2. The Go-Betweens, Oceans Apart


This still stands.

1. The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday


So does this*.

EDIT: The link isn't working, so just scroll down to the bottom of this page to the December 7 entry...if you got the patience.

"It got us good"

My review of Brokeback Mountain, which I admired enormously and left me stumbling dumbfounded for most of the Christmas holiday. It's not a great film, though: damn, does that Ang Lee dig repression.

4. Kanye West, Late Registration


At least he's got the good sense to over-orchestrate his songs when his ego threatens to humble him before the eyes of impatient critics. Jon Brion should sell his mellotron to Aimee Mann as a parting gift.


3. M.I.A., Arular


One of the year's most gratifying sights was watching teens who wouldn't know Sri Lanka from Sirhan Sirhan go apeshit over "Bucky Done Gun" and "Galang." The kerfuffle over her politics has never captivated this listener. Only those beats -- those dizzy, dizzy beats -- and M.I.A.'s exuberance -- an exuberance born of sorrow and death -- signified beyond the pre-release polycultural condescension (and post-release; read this recent horror of a blurb in SPIN's year-end countdown).

6. New Pornographers, Twin Cinema


What I wrote here still holds up. If you don't agree, have fun with your Destroyer, Zampano, and Neko Case records.


5. LCD Soundsystem, s/t



I'm now having second thoughts about ranking it so high. Most of the previously released singles leave me cold (even "Yeah"); and the genre exercises just sorta sit there ("Movement" is rank mid'90s Moby). Still, here's your chance to listen to every dance, trance, and electro trend of the last 10 years, sped up, slowed down, schlocked up, for your pleasure.

8. The Rolling Stones, A Bigger Bang


In which four reprehensible plutocrats remember that they're also, um, in a rock band and should play like one. Their best since Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), if not Monster.


7. The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree


Imagine all the shit that's most revolting about autobiographical songs cycles. Now write and record them with surprising instrumental embellishments, narrative clarity, and a cold ruthless eye. David Copperfield meets Dazed & Confused, and it's a wonder that John Darnielle seems like such a nice person.

Best of 2005

I stole this idea from Miccio. Two a day, taken from my Village Voice Pazz & Jop ballot:

10. Kate Bush, Aerial



Having made my peace with Bush's rather stiffjointed motions towards ecstacy (chugging power chords don't achieve liftoff even when she's howling "I wanna be up, up, UP on the ROOF!" like she's still wants to take her shoes off and throw them in the lake), I relaxed and accepted this woman's version of middle-age domesticity. From dreaming of washing machines to Renaissange madrigals for her son to the subtle smarts of her sound (she makes the best case for the virtues of self-production), this is still plenty weird.

9. Spoon, Gimme Fiction



Unduly impresssed by Britt Daniels' previous excursions into tuneful opacity, I was prepared to like this record before forgetting it in December. What I did forget was how seductive tuneful opacity can be when garnished with bits of ugly guitar squalls, with Daniels' increasingly confident vocals atop. Flaunting the encyclopedic knowledge of all things rock that is de rigueur for canny aesthetes these days, Daniels is more comfortable doing "Rocks Off" ("Sister Jack") than "Emotional Rescue" ("I Turn My Camera On"). For canny aesthetes, this is a real achievement.

Score one for secularism!

And now for some good news:

HARRISBURG, Pa. – "Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.

Bah, humbug

This morning while walking to my car I noticed that I was the only person in my building with neither a wreath nor a Christmas tree. (My mom bought me a poinsetta, but it's looking rather wan and forlorn on my terrace).

What a relief then to read this by Christopher Hitchens on Christmas:

This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy. Time wasted on foolishness at one's children's schools. Vapid ecumenical messages from the president, who has more pressing things to do and who is constitutionally required to avoid any religious endorsements.

He ends with a cheerful "God damn them everyone."

Recent nonsense

Blogging has been non-existent this past week, thanks to a stack of papers to grade (done) and a three-day vacation (done, alas). Let's try to catch up.

