jane dark's sugarhigh!

even more albums of the year: five final paragaphs

If one were mandated to name a country album of the year, it would likely be Taylor Swift, but not without competition from, for example, Keith Urban's quite lovely if badly-titled Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing, which was on and off and not quite crazy enough, but had a slew of tremendous songs, including "Won't Let You Down," "Faster Car," "Raise the Roof," and the outsized "Stupid Boy," which sometimes seems to be the singer talking to himself, sometimes to the ex of his paramour, which is to say that the song is haunted by the specter of Tom Cruise, to whom the song's title could not possibly do justice.

Kelly Willis has sort of become the country's Jennifer Jason Leigh, who didn't win the Oscar when she shoulda, and has since wandered or been shouldered ever closer to the margins of the genre, of success, and of artistic viability — oscillating between brittle recapitulations and aimless experiments. Willis could've been a platinum Grammy factory in '93 or '99 and has drifted ever since; this year, with Translated From Love, she has has come up against the shoals of something sweetly eccentric and alluring and not that far from the American songbook's desolation row. The opener, "Nobody Wants to go to the Moon Anymore" is a little rockabilly and a lot Tin Pan Alley and much of the remainder — almost all of it quite a few paces slower — keeps its Tin ear. These are songs that deepen with frequent listening and cut more sharply late at night, especially the title track, "The More That I'm Around You," and the cruelly clear "Stone's Throw Away," arguably the prettiest and saddest song of the year.

But in some strange way, the album of the year was Google. We don't mean that at all, but we do mean something. The only artist who could compete with M.I.A. this year was Lil Wayne, and you could sort of squint and pretend he had an album this year, but that's dubious and even if it weren't, Da Drought 3 is no album of the year. All of this shows exactly how weak the concept of album has become; if you've been following the adventures of Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., you know that he's reveling in the album form's current volatility, which makes him seem somehow heroically don't-give-a-fuck in much the way that the the early days of Napster made Metallica and Dre look like narcs with saurian brains the size of cashews. Wayne's 2007 output of mix tapes, fake leaks, real leaks, radio drops, guest 16s and remixes may stabilize in '08, but that might be too bad, since the discrete moment-by-moment mode seems to allow his talents a chaotic creativity that trad albums tamp down. It's not just a production model, it's a way of thinking, a way of conceiving of one's art. And for Wayne at least, it's a better way.

It nonetheless begs what is basically a software question: shouldn't there be some program with which you can essentially scour the digiverse via some Boolean headhunting (Lil Wayne AND >100sec AND >192kbps AND 2007 BUT NOT Kanye: 70 minutes) and get all such tracks bundled together on your hard-drive an hour or two later? There sort of is. Seeqpod is not the sort of warez that survives, being balky and having limited, inexact targetability and, most significantly, sharing with imeem the fatal flaw of giving you only a stream. The days of every pop music listener having a 24/7 fast pipe are still too far off, and such streaming platforms are little more than fairly customizable radio stations that are neither as stable nor accessible as old-fashioned broadcast, and make the labels perfectly happy. No, we're talking about an aggregator program with fine-carving finesse that actually produces, oh, let's just call them "bundles," that you can play from a hard drive, a iPod, even burn to disc. This is probably the best near-future for the album.

Given that an iTunes Store search and a few clicks is the smoothest current bundling method, it does seem a bit silly that they shouldn't become the label (wth Jay-Z rumored at the head). But the genie isn't going back in the bottle, and paying Apple by the track for your bundle just makes you seem like a barney. The software closest to doing the superaggregating work of scouring the whole world of hard drives is obviously Google; they say they're not a content company, but so does Pirate's Bay. You could be listening to a GoogleBundle of Lil Wayne, accribitzed via a few keystrokes, within six months if Google so desired; it's hard to imagine this won't be explored. But it won't be explored by Google, since they won't find a business model that fast. So someone else will using similar tech, and then they'll be the new record label, and finally those'll be the new records for a little while.

another album of the year...and not: five-paragraph essay

One always wishes to be generous. So we will make a generous assumption about the gushing over Miranda Lambert's 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, by various of our finest critics and the Village Voice year-end poll in general. We will assume these are apologetic makeup votes for having missed the yacht on Lambert's superb, delightful 2005 record Kerosene, which is to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as Appetite for Destruction is to Use Your Illusion II. So it goes: a blown call a couple years ago, and a little guilty retroactive dap.

