Best Music of the Year

Top Albums of 2008

1. TV On The Radio Dear Science

What a year. Music in 2008 was more passionate and exciting than in any year this decade, and it seemed to crib from whatever was necessary - the 80's and early 90's came back in style with synthesizers everywhere, punk giutars roared back, and techno was safe for the radio. This year, I think we moved backwards to move forwards and wound up creating music that was wildly inventive - new in terms of scope and topic and even pushing sounds past what we thought we'd seen and heard.

I was already a TV On The Radio fan, but nothing the New York art-hard rock-punk-world-techno band had done before sounded anything like the furious guitars and calm vocals that open "Halfway Home," a song of dizzying ambivalence of death, comfort, confusion, and acceptance. The song is electrifying, but also magnificently warm and singable, in a way that even the band's best work hadn't been. That's true of the record as a whole - letting the rap giddiness of "Dancing Choose" eagerly beckon into love songs like "Family Tree," and letting each song be a profound bed of emotion and poetry. Music like this is astonishing in and of itself anyway, but the lyrics open Dear Science into a world you don't expect - a blazing, brave confrontation with meaning, passion, existence. By closing in the 1-2-3 punch of "Shout Me Out," "DLZ," and "Lover's Day," TV On The Radio shows excitement, fury, and love be one and the same, exist in the same breath. "Yes of course there are miracles," they conclude in "Day," "A lover that loves, that's one," before unleashing a filthy, beautiful song of sex and longing that makes explicit and raging all the passion that fuels questioning, love, and living. Dear Science longs for answers and then gives us some.

2. Q Tip The Renaissance

I can think of only one possible reason for The Renaissance not being near the top of every critic's top ten list this year - it's so fun and ebulliant from beginning to end that it just reminds of you of every other great Q Tip and Tribe Called Quest song ever made. That has to be it, because The Renaissance makes you feel high from the opening beat of "Johnny Is Dead" and makes you perfectly content to remain there until "Shaka" signs off with dramatic hope. Or maybe it just didn't sell that well.

The truth is rap and rock have a double standard in the way music critics talk about them. Rock can be totally irrelevant, the albums can be listened to by 15 people in Seattle or Williamsburg and still wind up on top of most critics best of the year lists, whereas rap albums have to have Lil Wayne's numbers to be considered relevant - ignoring mainstream rap in favor of less successful albums is tantamount to cultural illiteracy. Well, I dare you to listen to Lil Wayne's dully mediocre Tha Carter III then follow it up with The Rennaisance and tell me you like Wayne better. The Renaissance is so varied, wild, packed with guest stars (like "Life Is Better," featuring a Norah Jones vocal that plasters a smile permanently to your face), and exciting, it becomes a giddy, energizing force that doesn't even break between songs. The theatrics of "Shaka" are more than well deserved - by the end of The Renaissance, they're a curtain call earning a standing ovation.

3. Madonna Hard Candy

In a year in which the 80's infected absolutely everything from fashion and music in rock, pop, and R/B, it should make sense that the best neo-80's sound came from Madonna. It may be her 11th record, but Hard Candy tops a decade of Madonna at her Euro-techno finest. "Give It 2 Me" turns the worst synthesizer of 1988 into a propulsive club anthem and gives Kanye West his best moment of the year (seriously) in "Beat Goes On." It offers the promise of a "one stop candy shop" in the opening moments but allows ruminations on failed relationships that run from wrenching intimacy to furious resolve, often in the same song ("Miles Away," "Incredible"), and considering her year of divorce and custody tabloid mishegos, songs like "Voices" and "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" allow a rather shocking bit of bruised intimacy into the Madonna fray. The truth is, since most indie music is obsessed with 80's synth and techno anyway, most indie bands would do themselves a favor analyzing what goes so right with Hard Candy - sure, it may have plenty of input from the biggest pop producers and stars in the business, but it's all Madonna, confessing and cracking a whip all over the dance floor, as only she can.

4. Eagles of Death Metal Heart On

What was once a joke band to keep Josh Hommes occupied between Queens of the Stone Age records wound up making an album of more humor and bravado than even Queens have been capable of in their last two records. Sure, the dufus-in-tight-pants schtick is in full effect in "Wannabe In LA" and "High Voltage" ("We're gettin' freaky in the shadows of the night," Hommes and Jesse Hughes sing), but there's also a rock sensibility that was only part of the show before on this record, and in "Heart On" or "Cheap Thrills," the record is so loud and exciting, you forget you're supposed to be laughing. That's because Heart On is the dufus-with-a-broken-heart EoDM album, and "Now I'm A Fool" makes a fairly convincing case for this. With all emotion, excitement, and humor intact, the finale, "I'm Your Torpedo," manages to be the loudest and most satisfying rock song of the year - and one that could have been made by no other band.

5. My Morning Jacket Evil Urges

MMJ deserve credit for expanding their sound from any recognizable alt-country genre exercise and indulging their instinct to free themselves from expectation, to engage in a few evil urges themselves. The results, like "Highly Suspicious" and "Evil Urges," sung in falsetto, are ridiculous and astonishing. The rock numbers like "I'm Amazed" and "Aluminum Park" are more infused with belief and passion than repeating another MMJ album would have allowed, and if it weren't for a few ponderous, supposed-to-be-deep clunkers in the middle, the excitement of "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Pt. 2" and "Smokin' From Shootin'" would have made this album legendary. As it is, we're lucky that this album reaches such astonishing highs, even if it isn't sustained.

6. Beck Modern Guilt

Beck caps his 2000's winning streak with an album that pushes his anxiety and techno instincts into a deadly standoff - "Orphans" sees Beck wrestling with his maker, "Volcano" sees him jumping into a volcano, and "Soul of a Man" has him waxing existential. Using Danger Mouse as his dance muse, Beck loses his way and, in 34 wise, concise minutes, helps us grapple with our own dual instincts to party and drink ourselves to death.

7. Kings of Leon Only By The Night

Following their instinct to get psychadelic and long, opened up on Because of the Times, Kings show what their best at - wild rockers like "Crawl" and "Manhattan" that allow for Caleb Followill's southern-mumbles voice to bury a hard-partying consciousness in great rock, and then set it free on glorious, sad jams like "Cold Desert."

8. MGMT Oracular Spectacular

Where Madonna got the 80's techno pop right, but for the indie version, MGMT is as great it comes. Subversive or no, "Time to Pretend" and "Kids" are party-friendly and just as fun in skinny jeans.

9. Jaymay Autumn Fallin'

The year's best singer-songwriter debut, this forgotten March release is a warm, well written, beautifully simple record of heartbreak, easing moments of excitement like "Grey or Blue" into daring, lovely Dylanesque rambles like "Sea Green, See Blue" and "You'd Rather Run."

10. Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It

There's plenty of R/B on the radio to steal its thunder, but by sounding older and more retro than everyone, Saadiq's way of seeing also sounds more seductive and wild.

Top Singles of 2008

1. "Disturbia" Rihanna

I didn't believe Rihanna was a real pop star until "Disturbia," a techno'd-out horror story that really is a song of feeling cut off and overwhelmed. Addicting and pulsating, "Disturbia" works because Rihanna's voice sounds more vulnerable and in control than any song she's done prior.

2. "Forever" Walter Meego

An indie-techno wonder that earns the power to say (through a voice-box, natch) "I can make you excited."

3. "Electric Feel" MGMT

The best of the MGMT techno-rock numbers, "Electric Feel" gets you sailing on its synth-flute beat and dorky charm.

4. "Paper Planes" M.I.A.

It takes a Tamil rebel and a chorus of gun shots to make the hustler anthem of the year. Santogold took much of MIA's wild-ethnic-superstar thunder this year, but "Paper Planes" proves why MIA's the real deal.

5. "So What" Pink

A kiss off like no other, if it weren't for its simple melody, and great techno chorus, this would just be another Stewart Smalley affirmation.

6. "Forever" Chris Brown

The techno R/B seduction anthem that everyone tried to make this year, Brown's "Forever" is the one you want to go home with.

7. "Keeps Gettin' Better" Christina Aguilera

Getting the 70's into the 80's dance party, Aguilera is dirrty and beautiful at once.

8. "A-Punk" Vampire Weekend

An indie rock guitar dance song that's like a festival-rock bounce anthem gone giddy.

9. "What U Got" Colby O'Donis featuring Akon

I'll take "What U Got" and its sexy curiosity over the balcony-humping "Love In This Club" at any dance party.

10. "Ready For The Floor" Hot Chip

Like "Electric Feel" performed by more sincere robots.

