And it continues...
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In the early part of this decade you just absolutely couldn't fuck with Timbaland. His work knocking out Jay-Z tracks, playing up Aaliyah's seductive elegance, and getting Missy Elliott's freak on was unparalleled in the aughts' hip-hop/R&B realm. And Justin Timberklake's solo career has always had a clear R&B vibe - and even a weird respect from the hip-hop community, too - that it made sense for them to collaborate on JT's first album Justified. When the Timbaland-produced "Cry Me A River", Justin's breakup song about Britney Spears, made listeners actually care about their Mickey Mouse Club relationship, it made even more sense when the pair joined up for the former N*Sync star's follow up.
Futuresex/Lovesounds is probably the weirdest appropriate album name of the decade, because it actually plays like a soundtrack to sex in the future. On a spaceship, maybe, or at least in zero gravity. Justin's effortless cool oozes all over tracks like "Sexyback" and "What Goes Around Comes Around", and he contrasts earned arrogance ("If that's your girl better watch your back" he warns on "Sexyback") with moments of genuine tenderness ("I could see us on the countryside" Justin intones on "My Love").
But it's Timbaland's varied production, the blorping stomp of the self-titled opener, the vamping boom-bap of "Summer Love", that allowed Futuresex to satisfy its carnal desires. It's a shame that Timbaland seemed to run out of tricks after this album, but it's nothing to be ashamed of, most producers would have been old-news five years earlier.
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In a pretty brilliant opening line, Lil Wayne yells over the top of this album's opening song "3 Peat" that "They can't stop me, even if they stopped me." It's as appropriate a summation of Lil Wayne's attitude as there could be - confident as fuck, a little strange, seemingly nonsensical. He's like the Stephen Colbert of rappers, his words themselves may not make sense, but they feel right, so when Wayne says something like that not only does it not bother you logically, you actually find yourself nodding in agreement.
Tha Carter III jumped through more genres than anything this side of a Broken Social Scene record, like the tense Western guitars that drive "Shoot Me Down", the delicate R&B of "Comfortable", the easy jazz improv of "Dr. Carter", or the minimalist thump of "A Milli". Emotionally Wayne switches up just as easily, like the post-Katrina New Orleans helplessness of the gorgeous "Tie My Hands" to the unabashed sex of the pop-rap vocal harmonies of "Lollipop".
Like Wayne's opening line was a template for the rest of the record, a line in the middle of the otherwise straightforward "Got Money" defines Wayne on Tha Carter III. Coming out of the chorus, Wayne's flow goes syncopated, dancing just around the beat without ever hitting it as Wayne casually mentions as the beat drops out "Bitch, I'm the bomb, like tick tick." The explosion comes a second later as the beat kicks back in and, rightfully, you're blown away.
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It's going on seven years now since the third Wrens record, 2003's The Meadowlands. Before that the band had waited another seven years between records two and three. Of course, that time period was marked by obfuscating factors, like refusing to compromise their sound and losing support from their label, trying to find a new label and record music while keeping their heads above water, and trying to create new lives for themselves as they moved out of their youths and into their "adult" lives.
The Meadowlands was the sound of the Wrens maturing, without the annoying dad-rock connotations the word implies. Gone was the visceral attack of songs like "Built-In Girls", replaced by the heartbreak of "She Sends Kisses", the frenetic energy of "Joneses Rule of Sport" morphed into the juxtaposed rhythms of the guitar and drums in "Hopeless". The Meadowlands is a reference to the Wrens' home state of New Jersey, and the New Jersey sound, like the Gaslight Anthem and Ted Leo, reveals itself, particularly in their blue collar honesty and Newark-as-the-world storytelling.
They were able to take moments of specificity, like the Newark layover in "13 Months in 6 Minutes", and make them apply to everyone who had ever seen an opportunity for love slip away. Coming from a band that had supposedly grown up, the powerful gloom that hangs over this record was a reminder that sometimes things don't get better from sixteen.
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While Hold Steady frontman was born in Boston, he was raised in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And it shows. Finn loves to throw random Twin Cities geography into his music, particularly on Boys and Girls In America closer "Southtown Girls", which firstly refers to a Minneapolis neighborhood and secondly has a lyrics sheet that reads as some sort of metaphysical road map stemming from the city's center, leaving on Nicollet or Lyndale and heading out of town on Highway 169 or Interstate 494.
Minnesota was not only an influence on Finn's lyrics geographically, but also thematically, with stories of Midwest townies and freezing cold party nights that had mass appeal but could be felt most by anyone who had ever had a kegger in a cornfield. Music in the Midwest is a different beast to break into than on the East Coast, particularly in New York where there are outlets for experimental music. In the Midwest, you have to play bars and get drunk, laid-off construction workers to clap for you (or at least not toss bottles at you).
