December 27, 2006
eleven albums of the year/"generationality"
1) Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer. See review here.
2) E-40, My Ghetto Report Card. Standing on the shoulders of children who are standing on the shoulders of grown giants, one of whom is him.
3) Nadiya, Nadiya. See notes here.
4) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale. The most curious thing is how many enthralling details there are on an album which offers as its main appeal the fact that it could just go on and on with its endless nonsense and soulspace shuffle without anything in particular mattering very much. What did Q-Tip say, "Infinite on my mind every minute"? Yeah, that, exactly inverted: moments in the midst of the infinite.
5) Justin Timberlake, FutureSex / LoveSounds. See review here.
6) The Wreckers, Stand Still, Look Pretty. When teenpop loses interest in broad melodies, broadly melodic teenpoppers will build a home in the country.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55. Somehow this all makes Zero 7's aping of Air: A French Band make sense by reversing the Channel crossing. Or: never has anyone sounded so much like Sarah Nixey. Especially a French person.
8) Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury. Four years ago, it took the Neptunes' sounds to make sense of Los Bros' crude'n'curious style; herein, the favor is duly returned, as the real Yin Yang Twins' brutal intricacy provides a context for Chad'n'Pharrell's astringent loops to sound once again like minimalist elan rather than dispirited sparsity. Moreover, moments like these explain why popular culture as a general sphere is such a remarkable place: it's where you can still be too raw and too literary at the exact same time, via the very same gestures, and sell only 78,000 out of the box. Hubert Selby, Jr. should be so lucky.
9) Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way. See review here. Their least lovely studio album since Natalie joined is still about three songs better than most of the year's popular country albums. This is a fact both about the year in country and the actual greatness of the Dixie Chicks. Natalie Maines, by the way, is one of the greatest singers. Ever.
10) Tori Amos, A Piano. A bunch of tracks that anyone who cares already has, and a few they might not, which is just fine as long as the music's basically free (what's up, allofmp3.com!) Kind of nutty: "Dolphin Song." Kind of slept on: "Sweet the Sting." Kind of unbelievably great: "Ode to my Clothes."
11) Pretenders, Pretenders (reissue). Sometimes a reissue is just reminiscence. Sometimes it's rear-view mirror magic. The live version of "Stop Your Sobbing" is, in some degree, quite predictable, with its slow, emotionalized vocal first passage eventually opening out into a full-force charge. And yet, leaving almost no cliché unturned, the song succeeds in sounding like a torn, tragic elegy in advance for James Honeyman-Scott, who reaches into the solo and fearlessly tears up his own funeral.
NOTES ON GENERATIONALITY:
[We do not claim any Christgauvian/Archimedean overview of the year in music, nor is this note particularly relevant to the Albums List, as opposed to the forthcoming Singles; we're just putting things in places distributively]
Every year bears some traces of generational shift. Sometimes it takes the form of Oedipal agon; sometimes it appears as a necessary refurbishing of the industrial machine along its cycle of planned obsolescences; and sometimes it seems to be little at all until long after the fact: a novelty hit that turns out to have founded a genre; an ignored debut that revivifies a form; a star's album that stiffs a little, secretly presaging the unremarkable moment when a whole cohort loses its juju.
Generationality happen. The market requires it, as do Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, and Machiavelli. More interesting in any given year is where it happens, and what that says.
This is not to say that it's always surprising, and this year it wasn't surprising at all. It didn't happen much in rock, unless the fermentation of emo as the ubiquitous form of guitar-combo pop counts as a generational shift, which it really doesn’t, and didn’t produce much good music (you miss Fall Out Boy now, bitchez, don't you?) The best moment of the year in emo was probably the truly stupendous mono-argyle on that Panic! At the Disco guy’s top hat.
Conversely, hip-hop made a big point of generational shifts, most notably via Jay-Z finally getting out of the rap game. This millennium’s pantomime retirements were ways of sustaining his spectacular rule, his justified domination of hip-hop’s centrist regime; only an actual yawn-worthy album could have removed him from the throne, and he finally obliged. Meanwhile, though it may just indicate a clearing of the golden throat and mind, this was the first year in memory that Missy Elliott, the other best rapper alive, didn’t do something that was complete and absolute genius, and in fact didn’t really do anything at all.