Top 10 Songs from Non-great albums

1. "Real Love" Lucinda Williams (from Little Honey)

2. "The Cheapest Key" Kathleen Edwards (from Asking For Flowers)

3. "Blue Ridge Mountains" Fleet Foxes (from Fleet Foxes)

4. "Strange Times" The Black Keys (from Attack and Release)

5. "Love Lockdown" Kanye West (from 808s and Heartbreaks)

6. "Living Well Is The Best Revenge" R.E.M. (from Accelerate)

7. "I'm A Lady" Santogold (from Santogold)

8. "2080" Yeasayer (from All Hour Symbols)

9. "Drunk With The Thought of You" Sheryl Crow (from Detours)

10. "Magick" Ryan Adams & The Cardinals (from Cardinology)

Best of the Year 2008: The Real List

Every year, I spend some time during the flurry of annual Best Of The Year lists is movies, music, and TV to reflect on what I think is the best of the year, at least, the most meaningful books, songs, albums, movies, TV shows, etc., that I had not known about or experienced a year ago. For most people, any year can include any number of works of arts from any number of years – this year, I saw for the first time the classic The Lion In Winter, which was entertaining and theatrical enough, and released 40 years ago. This year I saw The Rules of the Game for the first time, a seminal film released in 1939. I did not include either of those movies on my list because, as great as they were, they were works I appreciated without being moved, changed. These ten works, new or not, meant more to me.

1. Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (1949)
So often, I read a modern novel, and find a consciousness and character at work that I identify with immediately. I’ve fallen in love with works by Rick Moody, George Saunders, Paul Auster, Alice Munro, and read their books so precisely that I feel I have no tolerance for older works, works of the American and world lit canon that I feel like I missed out on because I wasn’t forced to read them in college.

That changed this year. The modern works I read that I was supposed to love this year – Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street, Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep – I saw through, detested, or gave up on midway through. Instead, far and away the greatest book I read this year was the Paul Bowles classic The Sheltering Sky, published in 1949, a classic I didn’t even know I’d missed. The book explores Port and Kit Moresby, two Americans wandering Africa sometime after the war – for what reason? We’re not sure really, and neither are they, desperate to shed off the skin of the civility of their New York world.

The Sheltering Sky gives them what they’re looking for, in a way, and it’s an act of both great indictment and vindication to have a second act of your book titled “The Earth’s Sharp Edge” – that is, the edge with which Kit and Port fall off. In it, Port contracts a disease and Kit collapses under the pressure only to release herself in a way she certainly wasn’t expecting. Is society a lid that keeps down the madness of Port and Kit’s soul, or is it what makes them desperate, lonely, and vicious to one another? Bowles has some answers, but it’s the fact that the questions are asked, that madness is granted and warned against, and that it’s written in a style like Hemingway, minimal, cutting, giving you nothing but what you need to know, and letting the bleakness of the surroundings and the prose tell you everything you need to know and then some. Right now, just writing it, I want to reread every word and pick out the factors that made these characters delusional, angry, pitiful, and representative of all of us, protected by a sky above us that creates order.

2. Playtime (1967)
This year, a friend’s fantastic birthday purchase of a Netflix subscription has yielded me an opportunity to see a number of amazing movies I’ve always meant to see. I saw Tokyo Story and La Dolce Vita and Beauty and the Beast, and what a gift each of those movies are. The one that surprised me the most, though, is Playtime, a movie that pushes you right in the center of its wonderful concoction of modern metropolitan France and leaves you in awe and smiling for 2 hours. A world of an order, and of specific modes of movement and behavior, Jacques Tati’s Paris is bewildering, ridiculous, and full of people grasping for connection and understanding.

The movie is a love poem to modern society even as it spotlights the contrivances that keep people from connecting. In one of its many nimble, extraordinary sequences, a man and a woman in separate apartments engage in a bit of a seduction, as we watch from their outside windows. Yet they don’t actually interact, they’re separated by the wall and the televisions each are watching. The two complement each other without even being aware of each other’s existence. Tati created Playtime as absolutely a movie with no equal – a song of movement and interaction that moves, unconcerned with plot or character, simply wrapping us up in the world that we’re so lucky to live in.

3. “Forever” Walter Meego
The 80’s are everywhere, and for proof, line up the pop music of the year next to the indie music – you’d find the two not so distinct. Songs like MGMT’s “Electric Feel” and Hot Chip’s “Ready For The Floor” – songs, basically, about love and dancing – fit right in with Chris Brown’s “Forever” or Madonna’s “Give It 2 Me.” Of all of these, though, music made me dance, laugh, and appreciate all things indie, no single song moved better or excited more than Walter Meego’s “Forever.”

I heard it first at a concert I saw for no particular reason, and found Walter Meego’s guitar/voicebox/synth combo charming and fun. Yet “Forever” is more than that – it’s that sense of fun turned into something that elevates and restores. Its choruses are bracketed by the line “I can make you excited,” and it proves itself right – full of bass, pulse, and drive, the song is excitement, about music, about love, about being alive. Songs did better than “Forever” in both pop sales and indie recognition (although, I did see the “Forever” video playing in an American Eagle in LA, and later on an ad for Heineken), but none elicited more easy smiles than this one – and certainly, none meant more to me.

4. Penelope Cruz in Elegy
In this time of Oscar prognostication, people write about Best Actress contenders in terms of “slots.” Is there room for Meryl Streep in Doubt to be nominated without taking up Angelina Jolie’s “slot” for Changeling? We used to watch movies throughout the year and then decide who was deserving of nominations. I for one would ask that people remember a woman who seems to already have a “slot” for Best Supporting Actress – Penelope Cruz, who will be deserving, too, when she is nominated this year for her magnificently fiery work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

But her better performance was in a lead role, in Elegy, and she almost certainly won’t be nominated. As the young object of desire by a mid-60’s professor, played by Ben Kingsley, Cruz manages to be mysterious under his gaze, as well as gorgeously open and naïve. She is full of love, excitement, and desire, and it is perhaps her genuineness that, along with his own self-centered concerns about his age, keeps Kingsley’s David Kapesh from really understanding her. Cruz manages to convey everything through gorgeous glances and perfect smiles, but it’s one unforgettable, devastating scene towards the end of the movie in which Cruz gets very very naked, that we truly understand every emotion she feels. The scene is wordless, but loud – Cruz proved herself as capable and powerful as any working today.

5. Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live
Without a doubt the single most important bit of fictional television all year. For around six weeks of completely inspired impersonations, Fey deeply wounded a political figure perhaps more than any actor, comedian, commentator, or talk-show host since Chevy Chase skewered Gerald Ford in 1975 – and she did it simply by mimicking her, by looking like her in stately dresses, and by sounding like her when she spoke. Her impersonation of Palin’s wild inconsistencies and quirky-moronic defense mechanisms during the Palin-Katie Couric interview were only hair’s breath from realty anyway, but it allowed for lines like “and now I’m going to impress you with some fancy pageant walking” or “For those of you Joe Six-Packs playing a drinking game at home? Maverick” to be even funnier because they didn’t seem all that off from the real thing. This was a moment that we can remember as the way true comedy, done well can really matter – and can matter more by being of high quality.

6. The Straight Story (1999)
Another great Netflix viewing that I didn’t expect to love and miss as much as I did. David Lynch’s The Straight Story seems like a joke on paper – a straightforward narrative of a nearly blind old man (Richard Farnsworth) driving his lawn mower across Iowa to see his dying brother – and perhaps that’s why it took me nearly ten years to see it. But the amazing thing about the movie is that Farnsworth, with his small, searing eyes, seems to be the only person capable of allowing Lynch to express his sincerity. Unlike his movies that, with varying success, plunge the duality of human desire and cruelty, The Straight Story is about the kindness and compassion that binds us all together. You see Lynch’s vision in his shots anyway, and maybe that’s the greatest aspect of The Straight Story – that kindness can exist in people you’re suspicious of, and that it can sustain you.

7. TV On The Radio Dear Science
Every year, it gets more and more exhausting to try and keep up with critical music tastes – even this year, when I feel I’ve been relatively up-to-date on music coming out in the world, I don’t recognize half the albums of most critic’s top ten lists. Usually, I pick whatever album meant the most to me as the album of the year – Neko Case or PJ Harvey or Blackalicious, or whomever I just happened to find give me the most sustained, exciting record of the year.

Well, I’m good and shocked to find that most critics seem to agree that Dear Science seems practically on another plane to every other mainstream release this year. “Halfway Home” opens the record with its furious guitars and drums, and shocks you with its lyrics of consternation at so many eternal questions. Science is TV’s eclectic, loud confrontation at the things that create meaning in our life – the threat of death, the existence of love. They do it with Tunde Adebimpe’s astonishing lyrical abilities, and with music that can be poppy, rap, punk, virulent, sexy, or lovely at any given moment. For a band that was already unique in their spot in modern music, Dear Science is their most listenable, and most ambitious record. When Return to Cookie Mountain was released in 2006 and everyone called it amazing, you sometimes had to work to enjoy some of its weaker cuts; it was excellent but cerebral. Dear Science is the first record of theirs I loved as much as I admired.