Boys and Girls In America is the Hold Steady perfecting that art. With the epic Springsteen keyboards, the thundering guitar solos and crunchy riffs, they were a perfect band for the corner dive bar. If you were just drunk enough, and you usually were, you could mistake it for Thin Lizzy or the Boss; the Hold Steady's concise rock songwriting on this album screams future inclusion on classic rock playlists. While the incessant Twin Cities references may be seen as home crowd cheer baiting, they transcend that because when you hear about walking on Washington heading to the river, you remember it as cleary as if you were there.
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Xiu Xiu is not for the faint of heart. The project that is primarily driven by Jamie Stewart deals with some rough topics, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, and rape, usually in a frank and brutal manner that cuts past pretense and exposes the emotional pain at the center of these tragedies. Even when dealing with simple depression Xiu Xiu imbues it with all the dramatic pain of the very first time you'd ever been hurt.
One of the most remarkable things about Xiu Xiu is how intelligently they use different tones and instruments to create a very specific atmosphere. While their lyrics have been accused of being childish ("Your black hair is like black hair/Mine, I promise, is a jerk's hair"), the advanced way they use sounds is anything but. While other albums showcased Xiu Xiu's ability to create devastating art-pop songs out of a variety of noises, The Air Force showcased them incorporating these sounds all together.
Like on piano-led opener "Buzz Saw", which seems inappropriately titled until the square-weave synth that sounds, well, like a buzz saw, interrupts just for a moment, leaving behind it a gentle tension; when are we going to hear it again? Or the tape loop manipulated vocals that play with the crushingly aimless strings of closer "Wig Master". In between are drum machine crackles like "Vulture Piano" and haunted house explorations like "Save Me Save Me", songs that combine precocious keyboard tones with close-to-the-bone vocal performances that sound like a cry for help, one that you can't tell if it's coming from Stewart or yourself.
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"Wake Up" was my number one song of the decade, a track that turned the crushing ambivalence of adulthood into a Peter Pan rallying cry to never grow up, even though we just turned every good thing to rust. It was huge and joyous, and insular and heartbroken at the same time, with those huge rallying cries that were some kind of primal catharsis, an expulsion of tension and emotion that had been bottled up, even if only subliminally.
"Wake Up" essentially boiled down the best parts of Arcade Fire's first album Funeral into five and a half minutes. They were a band that had gained an abundance of hype through their live show, enough hype that could have crushed a less talented band. Somehow, though Funeral lived up to it. While it couldn't mention their bombastic live shows, they still managed to communicate that same extroverted energy.
The "Neighborhood" series that opens the album, interrupted only by the French language "Une Année Sans Lumiere", a gentle, much needed breather, plays like a mini-album in its own right, with three bruising rockers, then ending on the sweeping strings of "7 Kettles". And in a genre that usually works on understatement, Arcade Fire fought to pack as much grandiosity as they could into the album's second half, with "Wake Up", the theatrical, romantic waltz "Crown of Love", and the sunburst bounce of "Rebellion (Lies)". They were going for broke as obviously as possible, but were skilled enough to be the ones to break the bank.
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If anything defined the burning of genre barriers over the course of the decade, it was the rise of Girl Talk. He even got the U.S. Congress thinking of how copyright laws need to change; when considering the success of Night Ripper, Congressman Mike Doyle said, perhaps speaking for the entire mashup movement when he said, "Maybe mashups are transformative new art that expands the listener's experience and doesn't compete with what an artist has made available on iTunes or at a CD store."
Night Ripper was the album that put Girl Talk on the proverbial map, in particular the now legendary combination of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" and the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy". It was mashup both reinvented and taken to its logical extreme, a product of someone who has an unabashed love for music, all music, but also had either an ADD-like need to never stay in one spot for too long or an unquenchable love for the weird transitions that litter late-night hip-hop radio's club mixes.
But Feed the Animals perfected Girl Talk's art. Where Night Ripper felt very much the product of the times, Feed the Animals still sampled from the most recent radio hits, but also sampled from source material across several musical generations. And even when the novelty of "Oh shit, did he just put Lil Mama over Metallica?" had worn off, where on Night Ripper the music, particularly the more languid second half, Feed the Animals turned it into exactly what Congressman Doyle thought mashup could be, transformative new art. A piece of music more than the sum of its parts.
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I got a lot of shit for putting Elliott Smith's the collection of unearthed Smith music New Moon on my list for top albums of the year in 2007. The argument was simple, it wasn't a new album of new material. If New Moon had been a reissue, or even a b-sides and rarities collection of things that had already been released, I would have been more inclined to agree. But, while none of New Moon had been written that year, or probably even in Smith's From a Basement On the Hill sessions, they didn't reach listeners' ears until that year. As such, I felt it deserved inclusion.