It's a little hard to maintain that generosity of spirit, given further information: most tellingly, the way Lambert's appearance on all these '07 year-enders tends to hold the place of country music in general. The Voice poll is exemplary: all those voters, all that eclectic and well-informed taste, and Lambert's is the only country album to make the long list (no, the Krauss/Plant album doesn't qualify, thanks). That's not a story about Lambert so much as about the limits of music critics, and the kinds of value judgments that everyone not-so-secretly agrees on.

The critical effusion in re the entirely decent Crazy Ex might be a makeup call, but it's also evidence that said critics are neither thoughtful nor informed about the genre — that they don't fashion their jobs description to include keeping up with an American music which features an almost identical popularity to hiphop, according to SoundScan. Theres a technical name for this practice of deciding before hearing: one might call it "pre-judging," or, in common parlance, prejudice. At least Jody Rosen's heard of Brad Paisley.

Here's a thought problem. What if we were to devise a category and limit it to country albums by women? Or even just by blond women — no, wait, let's limit it to blond women who write most of their own material, got started as teens, and released a country album in 2007? Even if we narrow the aperture down to that very tiny category, Miranda Lambert is in a tough fight for runner-up, with Kelly Pickler. And neither of them is particularly close to Taylor Swift, whose debut album Taylor Swift isn't as good as Kerosene (which might be a once-in-a-decade disc), but is a whole lot better than this year's models, with three songs that could've made the top singles list except that one of them made last year's and got a lengthy writeup about the next generation.

Which is to say: Swift's been around, and all over the radio long enough that music critics should be all over her. Except they don't hear that frequency. One fears they'll be playing catchup again, or taking notice of her now that she's covering Rihanna and Beyonce in concert, which will somehow do more to establish her talent and credibility and general fun-to-listen-to-ness than any number of terrific country singles could do. And so they will end up voting for her next album by way of apology, while missing out on any number of popular and beloved albums of 2009 that also happen to be aces all the way down. Which will turn out to be a sort of embarrassment for said critics, just like this year's Lambert votes.

more albums of the year

M.I.A.'s album and vibe had such a mindshare among our pals that more than one person suggested to us that they heard it underneath Blackout, especially in the song "Toy Soldier." One could certainly imagine that as an an Arular title, though the track sounded far more like Betty Boo, and Britney could do a lot worse. Either way it's a fine song, one of five or six on the darkly rollicking gallop, ending with the fine r'n'b slogroove "Why Should I Be Sad?"; whoever sings those little Princesque asides ("Britney let's go," "hey baby, what's your name?") is sort of a genius. Miss American Dream herself has a narrow but weirdly fascinating vocal talent: a sort of aggravated coo that slips as easily into talk as song. It's a style perfectly confabulated for an album whose emotional content is I fucking hate K-Fed and the paparazzi, all of whom I feel responsible for. Except that the style has more or less been with her from the jumpoff — oh baby baby how was I supposed to know that something wasn't right here? — a passive-aggressive purr so extreme it tilts immediately into sado-masochism. As a style, it's better suited to the production gifts of Monsieurs Bloodshy & Avant than to that of Señor Danja; he makes her sound too cold. Justin actually does a better job with such chilled precision, while Christina's vocal style is hot (but not le jazz hot, please), and Fergie has herself a louche cool. Whichever way, it's interesting to see the Western world's great producers and its former Mouseketeers circling each other looking for a fit, a hit, a meeting of the minds. This has been the core activity of pop music for almost a decade now, it's going away less than you think, and when things break right, you want a piece of it.

This should have been the year when hyphy took over; instead it couldn't find a direction. This allowed certain facts to come clear — most notably, that hyphy doesn't quite have the sudden explosion of talents that often appears around such energetic new movements. There are quite a few entrancing microphone stylists beyond E-40 but, alas, no genius producers beyond RickRock, and that sets limits on how far things can go. RR can get hectic or roll slow, and he finally delivered the Federation's album, Whateva, which suffered from incoherence and skits but still had some of the best loops and hooks hip-hop could come up with this year, including the perplexing "From the Bay," which is about something or other or it isn't about anything but what the title sez, but has one of the few tracks to have the stones to model itself on "Ante Up."