8. Battles, Performance at Bumbershoot
This is a work of art that only those lucky enough to see Battles perform live can appreciate, as seeing music live is so different from listening to it on your own. Particularly at a setting like Bumbershoot – Seattle’s annual 3-day, outdoor music festival over Labor Day weekend – where the excitement of music and art is infectious for everyone wandering from one unheard act to another. I’d never heard of Battles before the show, and nothing could have prepared me anyway – a drummer, guitarist, and keyboard player who are maybe electronic, or maybe art-rock, or maybe industrial, or maybe hard rock, or maybe pop, and who each seem to play whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it. It’s an art-rock version of a discordant jazz jam-band, but it requires the setting of a concert to really understand – to feel the volume that pulsates, the bass that moves your body, the noise that takes over. This is musical performance that’s beyond magnetism – it’s a release, a cleansing.

9. “The Children Stay” By Alice Munro (1998)
As I’ve written about “Cortes Island” from The Love Of A Good Woman collection by Munro on one of these lists, I wanted to avoid writing about a second story from the same collection – particularly when I could have written about “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” or “Post and Beam” or “Family Furnishings” or “Trespasses,” all by Munro, just as easily. But “The Children Stay” is the Munro story I think of most (including the other greats from Good Woman I read this year, “Save The Reaper” and “My Mother’s Dream” – each of which was astonishing).

Reading a great Munro story is a tapping into the desires and fears we all experience and consider too small to discuss, and “The Children Stay” is about an affair, of sorts, but it’s also about the non-reasons that could create its existence, about the way longing has a million reasons, or none at all. It’s three parts of this story that have stayed with me months after reading it. One, a quick reference to “talks like this” throughout the marriage of its two main characters – meaning late night talks about love, life, philosophy – as a force that sustained the marriage and masked its discontent. Second, a lengthy dining room conversation about the meaning of Orpheus. Third, a dizzyingly simple, haunting final line that shows the longing as lifelong, unanswerable. All I can say is that any reading that sticks with you months is a gift, but a story in which the individual moments that surprise you continue to register that surprise on their recollection is more than great writing – it’s great art.

10. Lawrence Lessig Free Culture (2004)
My strangest bit of popcorn reading for the year, Lessig’s Free Culture dissects the current (well, 2004 current, so current enough) conflicts of copyright violation, people’s fears of litigation, and what that means for how we express ourselves creatively. Free Culture is also a history of the way creativity has always been an act of piracy – or, at the very least, collaboration, and that as much validity that exists in cracking down on illegal, immoral piracy, the harms and the reality of that cracking down are far much worse for how we live, and how we express ourselves. Its legally precise prose that entertains because it makes us question at what point the hassle of the protection for expressing ourselves is enough to contain our best creative instincts.

Honorable Mentions: Great moments without much context? How about the Roger Ebert essay on why he won’t review Ben Stein’s Expelled (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.html), a gripping piece both on the importance of shaping arguments correctly, and defending moral beliefs? Ebert wrote up a storm this year, but of all of his memorable writings, this recent work moved me most.

The final montage of The Wire’s finale “-30-” in which we see, basically, a synopsis on everything and everybody. You could complain that this sort of thing was excessively summative, but it also created a compelling, singular moment of explanation to recognize the factors that create who we are, from our crackheads to our governors. As a philosophical text, this four minute piece of the 90 minute finale gave me more to think about than everything on television combined… except Tina Fey of course.

Finally, the cinematography of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. It was not showy and will likely not win any awards, but the filming was a frame by frame evocation of that movie’s wonderful advocacy for being positive and caring. One beautiful shot of its lovely protagonist Poppy (Sally Hawkins) walking onto her new boyfriend’s balcony after a wonderful date is like a vision of tranquility – her hair flowing as the sun sets on her beautiful city. Leigh gets much credit for the subtle and true improvisation he brings to the actors of his movies, but I hope people begin to see Happy-Go-Lucky as proof of his subtle and true visual capabilities, too.

A few new albums

Some notable artists I’m fans of released albums recently, and each surprised me a bit, but perhaps not as I expected.

Eagles of Death Metal Heart On

Originally, Eagles of Death Metal were Josh Hommes’ joke side band during bong-rips between Queens of the Stone Age albums. Their initial release Peace Love Death Metal in 2003 had some fun songs on it, like the jangly hoe-down “Wastin’ My Time” and the bombastic “English Girl,” but didn’t really last on my play list very long. At the end of the day, the record was only slightly better than a joke my buddies would’ve come up with between bong rips, and once, did, creating the sadly defunct Hidden Valley Man Ranch.

I wasn’t planning on buying Heart On for mostly that reason – the kitschy swagger title, the artwork of Hommes and co-band mate Jesse Hughes in full 80’s butt rock attire made me think it was more – and more extreme versions – of the same stoner joke. Then I heard it in a cd store and found myself shaking my ass and clapping along – just a little – to the opening song “Anything ‘Cept The Truth.” Heart On seemed to be onto something that Peace Love only hinted at – this music could be as fun for us as it was for Hommes and Hughes. “Anything ‘Cept The Truth” is a song of bravado like any of their previous works, but about a man proudly displaying how full of shit he is – something that makes it remarkably more honest than the rest of their catalogue. Even more than that, songs like “Now I’m a Fool” and “How Can A Man With So Many Friends Feel So Alone” are plenty full of LA doofisness, but are also actually sorta sad. Could this be the high school fantasy where the high schooler finds himself inexplicably heartbroken?

Sometimes, and that only aides the feeling of rock discovery with Heart On, which could have added the words “your sleeve” to that title if it would’ve still been funny. Instead, the title track and record have a great deal in common – they’re jangly, economical beasts of heart, humor, and excitement. In fact, the albums missteps are its “typical” Eagles of Death Metal songs – “Prissy Prancin’” and the masturbation anthem “Solo Flights” that are humor without the bite. It doesn’t matter though – surrounded by tracks like “High Voltage,” “Cheap Thrills,” and climaxing with “I’m Your Torpedo,” this is the rock record that earns actual bravado instead of just dresses up in it for laughs.

Lucinda Williams Little Honey

Since Lucinda released West in February of 2007, apparently things have gotten better. Then, Williams muttered that she “can’t find her joy anywhere,” begged for a man to “unsuffer” her, but then muttered that said man “won’t rescue” her, and ended, with a glittery recognition that “who knows what the future holds or where the cards may lay.” It was one of the best reviewed records of her career, but I found it rather stiff and unconvincing, even if it had moments that soared and were wonderful.

But things are better now. “I found the love I’ve been looking for – it’s a real love,” are the opening words on the record, and the song, “Real Love,” is one of the most fiery and happy she’s ever written. Little Honey is being very well reviewed also, but many are seizing on that “It’s a real love” as proof that happiness is not really as useful for Williams’ best writing instincts as misery was – that her loneliness was always so eloquent, and her happiness turns more easily on cliché. I’ve also read that even though the “happy” songs are wonderful (or not, depending on the review), the “real bread and butter” of Williams is still her morose numbers like “If Wishes Were Horses” and “Rarity.” I disagree in 100 ways.

First, Little Honey is the weakest album Williams has ever made. Second, it’s not because she’s happy; the happiest songs are the strongest here (ignoring the half-assed numbers like "Jailhouse Tears," a rather worthless duet with Elvis Costello). More importantly, happy songs are not new to Williams, she’s always made great ones, and always made them with simple ideas rammed home under a good structure. “Real Love” might not break any new ground, but it’s fun, lithe, sexy, and propulsive. People writing that it’s new territory for Williams didn’t hear “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad,” the opening song from Lucinda Williams, or “Passionate Kisses,” full of ebullient hope and excitement, or “Six Blocks Away,” full of country sass. None of those songs was particularly more complex than “Real Love,” and like all the great songs of Williams’ great career, the simpler they are, the more they work anyway.

That’s especially true of the two other great happy songs of the record, “Honey Bee,” which isn’t even about anything but rocks ridiculously, and “Little Rock Star,” a song of rock self-destruction that morphs into an incendiary guitar-god triumph. But truly, only those three songs to me fulfill what a great Williams song should be – as brilliant as it is effortless. So many of those sad songs of West were competent, full of gorgeous production, and… far too much work. Songs like “What If” and “Words” and “Fancy Funeral” had interesting ideas wandering away from Williams, grafted too heavily on productions that were sweet and wonderful, and didn’t quite fit. That album produced one perfect song, “Are You Alright,” which touched on the magnificent simplicity and profundity of any of the best Williams songs – something I’m quite thankful for. The difference is that on a great Williams record – on a record like Car Wheels On A Gravel Road or World Without Tears – nearly all the songs would have felt like that.

Little Honey is already being discussed as a “renaissance” of kinds for Williams, but I actually think it’s proof of something more upsetting – that Williams most creative years are behind her, and this Williams of West and Little Honey is a competent, charming touring musician who loves her guitar and the world of music (on Little Honey, this climaxes in an unobjectionable, not very good remake of AC/DC’s “It’s A Long Way To The Top”). That’s nothing to object to, but it’s perhaps better to ignore the false praise these albums haven’t deserved and enjoy her for the comforting presence she still is.