The vacuum in the national consciousness wasn’t filled by longtime critical demi-gods like Cam’ron or his Dipset dudes (snooze), nor the even-more-fetishized second coming of The Clipse; it was filled by actually juvenile fellows who figured out how to turn the local sound of southern rim cities just enough toward the center to consolidate national audiences. What was once a few frontier scenes is now the capital of the hip-hop century, stretched along the length of the Southern Smile: it starts in the Bay Area’s hyphy movement, dips down through Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and rises again to complete the grin right there in the syncopated surf of Virginia Beach that laps against the decaying wood paneling of Teddy Riley’s old 48-track analog console.
Plenty good hip-hop from elsewhere (peace to Miami, and to The Game, probably the most pleasing total cartoon poseur since Robbie Williams) — but the generational action is along that Smile, which might be a grimace, concealing a confederated grill from whence shines the brightest diamond, Lil Wayne himself, who clarified the whole situation by being the first person ever to say he was better than Shawn Carter and mean it. Meaning it doesn’t mean you’re right. Yet.
The generationality of country was kinder and gentler, natch, but even tidal shifts seem dramatic on a molasses sea. Johnny Cash was really really dead, Garth supernally irrelevant; meanwhile, Carrie Underwood morphed from up’n’coming talent to king of the world over what seemed like no more than weeks, and ex-pop stars and their backup singers were going country just like Alan Jackson promised, and Taylor Swift...well, Taylor Swift.
By country’s measures, Tim McGraw is still a pretty young thing: he showed up a while after Clint Black showed up a while after Randy Travis showed up a while after George Strait showed up, and George Strait’s still making hits on the regular down at the Young Country station. For what it’s worth, Tim McGraw is five years younger than Trace Adkins, who made everyone and their mother throw up in their mouths a little with last year’s “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” (maybe that’s what Missy’s doing; she’s gone country, if she wasn't there already). And yet, there was Taylor Swift, born a month after the border between East and West Berlin was opened, treating Tim McGraw like a distant memory in arguably the best country single of the year (its competition was “Leave the Pieces,” by Michelle Branch and Jessica Harp, twenty-something escapees from teenpop’s decadent era).
“Tim McGraw” is more or less a rewrite of Deanna Carter’s “Strawberry Wine,” firmly in the long country tradition of adolescent summer love narratives; it’s delicate and quietly pissed off, a feeling that keeps converting to melancholy by the end of every bar, so that it can’t figure out if it’s truer in the first or third person, and the final gesture reads as both a romantic bid and a knife-sharp kissoff, albeit impossibly sweet. Part of its mystery, what kept the song alive all year long, was the way that that Tim McGraw shows up: “when you think: Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song, the one we danced to all night long, the moon like a spotlight on the lake.” This is not like Garth giving props to an unknown Chris LeDoux; it's the forced conversion of a star to a legend. Converted to hip-hop years, it's like misting up when you say, "Remember way back when we used to listen to Juvenile?"
In this single gesture, Tim McGraw — not yet 40, about Jay-Z’s age — is banished to the realm of the dead, like Johnny Cash or Sinatra or Billie Holiday, surviving only in recordings and myths, a totemic figure whose recollection, whose absence, gives structure to the lives of the living. For real, how did she think she was going to get away with that? Or, more importantly, by what manner of magic did such a curious idea allow the writing of a perfect song?
It’s worth noting, lastly, that as hip-hop has smiled southward, country has inevitably forwned north: Gretchen Wilson’s Illinois home was just a forecast of Taylor Swift’s roots in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. This is not to say that they don’t remain worlds apart, alas for Cowboy Troy. Progressive critics often want to note that people listen more widely across the genres than the imagination of encamped culture warriors suggests, and at a literal level this is true; that doesn’t mean that poptopia is a beautiful rainbow coalition. Folks are still real good at choosing the cores and borders of their own identifications, and merely indulging in the rest; the idea that all commodities are equally available turns out not to have collectivized the nation. This is why the “rockist” debate persists, even if a lot of critics like Justin Timberlake’s album.
Meanwhile, to put the matter crudely, generationality happens where genres are both historical enough to have generations, and alive enough to be worth renewing. That aliveness is, of course, as much a story about money as about other kinds of emotional or libidinal investment. That hip-hop and country were the scenes of substantial generationality this year in one ways tells us what we already know: that these are the leading forms of indigenous music here in the hegemonoculture, where the greatest investments are made. Or at least it reminds us of that, since we seem to be so good at forgetting it every fifteen minutes. It’s not just that these musics are popular, and thus abstractly “populist,” and so should be reckoned with on those grounds; it’s also that they’re the most musically vital, the living forms, and if one’s way of measuring songs can’t recognize that, it’s the measure that’s got to go.
Posted by jane at December 27, 2006 12:44 PM | TrackBack