Our local music clerk was discussing Tupac's productivity of late: "once you're dead, you can really shut out the bullshit and focus more on the music." Elliot Smith is dead, and Neil Young hasn't done much of interest in about 18 years, and both released great records this year. New Moon tosses up 24 unreleased tracks recorded between 1994-97, most of which are appealing and a couple of which are beyond bittersweet: "See You Later" and "All Cleaned Out." "Got a choke chain," begins the former, instantly recalling "Rose Parade" — but the rhyme comes quicker. "Got a choke chain, made out of Night Train," and that's a nine syllable couplet snapping back on you quickly and painfully as the aforementioned choke chain, so that later when he slows things down, it's all the more attenuated: "See you later...see you later...if I see you at all."

Meanwhile, Neil Young released a set from some joint in Toronto, Live at Massey Hall 1971, and seriously, pretty much any 68 minutes he recorded between 1969-75 could be released now and be an album of the year. In this case it's an acoustic set and he strums "Cowgirl in the Sand" down to about four-plus minutes and it seems just right, which is some kind of magic trick. Remember when he was going to release, like, a 100-cd set from his crazy collection of masters and you started setting a few scrubby bills aside every month like a Christmas account so you could gaffle the barn-sized box when it came out, you waited and you saved, and then the months became years and you spent the Neil's Fucking Archives Stash on three and a half hours of cocaine, and that was maybe six years ago? Meanwhile we're still waiting.

In the last 18 years, most of Neil Young's best music has been made by Uncle Tupelo and its offshoots — less so Tweedy's Wilco and more so Jay Farrar, under his own flag and that of Son Volt. So it's fascinating that The Search, Son Volt's best album since their debut, spends the least time yet in Young country. It even visits Williamsburg, for the (gulp) haunting "L Train," which is almost as violet-mooded as "Methamphetamine," the song that precedes it. These two lulling tragedies answer the early ravers, "The PIcture," and "Action," which ends somewhere closer to Road Warrior territory: "Gasoline junkies, feral diesel fiends, looking for action on the mercy wide road." Seriously, if someone from Uncle T has to be publishing books of poetry, maybe we could arrange a little switch.

album of the year: the five-paragraph essay

Kala is not the album of the year because it has three great songs (“Bamboo Banga,” “Bird Flu,” “Paper Planes”) and at least three very good ones (“Hussel,” “XR2,” “World Town”). Neither is it album of the year because it’s more interesting than the sum of its parts, a more body’n’mind moving listen if one goes straight through, an album as the concept endures (weakly, it seems). Those facts have something to do with it — but Kala is the album of the year because it is the soundtrack of a world turned upside down.

For decades, “world music” has basically been reggae.* Not in the sense of accent on the three, but as a structure of feeling: songs of freedom punctuated by melancholy domestic plaints, built on a foundation of rhythm guitar and percussive lilt, with a sense of patient endurance and occasional exhortation. A liberal-progressive politics of hope with a beat you can nod along to, convivial both to doobie and dinner party. That in fact describes the other current hero of world music, Manu Chao; you’ll notice that his international breakthrough, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, is practically named “Politics of Hope.” Manu Chao is excellent, and he is also reggae — sometimes in fact, and always in feeling. He released an album this year with stacks of cred and critical air support and it tanked. And for all its particular failings and delights, it tanked because it required the fantasy of reggae: that the world out there is going to love us into changing; is going to be stalwart and righteous til we get it; that we’re moving forward together, especially if we’re cool and progressive and down; that a better world is not only possible but is seven hugs and four joints away. This was never true; the “world music” we liked sure helped us pretend it was anyway. No more. At a minimum we need a new fantasy, though we suspect here that we’re getting a little closer to the real. The world fucking wants us dead.