Q Tip The Renaissance

I’ll keep my love of this album simple: if you’re not stoned when you start listening to The Renaissance, you might be pretty sure you are by its end. Maybe you should be.

I'd read a couple of positive reviews of The Rennaisance, so I went to listen to it at a local cd store. Flipping on "Johnny Is Dead," the brilliant opening track, I didn't just like the song - I started dancing to it. I didn't just start dancing to it, I started flailing my arms in excitement. Even that wasn't enough, so, talking to the guy behind the counter who started looking at me like I was crazy, I yelled, "This album is THE S***!" At this point, I'd probably heard 1 minute of it. Still, I was right - The Renaissance sucks you in with a mood of excitement and never lets it slip. And that's Tip's intention anyway, "So it's up to me to bring back the hope/ put the feeling in the music that you could quote." The songs are each, probably, less than 4 minutes long, and just as one slags for a second, the next starts. "Johnny Is Dead" moves quickly into "Won't Trade," and then into the giddy, lovely "Gettin' Up" without even leaving you a chance to breathe. Music this fun and moving is great, but it's the feeling that creativity has been unleashed and that Tip doesn't even need time to catch his breath. Most hip hop records start with the singles and then slog off into repetitive numbers, but Tip leaves the weakest material at the beginning and never slows. In the middle, "Manwomanboogie" with its devious baseline and awesome Amanda Diva chorus wins over any remaining skeptics on the record, and combines it with another wildly inventive cameo appearance from Raphael Saadiq on "We Fight/We Love." The album is 12 tracks without a forgettable one on it, and could quite easily lead you to similar fits of embarassment as mine listening to the record in the CD store. By the time you reach the Norah Jones collaboration "Life Is Better" and hopeful finale "Shaka," you're in a hip-hop high you can't even remember experiencing in the last ten years.

Give It 2 Me

A recent letter from a reader named Brett Faber in Aurora, NB to Entertainment Weekly wondered why Madonna wasn't included in the annual "Entertainers of the Year" countdown: "Madonna had the year's highest-grossing tour -- $163 million and counting, with several shows to go. This is one of her best reviewed tours, and she is probably the biggest entertainer of our time, yet she didn't make your list? If the two hours she is on stage each night giving out the energe of a 20-year-old isn't entertainment at its best, I don't know what is."

There are two more pieces of evidence to make the case for Madonna this year that this reader didn't include. First, that not only was that highest-grossing tour a mesmerizing critical hit, but sold out its run nearly instantaneously at a price of well over $100 per ticket. Second, that Hard Candy, though selling a modest-for-Madonna 700,000 copies in America, has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. That's pretty good, right?

I didn't even mention the less substantive bit of evidence: it's one of her best albums. I have to use the qualifier "one of" because there's a lot of competition. Thinking about it in light of all of Madonna's career, there's also a lot of competition in the past ten years.

Madonna is the type of artist that's always been referred to in constant retrospect. When Ray of Light was released ten years ago, it was greeted as a mature, sedate album by a sage and wise Madonna ready to enter her 40's as a sweet mother and wife ready to knit fashionable sweaters or something. Nevermind that "Ray of Light" the song was as pulsating and furious a dance number as Madonna had ever released, this was wise-calm-spiritual Madonna. By that token, Music in 2000 was a bit of an afterthought - we'd already said goodbye to Madonna the popstar, even if this album was #3 on the Album of the Year list at Rolling Stone and produced 3 Top 20 singles, as well as the last Madonna #1 with "Music." Then there was American Life, a commercial and critical flop raised to relevance only when Madonna kissed Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2004, apparently "passing the torch" from one generation of pop queen to the next.

Well, Britney went nuts and Madonna's still around.

Madonna is famous in a different way, I suppose, than she was 20 years ago, when papparazzi were accused of screwing up her marriage to Sean Penn, and she was embroiled in a contraversy regarding the imagery of her "Like A Prayer" video, as she danced in front of a field of burning crosses, causing her to be dropped from a costly Pepsi ad campaign. For one, papparazzi are accused of screwing up marriage to Guy Ritchie. For another, her face probably has less wrinkles now than it did 1989.

That was a time when Madonna's superstar status was indisputable. Like A Prayer, arguably the greatest pop record of the 1980's, had 3 #1 hits, a feat none of her records since has ever matched, and sold 10 million copies. That was perhaps a peak in her career, and since then, everything has been in retrospect - her Sex book/ Erotica period in 1993 was derided by many, even as the Erotica record sold 5 million copies and produced two #1 hits. Her 1995 release of Bedtime Stories was seen as a desperate pop attempt to remain relevant... even though it sold 3 million records, produced her longest-running #1 hit, "Take A Bow," and introduced in a major way Madonna's fondness for leather whips during her memorable "Human Nature" video, in which she reminds us that she's not sorry for anything.

Then it was really the period of Madonna's retrospective career - Ray of Light in 1998. But the funny thing is, Madonna has been just as relevant during the past ten years. More than that, however, Madonna has made, I think, her best work in the last 10 years. If she's been less of a cultural icon, it's hardly a "less of" worth considering - she went from being the single most recognizable, media-monopolizing superstar in the world to being... still one of the most recognizable, media-monopolizing superstars in the world. Judge it on coverage alone - her divorce with Richie earned the same New York front page attention as did Jennifer Aniston's from Brad Pitt.

If Madonna was praised as ushering in fashion and musical trends from boustiers to Gospel choruses, Madonna has remained just as influential the last ten years. I remember her "Ray of Light" long curly blonde 'do being described in 1999 by Kathy Griffin as "that hairstyle that everyone hated and now everyone has." I remember her Music cover derided for its bright-pink Urban cowboy look, only to see the cowboy look everywhere after her fantastic "Don't Tell Me" video in early 2001. For a woman in her 40's, even commanding two major fashion trends is a sign that things are still going well.

But how about that music? Take a look at this list of major Madonna singles since 1998: "Frozen," "Ray of Light," "Music," "Don't Tell Me," "What It Feels Like For a Girl," "American Life," "Hung Up," "4 Minutes," "Give it 2 Me." I can't think of an artist whose work in their 40's have produced as much consistently great pop music. By bombarding her pop with European techno back during Ray of Light and then dropping the introspective raison d'etre on her successive albums, Madonna again predicted the tide of musical trends. This year, I find no real difference amongst many of the biggest songs of the year - Madonna's "4 Minutes" as pop, Chris Brown's "Forever" or Rihanna's "Disturbia" as r/b, MGMT's "Time To Pretend" or Hot Chip's "Ready For The Floor" as indie rock. Madonna always believed in the power of music to bring the people together, frankly the rest of music figured out she was right.

I don't mean to suggest that Madonna is solely responsible for trends in pop music that have embraced techno, but I do think Madonna's career in the last ten years have benefited from the trends that she's been connected to, and that now, to hear a song like "Ray of Light" and "Hung Up," there is a dance-ready excitement that indie music also shares. That's the thing, really - excitement. Blasted with bass and drums to deafen and thrill anyone in a mile radius, her singles may have been seen as desperate or, at least, calculated attempts to keep songs in the top ten, but they've all worked - and, as the momentary spectre of "calculatedness" falls away, they've all deserved to be there. It's because far from an artist we view in our review mirror, Madonna is as relevant now as ever, and maybe even a better artist than she's ever been before.

The Alternate Hip-Hop Universe

The alternate hip hop universe

Something in this universe aligned to make hip hop what it is today, and keep a separate strata and type of hip-hop as “beneath” and secondary. Actually, nothing aligned but those entities artists giving awards-acceptance speeches call, succinctly, “radio and retail.” People eat what they are fed, after all, but loving the hip hop that I do, I like to imagine my alternate hip hop universe, where the strata are reversed, where one type of hip hop is the most commercially successful music in the country, creating an industry, and the other type of hip hop lives forever in its market-inept shadow.

Here in my alternate hip hop universe, Q Tip is being welcomed from a not-very-long hiatus with a #1 spot on the album chart for The Renaissance, now in its third week of release and not likely to leave the top ten for another six months at least. “Gettin’ Up” shot straight up the singles chart to #1, something that “Life Is Better” and “Manwomanboogie” will do right afterwards, probably at some point overlapping their time in the top ten. Pity Kanye West, who releases 808s and Heartbreaks this week, where it’ll debut at #11 and sell modestly before dropping out of the top 100 altogether. “Love Lockdown,” an unusually good song for him anyway, will find its devotees in stoners and hipsters, but won’t really be played much outside of college dorm rooms.

Beyonce’s double album I Am…Sasha Fierce is mostly laughed at by the music-buying masses, still too high of Raphael Saadiq’s The Way It Feels and, probably, finding a fourth single to treasure off of Alicia Keys’ year-old As I Am (that last part probably not too far off from this universe). But Beyonce’s used to this, being consistently outsold over the past ten years by the big names in the soul and R/B game, Jill Scott and Angie Stone. Artists like Scott and Stone – and, sure, Keys – made the trends lean toward soul-based singers with huge, irrepressible voices singing tunes they wrote themselves about love and independence and family that take on the sounds of truth just in how they sing, while thin-voiced come-ons about dancing and being arm-candy come out quickly and are forgotten about.

