NO GENRE

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Remember that time that Lil Wayne was the most promising thing in hip hop and then he actually delivered on that promise by releasing a great album after dropping a whole grip of great mixtapes and he also had a weirdly poignant documentary made about him but then had it all kind of taken away because of some outstanding drug and weapons charges and then after spending a year in the clink he released an album that everyone forgot to pay attention to but suddenly he came out with this one-off single called, of all things, “6 Foot 7 Foot” that built a beat from “Day-O (Banana Boat Song)” and featured classically hilarious Wayne lines like “Mind so sharp, I fuck around and cut my head off” and surprisingly thoughtful lines like “Life is the bitch, and death is her sister/Sleep is the cousin, what a fucking family picture!”and that song reminded everyone why Weezy was so fucking great because it buried everyone’s ears in huge bass hits and breathlessly hungry verses just like old times?  Yeah, that was awesome, wasn’t it?

In the truest spirit of democracy and parity, I believe that a best songs list should look very different from a best albums list.  As a teenager, I always loved Charles Aaron’s year-end songs list in Spin because they were so thrillingly eclectic.  Aaron’s lists democratized taste for me: they gave me permission to love both The Fugees as much as I loved PJ Harvey.  Since then, I’ve believed that a best songs list should be for the one-offs, the flukes, the lucky ones, the temporary geniuses, the chart-toppers, the forgotten underdogs.  There’s no sense in telling you that Kanye’s “Runaway” and LCD’s “Dance Yrself Clean” and HTDW’s “Decisions” are my favorite songs of the year; I’ve made all of that abundantly clear all year long.  Therefore, my list will be composed of songs that are not featured on any album that I’ve already honored (i.e. no Kanye).  A couple of these, of course, are album tracks; they just happen to be from albums that for one reason or another didn’t quite grab me.  Check out the list after the jump.

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The thing that made 2010 such a remarkable year was the fact that the democratization of taste (thank you, internet) has continued unabated.  Everyone has the same access to every album, every artist, every song.  It’s in no way weird to like both Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and Salem’s “King Night.”  And with this, genre distinctions are becoming increasingly meaningless.  The balkanization of genre into ever-smaller units of sounds and artists means that they tend to less impactful and more ephemeral.  It’s no coincidence, then, that the best albums of the year were the albums that played with your genre expectations.  You wanted a funky hipster throwdown with LCD Soundsystem?  Tough luck pal, here’s the best record that David Bowie never got around to writing.  Kanye West wrote an emotionally devastating album that barely features a potential radio hit; Crystal Castles recorded the best punk rock album by completing ignoring guitars.  Here We Go Magic tried to resurrect motorik-driven Krautrock for the masses, and How to Dress Well casually re-invented 50 years of R&B tradition with a 4-track machine and some spare time.  And the most recognizable DJ of our time is a goofy guy who simply holds a mirror up to our culture so we can see it for all its strange glory.  But this has been the story of popular music for the past decade, and this is not a new thesis.  I’m just thankful to be living in the most productive, most generous era of pop music in history.  More people are doing more awesome things than ever before.  Here’s the proof: forty albums that were stunning and disquieting, revelatory and cathartic, destructive and piercing, redemptive and exhilarating.

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The ghetto fantasy, the coke rap, the politically-conscious treatise, the Nation of Islam screed, the misogynistic sex anthem, the trunk-rattler, the barbecue soundtrack, the Mafioso morality play.  Known territory that has been thoroughly surveyed, mapped, and strip-mined.  We’ve even heard the horror stories of an insane space gynecologist thanks to Dr. Octagon.  But have we heard a solipsistic and operatic monologue as apologetic and defensive as anything you’d find in a tense AA meeting?  Have we seen a rapper take such a shine, such a loathing to his own reflection?  Have we seen a rapper explore emotional depths darker and deeper than anything you’d find in a teenager’s diary.  Have we seen anyone gamble on his career with a bracingly honest album that both celebrates and condemns the author’s entire existence?  Have we seen a rappers as frustratingly, as sympathetically human as Kanye West?

This is why Kanye’s new album, the magisterial and conflicted My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, doesn’t necessarily feel instantly classic so much as instantly important.  The critical consensus seems to be that the album is a devastating portrait of the American id gone wild.  Besides having an unspoken racial edge to it, I think the statement doesn’t quite do Kanye’s achievement justice.  Fantasy is the work of the American id and the American superego clashing mightily against one another in the soul of one man.  Kanye has always been a hedonist with an absolutist’s sense of morality; he’s constantly wracked with guilt because he feels that his entire life is one complex transgression.  This contradiction in Kanye’s heart is the very same contradiction that chills America’s heart.  We’ve always been a Puritanical utopia that hosted primitive Roman orgies.  But the key question here is how Kanye handles this contradiction: how does this man contain and project his Janus-like personae into aesthetic forms?