Kala might be thought of as an attempt to destroy the softimism of world music™. Hands up guns out — represent now world town. The album moves past the bubbly syncretism of Arular; goes looking for beat and a form and a hook for the enraged new world and finds a proliferation of each, which is its wonder. Listening to “Bird Flu,” one has to suspect Maya’s been reading (or reading about) Monster at Our Door, the Mike Davis conjecture about the eventual arrival of deadly H5N1 influenza at America’s doorstep. It’s the exact kind of thing that Brooklyn sharpies who are also expats twisted on geo-social hard times like to read on trans-oceanic flights. You listen to the nervous squawks and fearsome, irresistible clatter of the track and you think, that’s not a song, that’s a revenge fantasy. And quite brilliantly, it locates blowback not in the romantic figure of some lone terrorist, but in global structure itself: terror as an inevitable outcome of evil voodoo poured relentlessly into the world-system. In Davis’s account, bird flu when it arrives won’t be an exotic catastrophe we couldn’t predict, but America’s bad faith returned to it after a mutating tour of the planet of slums, the world-ghetto. Funny thing is, that describes Kala exactly.

After all, the album opens not in the depths of some necrojungle around the horizon, but on Route 128 when it's dark outside, Roadrunner Roadrunner! That’s not just the beginning, it’s also the end. Roadrunner has her radio ooonnnnn, and the beat is beaming in from a Tamil movie soundtrack. Roadrunner is listening to M.I.A. and she’s back with a bamboo banger; she’s knocking on the doors of your Hummer Hummer. The song, and its album, have no time for your liberal-progressive pot-smoking ass, no space for your medicinal groove, no vision of freedom and no politics of hope. It is the bad faith of the U.S.A. returned to it after circling the globe, and that is what world music is now, and that is what M.I.A. has to say to you.

The album is certainly a bit resistant, even pleasurably recalcitrant: a pop challenge that finally wants to live under your skin. The question is, what alien life can it smuggle in there. M.I.A.’s döppelganger remains Neneh Cherry, she of the multi-ethnic world-ghetto avant-pop, flying hiphop as a flag of convenience. The first difference is time: Neneh and Maya are poised exactly on opposite sides of the Great Rest, 1989-2001, that brief one-power fantasia while the structure of global imperial conflict shifted from “Cold War” to the current conjuncture. This is not to conflate M.I.A. too easily with “terrorism”; this would be foolish and casual, merely the millionth desperate equation of cultural commodity with political action (if there is a hope remaining in M.I.A.’s world music, it is exactly the hope surviving in some part of her audience that culture can still have political force). But by the same token, it would be foolish and casual to find such gestures merely empty; to imagine that an artist who has had exposure to actually existing terrorism (here we recall that the Tamil Tigers invented suicide bombing) means nothing by raising its spectre, or means the same thing as someone without such experiences. To suppose such a thing is little more than a strategy of containment, as if the thrust of history itself could be parried because "Galang" was in a Honda commercial. That's a way of trying not to know something; Kala is a way of trying to know. One may of course decide for oneself that if it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, it can’t be the sound of the world turned upside down; this is finally to decide that pleasure must be empty by definition. That ain't music's problem, it's yours.

* Our man Alexander notes rightly that the distinction between conventional world music and Maya's was sketched judiciously in this article; we mean to add only some remarks on the historical substance of the shift, and the particularities of political affect that underwrite it — in short, to grasp something about specific conditions that the music is after.

pop07: the year in singles

Sugarhigh! top 40 singles of 2007, in reverse order. We assure you, "pop07" has no relation to "Popo Zao." Some explanatory information at bottom.

40) Blue Magic, Jay-Z feat. Pharrell. "Niggas wanna bring the Eighties back, it’s okay with me that’s where they made me at.”
39) Give It Up, Twista feat. Pharrell
38) Lip Gloss (Remix ), Lil Mama feat. Pusha T. Advice to DJs: set this up with “Studio Hair Gel,” by Barcelona.
37) No One, Alicia Keys. Welcome back, Alicia, we missed you. But not very much. Mostly we missed Whitney Houston, so much so that we will pay you to reproduce her last great song with a few cosmetic changes.
36) Give It To Me, Timbaland feat. Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake. Since around "Same Ol' G," listening to the best Timbaland songs has created the effect that you were suddenly hearing better — like putting on your glasses after walking around the city without'em for a week. In this sense, pace "Amazing Grace," it is a religious experience.
35) Tambourine, Eve feat. Swizz Beatz. See note here.
34) A Little More You, Little Big Town. You'll be hearing this name again.
33) Alamo, Hal Ketchum. Hearing this song for the first time, performed by the writer (Gary Burr) rather than the mild Mr. Ketchum, was the musical high point of the year for sugarhigh! We actually exclaimed, sitting at the bar of the Bluebird, “I love songwriting!” when he hit the bridge.
32) Things That Never Cross A Man's Mind, Kelly Pickler
31) Rehab (Remix), Amy Winehouse feat. Jay-Z. “My hero’n flows, more lethal than Marilyn’s nose.” If anyone really understands this, please email janedark [at] janedark [dot] com.