We’ve all stopped telling ourselves that Lil Wayne and T.I. don’t suck and you can’t hear them on any radio stations because they know better. Critics desperate to sound relevant and in touch, in fact, stopped describing Lil Wayne’s style upon vomiting a line such as “I’m a venereal disease like your menstrual bleed” in “A Milli” as “casual” and instead adopt the more accurate “repulsive,” and “obnoxious,” and perhaps even throw in “anatomically inaccurate.” The Black Eyed Peas that sang “A lot of MC’s should be unemployed” came after the Black Eyed Peas who gave us “Don’t Phunk With My Heart” and “My Humps.” The album containing those songs was just a forgettable demo tape the band made long before Bridging The Gaps showed us who they really were.

No middle schoolers find themselves singing along to “Love In This Club” because even they find the song ridiculous, and anyway, radio stations are too busy with their old copies of Talib Kweli’s Ear Drum and The Roots Rising Down to worry about the ethics of teaching kids to say to the girls of their choice, “Fuck it, let’s just fuck right here!” Rihanna and T.I.’s “Live Your Life” wouldn’t be taken seriously, as it is just a thin melody on top of an old YouTube clip, right? People would laugh at Mariah Carey for telling her guy to take her to the floor and not post it on You Tube in “Touch My Body” instead of laughing with her… and agreeing.

Next year when we look back on the artists that made up this decade, hip hop will still be king, but when we look back at the extraordinary black artists that made up this time, names like Wayne’s and West’s and T.I.’s and Sean Paul’s won’t really mean much, because there’ll be so much to say about Blackalicious and Me’shell Ndegeocello and Kweli and Erykah Badu and Tip (and, ok, Outkast and Timbaland) to get a word in edgewise. In that world? Quality and creativity are key, and the industry and sales respond accordingly – they respect the music that proves their genre is the essence and spirit of creativity today, and ignore the junk.

Best Of the Decade: ?

At this time in ten years ago, in 1998, in the world of movies, music, and even television, we knew we were living in a different era than we were at the beginning of the decade. We knew and could recite collectively that Nirvana's Nevermind was the great album of our era and had irrevocably changed music. We knew and could recite collectively that Pulp Fiction was the movie of the decade, that it had irrevocably changed movies, and that we could never go back again. We even knew that every sitcom to come out heretofore would have echoes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons, and to argue about diminishing their influence would be an exercise in futility.

We have that same feeling about television now, in a sense - this is the decade in which The Sopranos changed basic tenants of television, including the length of seasons, the quality of material on the small screen, the limits of what a show could cover, the amount of intelligence and detail that could go into the craft, etc. We don't have that in music and movies. Looking ahead to 16 months from now, in which magazines will be synopsizing this decade of the 00's, what will they say? What will our era be known as and known for?

I think the results will be wide, the choices for Album and Movie of the decade will be highly disparate, and probably disappointing. I was thinking this today driving around listening, straight through, to Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, an album I think, with two others, stands at the highest pinnacle of quality of all records released in my adult lifetime, which, coincidentally, happened legally on January 17, 2000. In fact, this is the first decade I can consider myself an "adult," however cognizant I might have thought myself before the time.

Does everyone feel like this, starting on that downhill curve of their 20's? Well, me start with the "this" that I mean, and let me start with music. What is this decade musically? A time of a great movement in music, like Alternative was? Not really - what was there, indie music? Hip hop? Bland pop-punk? Those seemed to be doing pretty well before too. In fact, of the three albums that I think of as the highest quality this decade is by a pop-punk artist whose peak was thought to have been 1995 - Green Day, whose American Idiot will no doubt find itself near the top of many Album of the Decade lists next year, including mine if I write one. It is and remains an extraordinary work, but more than that, it stands out as such a singular success for three reasons - 1) It's a work of frustration and rage, which is related to the frustration and rage that we've arguably felt all decade, 2)In an era in which albums as a collective work declined, in order to give way to a music industry that has progressed online, it is a reminder of the mastery of a full ALBUM and of what such a thing is capable. And most importantly, 3) We've heard it before, but we've never heard anything like it. That's what I want to explore more.

If this decade is full of work in which there's no clear agreement on what it all "means" and what can define us, I'd like to make a case for that indefinition as who we are. People, I think, are generally interested in the world of pop culture in the last 20 years, perhaps moreso than at any other time in America's history - those of us in our 20's and 30's have a bit of an inflated sense of how great our pop culture is - this year, Entertainment Weekly devoted an issue to the 100 "New Classics," 100 Top albums, movies, TVshows, books, etc., released since 1983 - which means, basically, the lifespan of the vast majority of its readers. Recently, the London Times released a Top 100 list of the greatest movies ever made in which #2 was Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which is a little ridiculous, but certainly indicates that we're ready to dismiss the conventional thinking about what are the "Great Movies" and embrace our own culture. #3 on the list was E.T.

"Best of" all time lists, as I've talked about too often, is more of an indication of current modes of thought than they are definitive discussions of what are the "Best" ever. Such a thing is impossible to quantify. Recently, Roger Ebert devoted some speculation over the fact that in every decade, Citizen Kane is universally declared as the greatest of all movies - strange convention, eh? As each year, Best Of TV lists come out, any top 10 nowadays will likely include The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, possibly even Sex and the City - we are, truly, going to think of our time as the golden age of television.

But it's sort of a useless battle, because if there's one thing that we can agree on for our time, it's that everything there is to say about life has been said, including the fact that we've said everything there is to be said. The reason "Best Of" lists seem so useless now is because we've said to the point of boredom that The Beatles are as great as music gets and that Citizen Kane is the world's greatest movies - it's even become convention to counter with Bob Dylan and The Godfather as "rebellious" answers.

But here's a question I have for people who are like myself - when people ask you what your favorite movies are, when were they made? When did you see them? And which of them, when you think about the movies that moved or excited you most, are truly your favorites? When I make my list (and I like to think I'm well versed in movies), I have some movies that have been named forever - The 400 Blows, Raging Bull - but also movies in my time, Boogie Nights and What Time Is It There? and Waiting for Guffman and Blood Simple. Now, obviously these are movies in which our older, more "influential" movies have made possible, but if I'm to answer that question truthfully, I'm going to answer with the movies that made me most love the capabilities of movies. And, as a man born in 1982, it's not as if Boogie Nights "feels" particularly newer than, say, Tokyo Story - it is, of course (it looks back on an era that happened after Tokyo was released, after all), but I saw Tokyo Story for the first time this year, I saw Boogie Nights when I was 16.

My point is this - why do I have to have my thoughts of Tokyo Story, which is a beautiful movie that has passed the test of time and made me cry, automatically more valid than my thoughts of Boogie Nights? How about those of you that would answer Happy Gilmore or Dumb and Dumber as your favorite movies? Are you wrong? I don't think so - I asked you what movies you enjoyed most. I don't enjoy those movies, but it's not up to me. There is no best movie ever made, there's just many opinions about it. Many, but not enough.

We define the culture, and there's nothing "true" about what's best and what isn't. Those of us that grew up being told, as I was, that The Beatles were the best band in rock history and that Citizen Kane is the pinnacle of moviemaking have absorbed that information but we don't have to necessarily conform to that notion even if we like The Beatles and Citizen Kane. When we were kids, we didn't really think a black man would be seriously contending for the presidency, even though we were told such a thing was possible. There was supposed to be outrage when the Obama candidacy began skyrocketing, and certainly to an extent there was (and we haven't even seen the end of it or the worst of it yet), but there sure seem to be plenty able-minded adults who decided they didn't actually care, and, in fact, really liked the guy. As adults in our 20's and 30's, we, now, decide the messages about taste that we want the next generation to develop.

I want my art now, if it's great, to tell me what I've heard and seen and then take it a step further. I want to hear about confusion and not tell me everything, but I want it to also be full of craft and life and ideas. I found myself, a night ago, talking about the third album I think stands as a pinnacle of quality for this decade - Blackalicious's Blazing Arrow. I said to a friend of mine that if it had just been more popular, I would absolutely call it the greatest hip hop record ever made. It's perfect from beginning to end, and at 17 songs, that's a long time to be perfect. It comes with fury and excitement out of its first track and only gets better in each track. It's rap that raps faster and louder and more precise than any I've heard, its moments of soul that move and cause you to swoon, it's samples and poetry and rhythm and love and sex and everything that hip hop has promised us it is. Why isn't it the best hip hop record ever made? Certianly if it had sold half of the records that Kanye West's The College Dropout had, it would find itself on as many Best of the 2000's lists as Dropout will.