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is an album that bottles complex existential states into songs that brim with tension, both musical and emotional.  The chief success of the album is that Kanye manages to (further) rewrite the rules of pop song sentiments while also rewriting the rules of pop song structures.  That is to say, Kanye sings about unfamiliar depths in unfamiliar ways.  The biggest hip hop star in the world shouldn’t extend an already amazing track with a hypnotic four minute vocoder solo.  Nor should he be using Elton John for unironic ends.  And he definitely shouldn’t be patching a fiery Gil Scott-Heron monologue onto an album’s closer.  I mean, this has to be the weirdest major label release since Kid A. It speaks volumes that “Power,” a desperately egotistical rap about Kanye’s powers of persuasion, ends as a suicide fantasy.

But this is exactly what Kanye has done.  Nearly every song on the album subverts hip hop’s conservative tradition by allow Kanye to eviscerate himself for the audience.  He’s laid bare so often here that the album sometimes feels more like a therapy session or an autopsy.  On “All of the Lights,” he turns what sounds like a triumphant march into a hand-wringing search for the human at the center of the monster.  Kanye inhabits the character of a wife-beating dead-ender who almost entirely unable to communicate:  ”I tried to tell you/But all I could say is, oh.”  Elsewhere, “Blame Game” is a unyieldingly honest song about a relationship of bottomless misery.  By turns apologetic and abusive, the song ends with a nauseating comic routine by Chris Rock, the lucky recipient of Kanye’s sexual scraps.  Rock praises Kanye’s ex up and down about her reupholstered pussy, her ability to satisfy his every kink and turn-on.  When Rock asks where she learned her tricks, a soulless female voice intones, “Yeezy taught me.”  Kanye has turned this woman into a lifeless sexual playground, and he pillors himself before a shocked audience.  And then there’s “Runaway,” the album’s centerpiece.  Spilling over nine minutes, “Runaway” is a theatrical epic that finds Kanye at his lowest point:

“Never was much of a romantic
I could never take the intimacy
And I know it did damage
‘Cause the look in your eyes is killing me
I’m guessing you’re at an advantage
‘Cause you could blame me for everything
And I don’t know how I’m-a manage
If one day you just up and leave.”

But just as Kanye reaches his most self-pitying moment, he rallies:  ”Let’s have a toast for the douchebags!/Let’s have a toast for the assholes!/Let’s have a toast for the scumbags/Every one of them that I know/Let’s have a toast to the jerkoffs/That’ll never take work off.”  This bitter sentiment comes with a stern warning:  ”Baby, I got a plan/Run away fast as you can.”  ”Runaway” ultimately reaches the nadir of his despair in an incomprehensible vocoder solo that sounds like a dying computer.  And this is most remarkable aspect of the album:  Kanye is uncanny in his ability to find aesthetic analogs for emotional states.  Inside this garbled nonsense is a voice trying to worm through, trying to communicate, trying to establish contact with someone being pushed away by that very voice.  This is a persistent theme throughout the album:  the inability to communicate plays havoc with our ability to make meaningful connections with others.

But perhaps the most telling moment of the album comes in the soulful “Devil in a New Dress” when Kanye asks a pointed question:  ”You love me for me, could you be more phony?”  For a man whose humility is essentially impossible (“It’s hard to be humble when you’re stuntin’ on the Jumbo-Tron”), this question is not rhetorical.  He’s deadly serious: how could you love an asshole like Kanye West?

The answer:  we love Kanye because he’s obsessed with the same things that nag us in the remotest corners of our being.  The album is a 70-minute excursion into those twin ghosts of sex and death.  My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is elegantly nihilistic about these subjects.  The values they instill come entirely from fear and shame and anger and solipsism.  But it’s Kanye’s rage against these existential poles that reveals the ultimate value of the album:  Kanye is ultimately a sympathetically human figure.  This is a man with fears and anxieties, responsibilities and freedoms.  This is a man not unlike you.  Just more bravely honest.

Rating: 10 / 10

Here’s the final installment of my countdown of my favorite Beatles songs ever.  Check out Parts 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 in the series so far.