30) D.A.N.C.E (MSTRKRFT Remix), Justice. Justice: part of the elaborate global mechanism, often using parallax, for measuring the greatness of Daft Punk. Latest results: really fucking great.
29) Men Buy The Drinks (Girls Call The Shots), Steve Holy. Lyrics are not the leading reasons to dwell in country music (that would be the fact that the best vocalists, and most deft melodists still working in versions of the American songform, go to ground in Nashville). Indeed, the lyrics are often the reason people stay away, perhaps out of distaste for the home’n’hearth Christian nationalism, xenophobia, and gender smackdowns. In this, country mirrors hip-hop, the other indigenous American musical form still with a pulse — though hip-hop, with characteristic incisiveness, has exchanged nationalism for violence + conspicuous consumption as if there was an equals sign between them, which there is. But another vexation with country lyrics is their famed cleverness: if you don’t like sledgehammer puns based around clichés and stock phrases, there will be blood. But if you have it in your heart to find these moves occasionally charming, you will be repaid on the radio. Beyond the title, this song starts in the Garden with Eve, who wouldn’t cha know it, “was wearing one of those low-cut leaves.” Ouch.
28) Hillbilly Deluxe, Brooks & Dunn. Their first pop-charting single was country’s follow-up to “Achy Breaky Heart,” which makes it the exact same age as Hannah Montana. It made sugarhigh!’s year-end list too, which might be some kind record.
27) Famous In A Small Town, Miranda Lambert. A pendant to Gossip Girl, the year’s best dramatic television show. See also forthcoming note on albums.
26) Takin' Off This Pain, Ashton Shepherd. You know what’s fascinating about “Jackie Blue,” by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils? Like many songs, it has two parts, A and B. A comes first, of course, and is all minor-seventhy and unresolved; B shifts to a major key, with an incredibly satisfying resolve to the tonic. Except that B has different lyrics every time, while A has a repeating lyric when it comes around. The structure of the words tells our brain that A is the chorus, B the verse; the music and our expectations of song structure tell us the exact opposite. And this is never mentioned, or settled. This is why the song is so tremendously haunting. “Takin’ Off This Pain” just starts with the chorus, which is smart enough, because the first line kills.
25) Wrapped, George Strait. See note here. See also forthcoming note on albums.
24) Every Mile A Memory, Dierks Bentley
23) White Kids Aren't Hyphy, MC Lars
22) Fast Like A Nascar, Kafani feat. Keak Da Sneak. See forthcoming note on albums re The Federation.
21) Big Girls Don't Cry, Fergie. A good year for “big girls” on the chart. You wouldn’t really have picked Fergie to make an oblique companion piece to “To Sir With Love,” replacing crayons and pearls with jacks and Uno cards. Stacey Ferguson now has more good singles than The Strokes. Or Kanye.