Same goes for movies - I think the best this decade are probably not that popular. I think I'm Not There was unlike anything I've ever seen, and it included many things I've seen. Same with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Those are truly the two that jump out at me as truly special and extraordinary, but also as movies that comment on our own over-analyzed sense of identity, movies that tell us about how hard it is to know who we are when we've talked so much about who we are. Which is something we need to talk about - doesn't it make since everything there is to say has been said, we need to throw out everything and start at the basics? This is a time that, I think, we can say truly that our culture is the one that is most important - or it is, at least, as important as anything that's come before, and it's because we have to think on topics that compound the things we already know of that are supposedly great. Now, great means something else.

The Hottest Spaniard in America

I happened to see only two movies in the month of August, and both starred Penelope Cruz. The first is Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona features Cruz as Maria Elena, the hothead, unstable ex-wife of Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), the “enlightened” Spanish painter at the center of everyone’s sexual fantasies and realities as he gets between the titular two American friends, played by Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson, on their summer trip to Barcelona. The second is Elegy, which features Cruz as Consuela, a grad student who falls for her much older professor, played by Ben Kingsley, and explores age and perceptions in sex and love.

The week I saw Vicky Cristina, I also caught Cruz on The Late Show With David Letterman. Cruz mentioned she’d just wrapped a Pedro Almodovar movie in Madrid and was exhausted touring the states doing promotions for her two movies. In fact at the time, I hadn’t even heard about Elegy, and now, a month into its release, I doubt I would’ve heard of it at all except for a rave review by Owen Gleiberman that sent me scrambling to the Seven Gables on 50th. I figured Vicky Cristina and whatever the Almodovar movie she’s completed were the movies she was promoting.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona has sort of gotten good reviews – you can tell because of the Woody Allen movies the reviews compare it to. It’s like Match Point says Variety, like Small Time Crooks (meaning, a screwball mixed bag) says The Village Voice, like Bullets Over Broadway and Sweet and Lowdown (meaning “funny!”) says The Baltimore Sun, and totally unlike Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors says Salon. Some dismiss it, some find things to enjoy – probably none love it all that much, which makes some sense.

It’s Allen’s biggest diss to American sensibilities of all of his recent European movies – in the movie, Cristina (Johannsson) finds herself wandering into a happy, Spanish hippie polyamorous relationship with Cruz and Bardem while Hall finds herself stuck with a successful Upper East Side real-estate yuppie who plays bridge and lunches with boring colleagues.

But something does work about Vicky Cristina – and that something is Cruz. Bardem has gotten some deserving good reviews for the movie, and so has Hall, but every time the movie zips, it’s because of what Cruz brings to it – the movie is ostensibly about Hall’s sensible Hall and her friendship with wild Cristina, but the wild one you truly believe in is Maria Elena – played by Cruz with total abandon, from her hair that looks like it’s never seen a brush to her Amazonian stalking of a painting canvas. Vicky Cristina should be Allen’s most thinly veiled free-love manifesto, but with Cruz at the helm of its “European” retro-sixties sensibilities, it feels alive and unpredictable.

That’s because Vicky Cristina Barcelona, like Elegy, is a better movie because Penelope Cruz is in it. The truth is, most movies with Penelope Cruz are better movies because Penelope Cruz is in them. How did this happen? Cruz became popular in America, if you can recall, not because of a film role necessarily, but because of a very pretty blue, Oscar De La Renta dress at the 2000 Academy Awards. She had starred (beautifully) as a pregnant, HIV-positive nun in Almodovar’s All About My Mother, and presented Almodovar with the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that year. She wore a tight, periwinkle dress and suddenly seemed to be dating Tom Cruise. Cameron Crowe immediately tapped her to play an American version of a Spanish role she’d created in his Open Your Eyes remake Vanilla Sky, which would eventually be seen as mostly unsuccessful.

Looking at her film credits since ostensibly becoming well-known 8 years ago, before her Oscar-nominated turn in 2006 with Almodovar’s Volver, her movies fall into two categories – forgettable flops like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Waking Up In Reno, Head in the Clouds, or Gothika; and flops that are memorable only because of the notoriety of how massive their failures were like Sahara, All The Pretty Horses, or Masked and Anonymous. One credit I’m skipping is perhaps her most famous American role – as Johnny Depp’s shrill cokehead wife in Blow, a widely derided movie at the time that earned her a Razzie Nomination for Worst Actress.

Blow has been resurrected by college-aged male movie lovers that enjoy seeing coke consumption and hot women on screen, but it still is, in all honesty, not a particularly memorable movie either. However, it too is a better movie because of Cruz. I remember at the time people discussing how obnoxious she was in her role, but I think that is Cruz’s success in the movie – with total abandon, she inhabits a shrill and obnoxious character. Her hair too flies around wildly until it’s chopped off in a masculine ‘do at the end of the movie (much like it is in Elegy, when she’s tamed a bit, too).

I’d like to say I called it then, and apparently it worked – amongst all those flops, Cruz became a major star. Maybe, movie dorks like myself that caught her, briefly, as a trash-talking woman giving birth on a bus to Javier Bardem's rival in Almodovar’s Live Flesh in 1996 knew she’d be this famous, but I doubt it – I truly think as good as she was in Flesh and All About My Mother, it was that fearless turn in Blow that did it, and since then, she’s made one bad casting choice after another, only to have them not matter that much.

Elegy is even less successful right now than Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but it proves how incredible Cruz can be. Ostensibly, her Consuela is the opposite of Maria Elena – proper, reserved, hair in a geometrically precise shoulder-length cut with uniform bangs, wandering around in a school-girl outfit. Her character is supposed to be somewhat “invisible” to Kingsley’s David Kepesh, as he is so consumed by the idea that a beautiful woman could love anyone his age. Indeed she is a mystery to him, and to us, but as played with the sincere, piercing dark eyes of Cruz, she is a full bodied idea of gorgeous curiosity and life, a woman mostly unaware of how beautiful she is internally and externally, but rather competent and wonderful anyway.

Kingsley is excellent too, but without Cruz in this role, I don’t believe Elegy would have the outstanding power that it has. I won’t ruin where it takes Cruz’s Consuela, but I will say that she is given, towards the end of the movie, a deeply wounding scene involving an unguarded, naked photo session (Cruz has the rare distinction of being an object of obsession in dark rooms in both movies – she certainly does photograph well). The scene shows the extremes of Cruz’s talent – an unabashedly carnal performer with the ability to catch a viewer off guard through vulnerability and honesty, her sexuality emerging simultaneously with emotions and needs that crave and overwhelm.

Cruz made so many bad casting choices over the years it makes sense that she was due to make a few great choices to show off just what she can do, but it may have also been that movies were looking for any “Hot, wild, mysterious Spanish woman” roles that could possibly reign in the vivacity she was displaying anyway. What makes Cruz continue to be so exciting as a celebrity is wondering just when we’ll get to see that side of her personality reigned into a movie worth watching – I was lucky to find out that that’s happening twice, right now.

An essay on The Confessions of Max Tivoli

I found this essay I wrote a few years ago on a great book about love and death, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Why not post it here?

In The Confessions of Max Tivoli, what seems like a gimmick takes on the air of great sympathy and understanding. Its protagonist, born with a foreknowledge of his death by simple addition, is born an old man aging backwards. We view him meeting his best friend with the face of a 54-year-old, falling in love with a girl his age while secretly sleeping with her mother (he does, after all, appear to be even older than she), getting the girl when they both coincide at the right age, and then, finally, pretending to be the same age as her son some decade and a half after she leaves him. Beyond requiring the most suspended of suspended disbelief, this concept seems hokey and awkward at fist glance – ages backwards? What are we supposed to learn, that age is a state of mind? Is this a Robin Williams starring vehicle in disguise?

There is simply nothing to prepare you for the actual text in the novel, which, both directly and indirectly, seems a modern incarnation of Lolita, another novel whose startlingly beautiful language takes a sticky concept and turns it into the ultimate meditation on love and life. I do not mean to say Andrew Sean Greer has the talent of Vladimir Nabokov (although, who’s to say, this is only his second novel). There is not a hint of preciousness in the design, not a second of cozying into the subject, not a single person who rises above his/her circumstances to learn an important lesson on the universality of humanity. No, that responsibility is ours, and the lyricism of the backwards man-boy does teach us invaluable truths about love, about self, about time, and about the inevitability of aging – as it is here, careening like a car crash you are powerless to control, the process that takes Max back in time propels us and confronts us with the inevitability, the uncontrollably finite process of time and age.

Max, being (mostly) the only person aware of his predicament is certainly a character locked into a sense of insular logic – being the only person having to live in his body, with his choices, it becomes a certain inevitability he’ll jettison the “life” of Max Tivoli on each reappearance of Alice, the girl he remarks towards the end of the novel he’s not sure if he ever really knew. Mid novel, he “becomes” his father, Asger Van Dalen (rechristened Tivoli after his love for the Danish amusement park) and marries his Alice under the pseudonym. Later, he becomes Hughie Dempsey, Jr., the child of his lifelong best friend, the only person who’s known and accepted Max for all of his often questionable choices.