Maybe the grumbling will be less pronounced when placed in the context of a decade list; I'm not sure. But my argument for its place here remains. It wasn't until this decade that the excellent music that populated the double-disc was heard, could be heard by the general populace. It seems wrong to disqualify such a great record on such a piddling technicality.
Really, all of that wouldn't matter if it weren't for the fact that New Moon is Elliott's best album since XO or maybe even Either/Or. While some songs are obviously half-formed ("New Monkey" in particular seems like it's waiting for the Figure 8 treatment), the ones that come from Elliott's earlier recording sessions are some of the man's most harrowing, like the painful acceptance of "Going Nowhere" or the agonizingly self-deprecating "New Disaster", and they're only two of a multitude of excellent examples that populate the two discs. While the exclusion of this album could be legitimately argued, the strength of Elliott's songwriting meant that I just couldn't force myself to do it.
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Remember when Kanye West was a role model? Before the awards show tantrums, before Taylor Swift, before the ridiculous high-top fade with the steps, before those awful slotted sunglasses... Before stage shows somehow bigger than the man's ego, before the gay fish episode of South Park, before the overblown drama of 808's and Heartbreak... Before all of that, we knew Kanye best as the guy who rapped through a fucking broken jaw on "Through the Wire", his Chaka Khan-sampling coming-out party.
The story of The College Dropout, a story that would be repeated, meta-philosophically, on The College Dropout, is that Kanye was an excellent producer who never got the chance to be a rapper. When he did get the chance to be a rapper, his refreshing take on typical hip-hop topics, and his middle-class approach to the genre itself, proved to be insanely successful. Even if we rankled a bit over him bitching that Gretchen Wilson won Best New Artist at the American Music Awards over him (Where is she now, by the way?), we couldn't deny how impressed we were with the dude's undeniable work ethic (fucking broken jaw!).
The College Dropout is a front-loaded album, with the insatiable ear candy all at the beginning in "We Don't Care", "All Falls Down", and "Jesus Walks", but deep cuts showed his versatility and where he could grow, like the sentimental keys of the undeservedly underrated "Family Business" and the horn blasts, wiggly guitars and sixteenth-note violins of "Breath In Breath Out". And, of course, regardless of how ubiquitous the sped-up soul sample had become, it was impossible not to be impressed by the flinching pain you could hear on "Through the Wire". Yeah, he's kind of an arrogant jerk, but still. Fucking broken jaw.
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The term "crescendo" refers to the musical activity of starting at a low volume and, gradually, increasing to a higher volume over a set period of time. In notation it looks like a "less than" math symbol, but extended over four or six or twenty notes. The opposite musical activity is called, appropriately a "decrescendo," where over a set period of time the volume starts from its current volume and gradually decreases to a preset new volume. It looks like a "greater than" symbol.
Sigur Rós have experience with using symbols to describe their music. Their third album was titled, essentially, by a symbol: ( ). And, really, the entire concept of their made up Hopelandish language was a symbol. Instead of singing actual words, they created their own words, meant to symbolize whatever emotion a listener may have felt. If the group's fifth release, Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust, were to be described symbolically, it would be by the symbol of the decrescendo.
The record opens with two blasts of concise pop energy "Gobbledigook" and "Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur". They were a stunning contrast from a band that had built their name on slow-burning epics that took their time to unfold each individual piece. Over the duration of the album's other songs, that energy gradually slows down, becoming more haunting and soft and more reminiscent of the band's previous work. What remained, however, was that sense of pop song structure, as if they had learned of the power of the format and, just as quickly, learned how to condense their strengths to fit it. By the end of the record it was clear that this was a band that had changed from a group that defined themselves by symbols to a group that rose above them.
Ouch, Funeral at 15? And behind Girl Talk no less (one copyright lawsuit away from total irrelevance).
ReplyDeleteIt's a damn shame I won't be reading 10-1.
Funeral is at #15 because, despite the greatness of "Wake Up" and the "Neighborhood" series, songs like "Haiti" and "In the Backseat" are so forgettable I, um, forgot what they even sounded like. Even if you have the #1 song of the decade if you have more than one song I can't remember on your album, you're not breaking the top 10. Bad luck, mate.
ReplyDeleteBasically, you're saying you don't like her voice. But seriously, those songs are incredible.
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with Regine's voice, I just can't justify an album with songs I don't absolutely love front and back, every track down the track list, in my top 10. The fact that Regine sings both those tracks is coincidental.
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