20) Lean Like A Cholo, Down AKA Kilo. So lean back, lean back.
19) Fall, Clay Walker
18) Joyride, Jennifer Hanson. Not as good as “Joyride” by Roxette, a quality this tune shares wif all but about 30 songs in history.
17) More Than A Memory, Garth Brooks. FOS Carla: “It's an Elton John song! But it needs Elton John.” We half-agree; Garth’s secret has always been the melancholic crypto-piano ballad, but he has his own mastery. Nobody goes all tacit and doubles the vocals for a phrase better than Garth. He’s shameless. Indeed, this tune reminds us of the Brooks oeuvre’s zenith, “Shameless” — which was written by that Long Island Elton John, name of Billy Joel. What goes around goes around (interlude).
16) Bleed It Out, Linkin Park. As Local H once said, all the kids are right.
15) Gotta Work, Amerie. See note here.
14) Love You, Jack Ingram. Year’s best Jack Ingram.
13) Isn't That Everything, Danielle Peck. Year’s best Sara Evans.
12) Rockstar, Nickelback. This song, basically a sequel to Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone,” is probably about the same bpm as “How You Remind Me,” but — like every Nickelback single since the debut — it feels a whole lot slower. This is probably because you can hear every move, every rhyme, every change coming with thudding certainty, and you just lay back in the cut waiting for it to go down. This leads us to the perhaps-obvious conclusion that the experienced speed of songs is in part an effect not of their rhythm but their novelty, which is perhaps useful for grasping the connection between speed and novelty in the long 20th century of railroads and modernism. I’ll have the quesadilla.
11) Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), Mika. Big boys are from Mars. Big girls are from Mercury.

10) Tennessee, The Wreckers
09) I Feel Like Dying, Lil' Wayne. Remember how Q-Tip was always swearing he was the abstract rapper, abstract poet, et cetera? It didn’t make all that much sense, because leaving your wallet in El Segundo was concrete like Jurassic 5.
08) Roosterspur Bridge, Tori Amos. The best auto-pastiche of the year. Not to be sneezed at: auto-pastiche is one of the main genres of popular music. It’s all Nickelback has, and they’re pretty good. But not as good as Tori.
07) Over It, Katharine McPhee. As Alexander pointed out, JoJo’s “Too Little Too Late” with the notes in different places. Which is true, on the so-what tip.
06) I'm With The Band, Little Big Town. See note here.
05) What Goes Around.../...Comes Around (Interlude), Justin Timberlake. JT has a certain kind of song, of which this is the best yet, that sounds like a million dollars on a crying jag, as seen through the impossibly glossy black of a plasma screen, pivoting across a pyramid of Quaaludes from self-indulgent misery to a killing spree, and you sort of can’t imagine how come every pop song doesn’t sound exactly like this, except no one else comes even close to the JT vibe, which is saying something.
04) Our Song, Taylor Swift. See note here.
03) Crank That, Soulja Boy Tell'em. Snap music’s follow-up to “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It” and “Do It To It” was the world’s follow-up to the Macarena and the Achy Breaky. Blame it not on the sunshine nor the moonlight, neither the good times. We are begging you, kind sirs and madams, to blame it on the boogie.
02) Watching Airplanes, Gary Allan
01) Piece Of Me, Britney Spears. Least explicable thing in this song of endless thrills is her decision to pronounce the word “derriere” in that St. Louis vernacular tone we know so well from Chingy and Nelly: dairy-urr. An unaccountable wigger moment, lyrically spliced up against the word “Philipines,” it suggests a transnational, transracial nowhere which is nonetheless organized by visions of Britney’s ass, a piece of which we apparently want. See note here.

A note on measure: unlike our film listing, which includes all first run movies seen in the theater, pop07 includes only songs we've loved at least a little. The results were tabulated by adding all the numbers from various iTunes displays and judiciously accounting for a minimum of in-dash listening; and then applying a proprietary algorithm which balances against the track's release date over the span of the year, taking into account the roll-off curve called "getting tired of a song." This method remains imperfect in much the ways that a subjective tabulation might (it has a slight skew for songs released late enough that their roll-off would happen in 2008), but is our best approach to objective recording.

A note on eligibility: historically, if a single makes the sugarhigh! list, the disc from which it's drawn is prohibited from that year's album list, and vice versa. This idiosyncrasy, in addition to broadening the field, was designed to protect the sense of singularity which is a crucial quality of songs on the singles list, and of our experience of them. However, this is a sort of watershed year. Because we are slowly abandoning the album list altogether (in part because the world is abandoning the album form, in part because it doesn't express much about our listening practices, and in part because we've opted out of the year end polls), the distinction makes less sense; it is preserved to the extent that, for example, we did listen to M.I.A.'s disc as an album. However, in reducing the album list to a unified prose note (forthcoming), we've mentioned therein the strength of certain albums which contributed singles to this list.