5.  Martha, My Dear – I’ve always secretly loved the term chamber pop.  It suggests a kind of elegantly intricate songcraft that got co-opted by a bunch of sensitive guys with acoustic guitars.  But I like to imagine that “Martha, My Dear” is the pinnacle of the power of chamber pop.  This cooly English love poem begins innocently enough, but soon McCartney’s gentle voice soon on that winkingly soulful edge that he occasionally flashed.  The song is so meticulously composed that it often sounds like filigreed soul or baroque rhythm and blues, which is basically the essential sound of Paul McCartney.

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4.  Here, There, and Everywhere – The Beatles’ response to The Beach Boys’ perfect pop symphony, Pet Sounds, is this tender song.  But whereas Wilson’s melodies were gracefully curved, McCartney’s best melody was a smeary wash that could still compete with anything from Pet Sounds. This swooning dream of a song is just so unabashedly pretty.  It feels almost too delicate, too fragile to bear the weight of its praises.  In fact, it even feels weird to sing along to it. It’s like watching a newly-married couple dance and insisting on cutting in the middle of the song.  Just sit down, drink your drink, and admire the lovely scenery.

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3.  A Day in the Life – From the suicide that opens that song to McCartney’s mid-day reverie to that final chord that rings like an awakening consciousness, “A Day in the Life” is out-and-out masterpiece of song-craft and production-craft.  But beyond the song’s obvious importance, it’s a hauntingly disembodied narrative that just barely tells a story: a man shoots himself at a traffic light, our narrator watches a film in a dingy theater, another man altogether goes about his day.  Ranging from mundane to tragic, “A Day in the Life” is a sort of pop Ulysses for those who never had the time or the patience for Joyce.  

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2.  Hey Jude – The Beatles were ultimately a life-affirming band.  And nowhere is their optimism more potent and genuine and affecting than on “Hey Jude.”  Originally penned as a pep-talk to Lennon’s son Julian, who was stressed about his parents’ divorce, the song has taken on a life of its own.  From that first striking piano chord to the long, soulful ride into silence, “Hey Jude” has to be the most universally beloved Beatles song.  Everyone loves this song: children, future soccer moms, frat boys, sensitive boys and girls, hack punk rockers, kids with new snare drums, sweet old guys, this fucking guy, Wilson Pickett loved the song harder than almost anyone else, and on and on and on . . .  

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1.  Twist and Shout - Rock n Roll was originally slang for fucking.  Not sex, not whoopie, and certainly not making love.  Fucking. “Twist and Shout,” then, is the ultimate rock n roll song because it is the ultimate song about wanting to fuck someone.  I mean, listen to Lennon make a fetish of this young girl’s hips.  He sounds dangerous; he sounds like a hormonal animal pulsing with blinding lust.  He sounds like he’s tearing out his own throat.  In a sense, this is exactly why button-down America collectively freaked out about the prospect of rock n roll.  These guys wanted to fuck your daughters, and they weren’t ashamed to scream it at the top of their lungs.  What’s more, it’s clear that these good daughters wanted to fuck right back.  And The Beatles were giving them permission:  ”C’mon and work it on out!”  The song subverts an entire moral order: it undermines the stiffling hegemony of procreation and argues for a redefined natural order premised on the idea that men and women can and should do what they please in their short lives, that women have an inherent sexual agency, that rock n roll is a form of salvation that delivers more kicks than a stuffy church.  This song will forever cement the promise of rock n roll: it won’t change the world so much as it will change minds.  Rock n roll makes promises and expects you to keep them.  Rock n roll gives you permission and obliges you to follow through.  It expects you to work it on out.  

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After 2007′s grim White Chalk, it’s nice to hear Polly Jean Harvey sounding slightly more upbeat.  Songs like “Dear Darkness” and “Broken Harp” from that sparse album were wrenchingly dark and uncompromisingly bleak.  But, then again, this has always been Harvey’s calling card.  So it’s a bit of a surprise that “Written on the Forehead,” our first peek at her forthcoming album Let England Shake, sounds at least moderately hopeful.  The song opens with the idyllic image of date palms and tangerine trees, but pretty soon we’re surrounded by eyes crying for everything.  And then Niney the Observer’s apocalyptic refrain from “Blood and Fire” starts bubbling up from the warm soup of the song’s instrumentation.  All told, the “scattered rubbish” and “fetid river” and “a war here in our big city” add up to something decidedly ruinous.  But the song’s hazy gospel belies the heavy surreality of the end of the world presented here.  If “Written on the Forehead” is any indication, Harvey is poised to release an album that is miles from White Chalk’s haunting desolation.  But, then again, this is P.J. Harvey we’re talking about here and the album is called Let England Shake.