Stylus and Pitchfork has released its list of the 50 best albums of the year; I've written the New Pornographers blurb for the former.

I'll post my own list shortly; there's a couple of albums I've recently bought which I'm still assessing (Spoon, Lee Ann Womack) for Pazz & Jop purposes.

As for movies, I loved Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe, unwieldy title and all. Still on the list: Syriana (sorry, Phoebe), Brokeback Mountain.

Hitch on Macca

It's refreshing when Hitchens plays nice on occasion, as he does here on the late Eugene McCarthy.

And now, for more fun...

At last: Stylus' Top 50 Singles of 2005 is posted, generating the usual boring controversy. The top 20 is the most entertaining I've read yet (by which I mean that most of the songs square with mine). I've got blurbs on "Hung Up" and "Bucky Done Gun." A few notes:

* I wish I'd heard Lee Ann Womack's "Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago" and the Futureheads' "Hounds of Love" cover earlier. (thank god for Pazz & Jop).

* My "Mr. Brightside" vote was for the Jacques Lu Cont remix.

* "We Belong Together" would probably be in my top 10 today.

* I know shit about Robyn. Wasn't "Be Mine" released in 1995?

Anyway, my Stylus list:

01. The Killers – Mr. Brightside
02. Kelly Clarkson – Since U Been Gone
03. Gorillaz feat. De La Soul – Feel Good
04. Madonna – Hung Up
05. Snoop feat. Justin Timberlake and Charlie Wilson – Signs
06. M.I.A. – Bucky Done Gun
07. Alicia Keys – Unbreakable
08. Annie – Heartbeat
09. Basement Jaxx – Oh My Gosh
10. 50 Cent – Just A Lil Bit
11. Ciara feat. Missy Elliott – 1-2 Step
12. Interpol – Evil
13. LCD Soundsystem – Daft Punk Is Playing in My House
14. Kelly Osbourne – One Word
15. Mariah Carey – We Belong Together
16. Franz Ferdinand – Do You Want To?
17. The Killers – All The Things That I’ve Done
18. Kanye West feat. Jamie Foxx – Gold Digger
19. The Pussycat Dolls feat. Busta Rhymes – Dontcha
20. Rob Thomas – Lonely No More

CCR were bigger than Jesus

In a commentary spotted with inspired toss-offs comparing Blender and Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, Scott Woods is generous enough to quote Phil Dellio on Creedence Clearwater Revival:

"I think that among people in my general demographic--rather than give an age bracket, I'll just say anyone who remembers hearing 'Up Around the Bend' while it was still on the charts--there's more goodwill towards Creedence than virtually anyone from the era. Maybe anyone, period--you'll see the Beatles get knocked around now and again, but I don't know that I've ever come across a truly negative word said or written about Creedence Clearwater Revival. They were brilliant, they owned Top 40, and they came and went in the blink of an eye..."

Based upon my conversations with both my student coworkers (most of whom are at least 10 years younger than me) and my contemporariers, this is true (it doesn't hurt that our boy/Dorian Grey wannabe Stephen Malkmus prefers chooglin' when he wants to deepen his elegantly-wasted pose). Three days ago I relistened to the evergreen Chronicles -- the only CCR I own besides my mom's scratched 45's of "Green River/Commotion" and "Proud Mary/Born On the Bayou" -- for the first time in years, and I was struck by how CCR managed to sound like they'd mastered the implosiveness we expect from classic punk (eight years before the fact) and the chops to flaut decidedly un-punk guitar textures, in tunes averaging a length of a two and a half minutes. Like the proto-punk he was, John Fogerty was a closet sentimentalist (he's stuck in Lodi with that damn green river, no matter how many friendly creatures he sees lookin' out his back door), but before he sought comfort in Americana tropes ("Centerfield") he was too bitter to become complacent; every whisper was a threat, every grapevine mouthed imprecations.

And they were the most popular American singles artists between 1968 and 1970.