Tivoli is about love, in the, at this point, unsurprising notion that anyone will do anything for love. This plot device, the lifelong obsession with Alice, is effective in its way – as a dramatic device to both mark the life and the motivation of Max, it doesn’t disappoint. But in the sense that she never knows the true identity of Max, even when she does (she thinks he’s a kindly old uncle living upstairs that was her mother’s true love), there’s an inescapability that the two cannot really be together. As a married couple, he lavishes her and loves her and is, we suspect, a reasonably good husband, but we know, as they marry when Max is 35 and looking like a 35 year old, they have only a set amount of time before he just wanders too far backwards from the man she married and their relationship becomes untenable.

To an extent, this can be read as a metaphor for love in general – the couple is given less than a decade of happiness before the moment she says to him, “I don’t know who you are.” It’s true she doesn’t, his identity is a lie, but the love is as strong as ever. Much like Lolita, the protagonist gets his woman for a time, but in truth never really has her, her affections somewhere else, and her need for Asger never coming close to resemble the intensity of feeling Max has for her.

It’s hard to tell when the book first sideswipes you and has you in its clutches. Perhaps it’s at the end of its first section, upon the realization that Sammy, the 12-year-old a now-58-year-old Max shares a room with, is actually his son. What it does is make the story, for perhaps the first time, full of possibility. You were willing to write off a character who either seems like he’ll be Simon Birch (that is, chirpy and sentimental) or else the Elephant Man (and invoke “you poor thing!” syndrome). The son gives you the sense that this man may have had a full life, entering and backing away from real interaction with the world, conquering his affliction occasionally, falling victim to its implications in others.

In that sense, what becomes the most sympathetic aspect of Max is, in its eloquent precision, his isolation. This isolation may be justified – he can’t exactly proclaim his condition to the world. Still, as a 17-year-old awkward in his skin, it barely matters that that skin is a 53-year-old’s – we all understand the sense of feeling a foreigner in your own body, skeptical of the way people view you and the way you view yourself.

Which is to say Andrew Sean Greer, a lyricist if ever there was one, follows precisely the axiom of great writing: take the specific, make it universal. Certainly the story of a Max, in love with an Alice, the type of woman who’d never pay attention to a Max (in this case because she thinks he’s in his mid fifties), is as old as time in its way. Yet you’ve never felt on the inside of it like this – the threads of time are pulled back and forth, his life in the sandbox, puttering around Alice’s house as a 12-year-old, and its backward-life forward chronology have a certain braided style that makes the puzzle of the novel interesting on simple logistics – his son, eh? How’d he find out where he lives without tipping off the mother? And the mother’s Alice, eh? How did she get convinced to take in such a stray 12-year-old?

The answers to these questions are great answers, of course, as any good novel must be fully aware of the appeal of their smallest tidbits. The final fourth of the novel, a section of careening intensity is so full of themes and elements you barely knew had overwhelmed your every sense – Max’s lifelong friendship with Hughie, the absence of his mother, the castrating effect of time on his body (as a 12-year-old, he notices, resigned, he just can’t get the thing to work like it used to), the accidental discovery of Alice’s whereabouts, Max’s hypnotic conversation with her newest ex-husband, the end of Hughie, and a final, sweet resolution of the whole crew – a late night cry and kiss goodnight from a torn up Alice.

What makes reading and absorbing these details such an overwhelming and moving experience, I think, is that concept that seemed cumbersome and untenable in the extreme to begin with, the obstinately backwards movement of time in a culture confined to a linear existence. Rarely in a novel – in absence of a terminal disease (and I’m happy for every time one is absent in a novel) – are we so swiftly reminded of the mortality of our protagonist. Even at 12, we know his years are even more finite than that because this trajectory of time, even more than an age-related dementia, will literally turn Max into a baby. In their magnificent final moments together, Hughie begs for a solitary existence with Max, saying he alone understands Max’s fear of dying as a helpless baby, and he alone is his answer to it. We know he’s right – Max, we’re certain, has no possible way of telling Alice or Sammy of his condition, and it’s a moment that clues us into the mental singularity of a man forced to live his life in total isolation from the world.

Was Hughie simply acting out a lifelong crush on Max? That reading is possible, I’m afraid, and in those final sections of the last quarter of the book, you’re thrust into an unenviable position as a writer – that is, the position to dismiss Hughie’s mostly human behaviors as long overdue puppy love. I choose not to read it this way, although I admit that such a non-reading is an arbitrary choice. Hughie, a homosexual in the beginning of the 20^th century, and Max are equal foreigners in their bodies and their worlds, and Max draws this parallel frequently. I read Hughie’s love for Max comes from a bond of understanding, of being the only two people alive that, without judgment, accept each other as they are. Indeed, Hughie’s secret is as antisocial as Max’s – unmoved by the death of his son and in a marriage that’s more annoyance than matrimony, Hughie is simply a man trying to find any way to make it through his days. With Max to look out for, he has someone to feel superior to (he does, after all, have it easier), and thus, accepted by.

I searched for reviews of The Confessions of Max Tivoli after I completed the book, and, dazed from the emotional wallop of its final quarter, and overwhelmed by its parallels to Lolita (more in a moment), I was surprised to hear the analysis, “beautifully written, but without anything meaningful to say on love and life.” I couldn’t disagree more. It may be not so noteworthy to say that love is all there is to live for, and that it is eternal – so, maybe there isn’t that much left to say on love – but as for life, I think Tivoli is actually a fairly important document. In its fictional post script – one saying the book has been brought to you, after being found in an attic in 1947, by the “Samuel Harper Foundation,” tells you, quietly, the fate of its reading. Sammy, then in his early 20’s, found this book and later started a foundation that trafficked manuscripts of some kind.

What it means is that the experience of good writing on your existence is a profound communicator – Max, who could not approach the things that mattered to him during life did find them after his death, either by a theoretical understanding of whatever Alice makes of these journal entries or, if Max is correct in his final pages, by having his 1941 necklace returned to her. He also lives on by the work of his son, perhaps even inspiring and causing the work of his song. It means that Sammy was so profoundly moved by what he read, he worked his life to publish it. This simple sentence after the completion of the events of the novel says that marking your existence on this planet, you make your mark by being true and creating proof of your existence. In another echo of Lolita, we’re told of what the power of writing will allow you to forgive. Max is a far less treacherous human being than Humbert Humbert, but he felt no less isolated, and, in truth, he’s not very much less eloquent.

Why Lolita, you ask? Like Lolita, Max gets the girl for a while, only to have her taken away by something he should’ve seen just under his nose. Like Lolita, he meets her briefly before one or both of the main characters’ deaths. Like Lolita, the “transcripts” we’re given are posthumous of the main character, and the fates of the other remaining characters told by an ominous outside source. Like Lolita, the character’s first sexual encounter is told in poetic non-specifics. Like Lolita, you forgive unforgiveable acts because you love the voice of the person speaking them.

It’s amazing that a novel with a ludicrous concept could leave such an indelible impression about the nature of people, the truths of existence, and the importance of expressing them. It’s amazing that it could still do this in the best way a novel can, by sideswiping you with utterly absorbing characters in a fully spellbinding narrative flow. The Confessions of Max Tivoli as a title is a sort of everyman journal entry type of banality, and that, in truth, could be the case – this is simply a man we’re presented with, with elements of his mortality and purpose apotheosized to the order of highest importance. In essence, they remind us why those elements are of the highest importance to us.

Some great almost-great albums

The release this past month of Beck's Modern Guilt has gotten me to thinking about the albums that I love that I can't claim as great. Last year, I wrote on here about Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, which I think has to be the epitome of this type of thing - an album that I could find dozens of reasons to dislike, except that so much is done right on the album and drawn to it over and over again. Artists all the time make albums that are mediocre with a few good songs sticking out, but this is something different - albums that are made to be expansive and brilliant wind up tripping on their own ambitions. Still, I love those grand amibitions so much, I keep trying and trying to love the album as much as the artist clearly did. Mostly it doesn't work, but what comes out of it is something that makes you happy you tried.


Once, Roger Ebert wrote about The Darjeeling Limited (a movie I didn't like at all), "Why do we have to be the cops and enforce a narrow range of movie requirements?" I identify with that statement quite a bit. It gets to be an exercise for critics, wanting to keep up an aura of crumudgeonness - of being difficult to please and having discerning tastes - to not discuss what good is in a movie or album or book but to instead make sure s/he is on top of pointing out a work's flaws. That's fine - flaws need to be discussed too - but perhaps tougher is to engage with a work whose flaws are obvious and acknowledge what draws you in about it. Since Beck's Modern Guilt is exactly this type of record, here are two others that fit that definition, and my ever expanding thoughts on that damn Joni Mitchell album I can't stop thinking about.



