jane dark's sugarhigh!

top 25 songs of 2009: 11-15

15) "Solitary Thinkin'," Lee Ann Womack. Aside from the fact of being a remarkable vocalist, Womack is distinguished for how briskly (in the relatively slow time of the genre) she has run the official country life cycle of classic sounding debut, pop crossover, lost audience, return to roots. (Okay, Dolly's already done the whole cycle twice, but she's special). To see the authority of this steel cycle, let's look at the semi-official listings. Here's wikipedia's breakdown of Lee Ann:
Music career
* 2.1 Country music stardom: 1997 — 1999
* 2.2 Pop crossover success & career decline: 2000 — 2004
* 2.3 There's More Where That Came From & hiatus: 2005 — 2007
* 2.4 Return to music: 2008 — present
Now, just for the sake of comparison, here's the other LeAnn:
Music career
* 2.1 1996: Blue
* 2.2 1997–2001: Pop crossover
* 2.3 2002–2004: Popularity decline
* 2.4 2005–2007: Return to country
* 2.5 2008-Present
Notice how Miss Rimes spends seven full years on crossover/decline, while Womack limits it to five? But what's rarest about Womack is how thoroughly she's pulled it off (the jury's still out on Rimes); she'll never hit as pure as "The Fool" again, but Call Me Crazy (released in 2008) is likely her best album. This song is rifted with beautifully-observed moments, as when she calls her ex and just listens to it ring — "a lonesome serenade." This, however, isn't even the album's best song. Hell, it isn't even its best song about hanging out at a bar at closing time and calling your ex.

14) "White Liar," Miranda Lambert. Adjacent to Womack, this comes from another disc, Revolution, that would make the sugarhigh! album charts if such a thing existed — a welcome return from the sophomore disappointment of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, albeit still suffering from an incoherent production scheme or lack thereof. The standout track is non-single "Love Song" (which along with the album's title suggests there was some unspoken contest about generic and clichéd titles), but this song manages to concretize all the album's inconsistencies into a forward-driving tension held together by the invention of the title, and ending with a slick swap of angry for exultant.

13) "Zero," Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If, back in the day of Karen O shouting "as a fuck son you sucked!" over and over, you had to guess whether she would end up eight years later as a reliable altish hitmaker with a feel for the dancefloor, or burbling annoyingly on the twee indie rock soundtrack of a movie with little purpose other than to argue that twee indie rock is too the true sound of the inner child we all deserve — would you have guessed both?

12) "Liztomania," Phoenix. Les Shins (no relation to La Chinoise), with chorus structure by Squeeze.

11) "Do What You Do," Marz feat. Pack and Mumiez. We are pretty sure that our reasonable and intelligent friend Alexander did not really mean to argue that 2009 was the year hip-hop died, despite making it too easy to take him as having done so. We believe that, had he a different venue and word count, he might have made the more reasonable case that hip-hop has so successfully insinuated itself into the genome of global culture that it is finally unclear as of about now what one talks about when one talks about "hip-hop." Gosh: disco is dead too, but people still go to discos in Beirut and Bayreuth and Bay Ridge and when they are there, they doth disco. Similarly, hip-hop. But the consequence of this success has been that hip-hop is less and less identifiable as the Sound of Black America (which hasn't been the main consumer of the form for a while, certainly not during this millennium). Simultaneously, or even dialectically, the main Black American forms of rap and r&b have turned away from the characteristic soundsets of hip-hop: said sounds can no longer signal cultural particularity, even as a seeming. We can't really have a world in which Miley Cyrus, Buraka Som Sistema, and K'naan set it off on the left y'all and set it off right y'all, while at the same time hip-hop still sounds like an underpass of the BQE on a Saturday night. We can however have funky funky car commercials with rodents driving around, which we take to be a shorter and funnier essay than this one about the universalization of the music. Where once were gangstas, now there be hamstas.

Posted by jane at January 2, 2010 12:36 AM | TrackBack