Lester Bangs: John Lennon, rot in peace

I've heard lots of mawkish crap on the radio today about John Lennon. As a palliative, here's Lester Bang's obit:

You always wonder how you will react to these things, but I can't say I was all that surprised when NBC broke into "The Tonight Show" to say that John Lennon was dead. I always thought that he would be the first of the Beatles to die, because he was always the one who lived the most on the existential edge, whether by diving knees-first into left-wing adventurism or by just shutting up for five years when he decided he really didn't have anything much to say; but I had always figured it would be by his own hand. That he was merely the latest celebrity to be gunned down by a probable psychotic only underscores the banality surrounding his death.

Look: I don't think I'm insensitive or a curmudgeon. In 1965 John Lennon was one of the most important people in the world. It's just that today I feel deeply alienated from rock 'n' roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams or aspirations.

I don't know what is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch and gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago. Perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers may have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they're kneeling to blow upon, whereas the kids who have to make do with things like the _Beatlemania_ show are being sold a bill of goods.

I can't mourn John Lennon. I didn't know the guy. But I do know that when all is said and done, that's all he was--a guy. The refusal of his fans to ever let him just be that was finally almost as lethal as his "assassin" (and please, let's have no more talk of this being a "political" killing, and don't call him a "rock 'n' roll martyr"). Did you watch the TV specials on Tuesday night? Did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the Dakota apartment where Lennon lived singing "Hey Jude"? What do you think the _real_--cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic--John Lennon would have said about that?

John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you. Those who choose to falsify their memories--to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened _that_ way in the first place--insult the retroactive Eden they enshrine.

So in this time of gut-curdling sanctimonies about ultimate icons, I hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that the Beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The Beatles were most of all a moment. But their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutten lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Lennon's lyrics into poetry. It is for that moment--not for John Lennon the man---that you are mourning, if you are mourning. Ultimately you are mourning for yourself.

Remember that other guy, the old friend of theirs, who once said, "Don't follow leaders"? Well, he was right. But the very people who took those words and made them into banners were violating the slogan they carried. And their still doing it today. The Beatles did lead but they led with a wink. They may have been more popular than Jesus, but I don't think they wanted to be the world's religion. That would have cheapened and rendered tawdry what was special and wonderful about them. John Lennon didn't want that, or he wouldn't have retired for the last half of the seventies. What happened Monday night was only the most extreme extension of all the forces that led him to do so in the first place.

In some of this last interviews before he died, he said, "What I realized during the five years away was that when I said the dream is over, I had made the physical break from the Beatles, but mentally there is still this big thing on my back about what people expected of me." And: "We were the hip ones of the sixties. But the world is not like the sixties. The whole world has changed." And: "Produce your own dream. It's quite possible to do anything...the unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions."

Good-bye, baby, and amen.

-Los Angeles Times, 11 December 1980.

The Hold Steady: The wages of sin or Sin City?

The Hold Steady's Separation Sunday is one of the two or three best records of the year, and I urge all the cranks who read this site to either buy a copy or bother me about burning/sending via YSI a copy. Best described as a loquacious Bob Mould fronting members of Thin Lizzy and Boston, the Chicago band recorded a quasi-concept album in which a character voiced by singer/guitarist Craig Finn recollects his inglorious youth in a crap suburb, where he and his buddy meet a junk fiend named Holly who's the object of pity and amusement. Finn's songs are meta-narratives, informed by borrowed riffs from classic-rock, in which Holly's mordant rationalizations of her substance abuse eventually lead her into the arms of the Catholic faith with which she's always held a somewhat ambivalent relationship ("She climbed the cross and found she liked the view," Finn says in "Crucifixion Cruise").

