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.

Ranking #1 alternative songs, 2001-2002

Convinced that I needed a hazmat suit, a spear gun, and a talent for quashing memories of the early Bush II years, I approached this batch carefully but wound up shocked how many songs were defensible and I didn’t care for, how few songs sucked, and how ready I was to hear things to salvage. Crazy Town’s “Butterfly” is horny-stupid that I can endorse because the dudes know they sound like morons who don’t give a damn, and their frosted tips don’t mind either. Whereas the Poppy Bush Interzone earns its name because the songs released during this four-year period sound unmoored from what came before and after, the era I call the Return of the Mook definitely sounds part of the 2000s. If decades aren’t blocks of mortar, the 2000s proved an exception: they began in 2001 and ended 2009-2010 with the rise of Gaga and arena electronic music.

Cosplaying versions of ourselves: ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’

We could be watching a film by the late Abbbas Kiarostami: the wear of being stuck in a car babbling for hours. Angela (Ilinca Manolache) drives through a Bucharest little changed from its Communist era, a point made by the decision to shoot the present-day in black-and-white and to intercut scenes from the 1981 Angela Goes On directed by Lucian Bratu for the sake of (rather plodding) counterpoint. A production assistant condemned — given what we watch it’s the appropriate word — to interview accident victims who repeatedly fail to be photogenic enough for the sake of a cash prize, Angela entertains herself by using a couple filters and filming herself as “Bobiţă,” a potty-mouthed incel influencer who in the opening minutes namedrops Andrew Tate (yes, that Andrew Tate).

Ranking #80 singles, U.S. edition: 1969-1973

One of those albums that documents the warmth between audience and performer, Live at Carnegie Hall is the aural equivalent of swapping stories with a friend about beloved relatives (the most haunting song: “Grandma’s Hands”). Bill Withers included new tune “Friend of Mine,” and I park it front and center because of its anomalousness in an era when the singer-songwriter perfected the song as testimony and as machine gun. A few years earlier Billie Jo Spears established herself with an equally epochal moment. Pop songs in 1969 didn’t have many songs sung by women where her ugly-ass boss who treats his female secretary like shit gets his.

‘They should tell me how they want their record to come out’ — Steve Albini

In a 2009 interview with Phil Freeman the late Steve Albini explained his methods:

I started as a musician, a guy in a band, and whenever I or my friends would go into a studio to work with these professional engineers, we were always treated in a sort of a dismissive fashion, as though we didn’t really know what we were doing. And that inspired the idea in me that an engineer should be subservient to the bands that he’s recording. That is, he should be working to their agenda, rather than trying to fit them into his mental image of how a band should behave. The analogy that I can make is if you go to the barber to get your hair cut, you should be able to tell the barber how you want your hair cut. Of course, the barber is the professional and he’s doing the cutting, but he should be doing it to suit you. And when a band comes in the studio, I think of them in precisely the same light. They should tell me how they want their record to come out.

The albums he recorded in Big Black are products of guys knowing how they wanted their record to come out. When Albini “recorded” a band he coaxed out their talents for noisemaking. Not for him the moist all-enveloping ecosystems of what Alan Moulder did with My Bloody Valentine and Smashing Pumpkins. Noise as a hammer, not a bludgeon. Get the nail in, bam bam bam. Done. Listening to Big Black’s “Bad Penny”, an anthem for future edgelords, and it’s not clear if the racket inspired the lyrics, a worldview required expressing, or, it’s punk, man, bam, bam, bam.

If I seem broken and blue: The best songs about walking

I’m quite taken with the flâneur ethos since reading Baudelaire in high school and Edmund White’s book. Because Miami offers few opportunities for agenda-free walking, ending up at this bookstore and that coffee shop or that bar, I try it wherever I go. Walking around a city is a concept that didn’t exist before centralized planning in the mid nineteenth century anyway.

Ranking #74 singles, U.S. edition: 1986-1993

I regret “Shake It Like a White Girl” and “Voice of Freedom” flopped, for Americans missed the chance to go on Sally Jesse Raphael’s show to share their experience with two terrible singles. Exploiting Tone-Loc writing credits into a recording contract, Jesse Itzler took the moniker Jesse Jaymes and released Thirty Footer In Your Face on Delicious Vinyl in 1991. Apparently Gerardo’s “Rico Suave” served as much visual and intellectual inspiration as Ingmar Bergman did for Woody Allen.

The bureaucratization of higher ed brews conservatism

With Israeli Defense Forces having captured the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing and another humanitarian horrorshow impending, I don’t want to make this post about American media’s obsession with student protestors ruining commencement ceremonies or about what Peggy Noonan saw after her third morning martini, not when student journalists continue their superlative work covering their campuses; but as we approach the end of the semester at many institutions of higher learning (not us; we started our summer semester yesterday!) I can tell that presidents hope protestors go to the beach in late May. Prying this phenomenon apart from the ongoing war will reveal the degree to which the increased bureaucratization of higher ed brews an innate conservatism.