Swordfishtrombones Tom Waits

Ask ten Tom Waits fans to pick the album that typifies Tom Waits to then, and they'll likely give you ten different answers - or, at the very least, 6 or 7 answers, with many of them repeating the title Rain Dogs. In the mid-70's, Tom Waits stopped making the sort of back alley jazz records and got into work that was darker and more tortured. By the mid-80's, he decided much of that was still too melodic, and made Swordfishtrombones, which begins in "Under Ground" like a small child banging on a xylophone, accompanied by a barking old man.

This was the album that would enable Rain Dogs, and, really, establish the weirdness that has remained Waits's backbone. For me, my own answer as a Waits fan to what his best album is would be Bone Machine, the astonishing 1990 album that sounds like one miraculous round trip to hell and back. Getting into Tom Waits now, as people cranky enough who are my age sometimes do, I wouldn't expect that Swordfishtrombones would be the record they'd gravitate towards - full of bangs on a kettle drum, off-key blows in a bassoon, screaming. In the track "Shore Leave," the title is sung cryptically towards the end of the song in a way that sounds like a baby spitting out its food. By the time you start hearing circus music during "Dave The Butcher," you're not even sure Waits knew he was supposed to be a musician.

Of course this is Waits's charm and it seems most charming to the cognizenti when he's at his most baffling - or at least, so they say. People's favorite Tom Waits' songs also tend to be the more melodic ones, and understandably so (how do you even remember the other ones?). The album is tough - but it's not without comprehension, revelation, and often beauty. No other artist makes records that can be ugly and silly and critical and light. When, in "Frank's Wild Years," Waits delivers a disaffected monologue to an organ about a man, his wife, who was "a used piece of jet trash, made good bloody mary's, and kept her mouth shut most of the time," it's something so wild and unhappy it winds up levitating on its very unlikelihood of causing a smile. If you make it that far, the album, without a doubt, wins you over - enough so that in the straight, beautiful numbers like "In The Neighborhood" or the jazz composition "Rainbirds," you truly believe in what Waits is doing, even if it took a lot of ignoring disbelief to get there.


29 Ryan Adams

The backstory behind 29 is that Ryan Adams had to shelve it for a while - it did, after all, come out when he was 31, his final of three albums released in 2005. Strategically it makes sense - 29, unique in Adams' catalog anyway, definitely didn't fit with his more direct, pop-oriented songs of Gold and Love Is Hell, and had at least a comrade of sorts in the countrified drunkenness of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, Adams' other 2005 releases. It was deemed too weird and obscure, but as the bass drum beats and guitar blazes a sound right out of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin" on the title track, it's something else - a declaration of survival. In the track, Adams muses "I should've died 100,000 times" and "Most of my friends are married and making them babies/ To most of them I've already died." He recounts bar fights, arrests, close calls, drug use, and even his dead dog's pile of bones and then roars on his way - it's obscure enough, I suppose, but it's also a thrill. Coupled with its following song, "Strawberry Wine," which has a softer Adams musing "Don't spend too much time on the other side/ let the daylight in," Adams imagines the side of his 29 years if he hadn't survived, and that makes this, really, a concept from start to finish about the luck of the surviving - even a manual of sorts.

Adams has long been criticized as being a machine that cranks out songs rather than an album artist, but 29 is the antithesis - a full record not that concerned with the song to song individuality. That's the strongest thing about 29, but it also isn't fulfilled. Though its middle, sad songs "Night Birds" and "Blue Sky Blues" are terrific, they're followed by the terrific, what-drives-me ramble "Carolina Rain" and then left unfulfilled by what should be the conceptual meat of the record - a bla love song "Starlite Diner," and "The Sadness," a fight with depression re-imagined as a bullfight. The truth is neither of the songs work, and they disrupt Adams' conceptual daring.

The record picks back up with "Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part," as emotional a song as Adams has ever written with its collision of two absolutely gorgeous melodies. However, the heartbreak seems isolated. "Voices" concludes the record, and it's like a postmodern folk song - all deadly pleas and emotional coos so trenchant you barely notice there's only an acoustic guitar playing. This song should connect 29's ends of survival - with its "Don't you listen to the voices" center, it's the hope that makes his good luck story of "29" possible - but it doesn't, it merely ends the album respectably. That all leaves 29 mostly unfulfilled, but still - there are times I can't sleep at night and "Voices" is the song I want to hear. There are times I drive in the rain and "Elizabeth..." is the song I want to hear. There are times I find myself amazed to be who I am and "29" will pop up - it's amazing that an album can call forth that sense of identification and still, not fully, work.

The Hissing of Summer Lawns Joni Mitchell

What's left for me to say about this record? To call songs like "In France They Kiss On Mainstreet," "The Jungle Line" and "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" tuneless would absolutely be right. But they also come at a speed of ideas and criticism that is its own bit of intoxication. Last year's Grammy-winning River, the Mitchell tribute albumy by Herbie Hancock, featured "The Jungle Line" turned into a spoken-word jazz piece, and maybe that's the right forum for it - not the moog-sampling wander from painted jungle flowers to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge that it has. As it is, it, like the majority of the songs on the record, are hard to know and hard to like. Sean Nelson, the eloquent writer for the 33 1/3 series, in writing about Mitchell's Court and Spark called out Mitchell on Hissing for losing all sense of compassion and empathy - this is Mitchell at her most disdainful. Her opening image in "Mainstreet" is of "under neon a signs/ a girl was in bloom/ and a woman was fading/ in a suburban room." That might be the nicest comparison she makes on the record - she sees women as chained to Ethiopian walls, imagines Scarlett O'Hara wandering Times Square for porn, sees nagging wives ruining their husbands' lives, finds them unable to speak up to save their lives.

The truth is, as hard of an edge as these songs leave you with, I've never disliked them, not any of them, even "Edith and the Kingpin," which is, I think, a waste of a song. "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" calls forth the history of women suffering and surviving only to be given the platitude "Bring that bottle over here and I'll pad your purse" - why not be angry? Its second half, too, has a perfect run - a man reminisces angrily on "Harry's House/ Centerpiece" and the result is experimental and beautiful. She dissects a bad local band in "The Boho Dance" rather dispicably as "just another hard time band/ with Negro affectations," but winds up really making a case for musicians needing to be true to who they are.

What keeps me coming back to Hissing is what has to be its strangest song - and Mitchell's strangest, for that matter. "Shadows And Light" was the first song I objected to on the record, and with its long, slow, drawn out keyboard as its only instrumentation, why wouldn't I? In her first mainstream negative review, Steven Holden of Rolling Stone wrote that the song sounded like "a long, solemn fart." But where the songs of Hissing are angry, "Shadows and Light" is lead by a synthesizer that accepts vicious dichotomies for what they are - stands in acceptance of them. "Hostage smiles on presidents, freedom scribbled on the subway," she sings to silence, and I have to think, to all things there are good and bad. We've given women - given ourselves - freedom and wound up bound to it. How do we reconcile the two? It's an effort to get there, but Hissing to me retains its fascination because it's, ultimately, just worth it.

Modern Guilt Beck

Beck has to be upset something fierce these days - the songs in Modern Guilt are pulled out of their straight malaise by dancy production of Danger Mouse, but there's not doubt of what he's feeling. "If I wake up and see my maker coming," he sings in the opening number, "Orphans," "We'll drag the streets with the baggage of longing." He drags the album with the baggage of longing - each song seems to be about how he no longer recognizes the world around him, and climaxes with Beck contemplating leaping into a volcano.

I should, in all honesty, truly identify with this record - I find myself baffled by modern culture constantly, and I think in 2006's magnificent The Information, Beck did just that - imagined a world with dead cellphones, drowned out by elevator music, and adrift with the strangeness of the world around him. The truth is, Beck's previous albums are the best reason to move forward with Modern Guilt anyway - knowing the winning streak he's been on. My theory with Beck has long been that 2002's classic Sea Change, full of such overwhelming sadness, freed Beck to make the music he wanted to - the far jauntier Guero and The Information along with Change are truly Beck's fullest, most inspiring work.

Modern Guilt is along that vein but is simply not as good because there is no movement - Beck's malaise traps you in the record and suffocates it with dance rhythms that feel mostly stapled on. A song like "Replica" makes great use with intensely overdone beats of creating a sonic landscape that seems impossible to penetrate, but most of the record does so without as much sense of consciousness.

But that consciousness still lingers and infects. The truth is I didn't care much about Beck when I was supposed to - Odelay and Midnite Vultures seemed like a lot of danc-y hoohah about nothing, and even when I liked a song I didn't care to go much further. Modern Guilt has so much to it, by contrast. "Orphans" is a great song, and so is "Volcano" (of that titular volcano Beck can't decide to jump into), and even at one note, a record about modern contempt and malaise is a stronger note than virtually all other albums in release. The truth is, the best thing of a record about malaise and contempt is that you feel it some yourself - you yearn for the release in songs like the crunchy rocker "Soul of A Man." That may be as effective as it is frustrating.