In an intelligent dismissal of SS, Josh Love argues that SS belongs firmly in the tradition of a film like Sin City, in which women are madonnas and whores, indiscriminately, but still trapped in the amber of the male gaze:

The gender qualifier is critical here—both Rodriguez/Miller and Finn put girls in the middle of their sordid tales, but their experiences are markedly different from those of the men. Sin City undeniably flirts with misogyny in its perpetual cycle of (scantily clad, perennially battered) feminine helplessness and masculine rescue, and while Finn’s narratives aren’t nearly so narrow, the film’s male-female positioning does help us read Separation Sunday and understand why it comes off unfair and even a little chickenshit.

"Hate" is too tepid an adjective to adduce my reaction to Sin City; "detested" is closer: vacuous gymnastics written and directed by men still enthralled by an adolescence in which film noir tropes were the closest thing to wisdom they absorbed. Josh is too hung up on the dicta of rote feminism: Holly is offensive because she's created by a male imagination which conceives of women strictly in passive terms. While I will cede that Finn rarely implicates himself (his regret is more subtextual than you'd hope), and the anthemic "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night" sounds rather gaunche out of context ("but I can take you to a place where you can save yourself/and if you don't get born again/then at least you'll be high as hell"), SS's adherence to the tone of demotic virtuosity concretized by fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow (okay, Nelson Algren) steers the album past the stylized tableaux which denoted Sin City's identification with the forlorn anti-heroes keeping the cities safe from sin.

Moreover, Finn devotes the whole album to her point of view. Josh forgets that film noir provided actresses with the juiciest parts in old Hollywood. Like Gloria Grahame in Crossfire or In A Lonely Sleep, Holly is a fully-formed character: witty, fatalistic, possessing a welcome sense of self-parody, and loves music (she knows the words to "Running Up That Hill"!) In SS's centerpiece "Stevie Nix" she's perceptive enough to note the posturing that's part of the narrator's nerd appeal ("You remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young/you got passion, you think that you're sexy and all the punks think that you're dumb"). And, sure, you can argue that her musical tastes confirm the Otherness of Women more definitively than Simone de Beauvoir hoped; but you try to look tuff gnarls Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks in the eye and tell them they're beguiling male fantasies composed of equal parts poesy and mystification.

Separation Sunday's subtext is obvious: Craig Finn's life was saved by rock 'n' roll and Holly's wasn't. But it doesn't mean that Finn's the better person for it. In the bleak irony of coda "How Resurrection Really Feels" (itself an allusion to Neil Young's "Walk On," a wry dismissal of the expectations of Those Who Know Better), Finn admits, in a voice devoid of affect, that the sexy mess Holly "looked strung out but experienced/and we all got kind of curious." I mean, what the fuck -- village tricycle or gang-rape victim? Either way, chilling -- and far from the eschewing of responsibility for which Josh blames Finn.

What a treat to end a year in which Kate Bush's Aerial (a response from the abbey, so to speak) battles it out with this hunk of Born To Run-style parodic Mariolatry.

(Now I need to hear from Hold Steadiers, of whom there are plenty.)

Can he be a bigger prick?

From How-can-I-be-more-of-a-schmuck Joe Lieberman:

Lieberman, whom the Bush administration has praised repeatedly for his war stance, defended the president. "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years," the senator said. "We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

Thanks for the reminder, Joe. The minority party--the party that keeps you in office!--should not be bothering those who control every branch of government with dissent, or parliamentary procedures, or checks and balances. It's downright unpatriotic. And it disappoints the president when we question him like that.

Also

Everyone should go see Match Point. It's terrific. It's a lot like one half of Crimes and Misdemeanors, but with an English cast--except for Scarlett Johannsen (yeah, that's misspelled)--and no neurotics, which shows an amount of range I, at least, didn't think Woody Allen had.

Wikipedia controversy

Talk of the Nation had a very good segment on the Wikipedia/John Seigenthaler today which showed Seigenthaler as the crazy, out of touch old coot that he is.

(The first caller's question was particularly illuminating: "why didn't you edit the entry yourself?" Second caller: "I thought we were supposed to take Wikipedia with a grain of salt." Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia who lives in St. Petersburg, FL: "You are supposed to take Wikipedia with a a grain of salt, just like you're supposed to take everything with a grain of salt.")

