983-1987

The peak of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ early style, Hearsay gleams. Alexander O’Neal, the best male vocalist they ever worked with, offers a pebbly base for his epicene tone; he can belt, croon, or hang behind the beat. Jam and Lewis didn’t write the burbling “Criticize,” though: the honor belongs to former Time colleague Jellybean Johnson and O’Neal himself. The guitar lines soar; the song is less a complaint than a lament. The call-and-response lyrics allow O’Neal’s female object of scorn some space.

Abetting “Criticize” is Deborah Harry’s best solo single — the Stock-Aitken-Waterman remix, that is, a considerable dance hit and as essential a part of Miami’s freestyle landscape in spring ’87 as Will to Power’s “Dreamin'” and Expose’s “Come Go With Me.” Also, another remix: tentative, demo-esque on Please, Pet Shop Boys’ “Suburbia” gets beefed up with sampled dog barks and its indelible hook played on Yamaha piano instead of synth; Neil Tennant could be eulogizing suburban hells, not denouncing them, such is the detail. Donald Fagen offers counterpoint. Duran Duran offers one of their more convincing funk numbers.

And “In the Shape of a Heart”? Well. Boomers love Jackson Browne’s “intelligent” love songs. Here’s one where the chord changes and the humility of his singing take him to places where his garrulous Ford-era songs didn’t or couldn’t.