No encyclopedia is perfect. Britannica contains mistakes; as well as questions of bias and scope. Wikipedia has far more erroneous information that Britannica and the established encyclopedias, but it makes up for that with the ability to be edited in real time--traditional encyclopedia's relevance is inversely propotional with the time elapsed since press time—and its mammoth amount of content. Compare, if you will, Wikipedia’s “squelch” entry with Merriam Webster’s.

I just don't know what Seigenthaler's bitching about. Every midlevel bureaucrat working in government in the '60s has been linked to the Kennedy assassination, some in more reputable publications that wikipedia. How this merits a column in USA Today and New York Times coverage I'll never understand.

You should also check out Esquire's piece on Jimmy Wales, part of their Best & Brightest feature, in this month's issue. Sadly, it is not online.

This is absolutely my favorite story of the day:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who have an alcoholic drink or two a day may have a lower risk of becoming obese than either teetotalers or heavy drinkers, a study published Monday suggests.

Researchers found that among more than 8,200 U.S. adults, those who said they enjoyed a drink every day were 54 percent less likely than non-drinkers to be obese. Similarly, those who drank a little more (two drinks per day) or a little less (a few drinks per week) had a lower risk of obesity than teetotalers did.

"Washing ma-ch-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-n-n-n-e...."

At last: the first review to grapple with the Kate Bush mystery that doesn't descend to this thread's obscuratism and inappropriate high-art analogies (most of the time; I can't support the allusions to The Waves and Sylvia Fucking Plath). At least Marcello doesn't avoid wooliness; the subtext of his review is, "Yes! This album is beautiful, enigmatic, and fucking ridiculous. I will be too!"

A couple of things

Now that I've taken the LSAT, I should have a good amount more time to post and tend to the blog in general.

I'm working on a new design that's close to being finished. One of the big things will be a left sidebar for advertisements. Also, I'm trying to convince Philip Brooker to design the banner and help me out with the overall design theme, which would be very cool.

Please visit the new list of Miami blogs that I included. I'm trying to create or at least bring together some kind of blog community in South Florida. I'd like to start organizing a weekly outing, maybe Wednesday nights, for bloggers to congregate.

This just in: old men should not listen to the Neptunes.

As I get older, I prefer it when aging musicians stick to what they know: De La Soul and Van Morrison and Kate Bush and the Go-Betweens working out their kinks, Thomas Hardy composing one more versified variation on the sophomoric fatalism to which he clung as others cling to God and King, like that. No doubt it's not as adventurous as checking out what the kids are listening to, but then you get Earthling (which, hey, I once defended), that Pat Boone thing, and every Joni Mitchell album of the last 25 years.

On his latest John Cale jumps off a building and goes splat. Well, Justin disagrees. But we're more fun to read than Black Acetate is to listen to.

Type "Doctor Doom" and "Galvatron"

Thanks to Alex for this story. Apparently Wikipedia is not as accurate as people think. As I always tell my students, the Internet is no substitute for, you know, an actual dictionary and thesaurus.

But I'm assuming that Skeletor really did "[come] from the dimension called Infinita. He is a blue-skinned, skull-faced warlord who rules the Dark Hemisphere of Eternia from Snake Mountain with an iron fist."

Princely fare

Lately I've tried to squelch any cronyist tendencies, but this On First Listen article by Nick Southall warms the heart the way that good critprose should. Since Prince, like New Order, the Beatles, Tribe Called Quest (and a handful of others) are artists whose pleasures I can't consciously resist, it's difficult to learn about someone else's experiences without condescending to them (i.e. "do you mean you've NEVER heard Sign 'O' The Times or Brotherhood?"). Southall approach is so guileless that when he finally understands why you love "The Cross" you want to tickle him.

Bush called to jury duty

He could postpone his service by letting McLennan County officials know that he'll be on vacation in December.