Every year, I like to take a minute to think back and discuss the most important works that I read or heard or saw over the past year, regardless of when they came out or what the rules that govern lists are. Each year, you encounter things that strike you, move you, that weren’t in your life a year earlier. What a year it was for me. I lost my father and started law school. I became busy, and had moments of doubt and darkness. In a way, none of these works reflects that darkness, though maybe I could have included Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell,” which I spoke about at my father’s funeral, or Joni Mitchell’s “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsay,” which inspired me to write about the darkness that lurks in us all. Maybe that would be the most honest way to write.
Instead, I had to speak to what is truest to myself, and this year, the things that brought me joy were what meant the most to me. The songs of Yeah Yeah Yeahs that were aggressive and dancy, punky and sweet, dark and light. The books that spoke of artists experimenting at the fringes. The tears and honesty of extended world of Yi Yi, Prince on stage, and a remembrance of all the great music of this decade. This is what I felt this year, this is what I saw myself in.
1. “Zero,” “Heads Will Roll,” “Softshock,” “Skeletons” Yeah Yeah Yeahs
I had had Yeah Yeah Yeahs on my iPod and even loved a song or two of theirs, but I didn’t really hear Yeah Yeah Yeahs until I saw them at Sasquatch over Memorial Day. There, all the rumored charisma of Karen O on stage, I realized, had been massively understated. On stage she’s a god, she’s totally transfixing, bringing ferocity and context to the primitivity of each song. She’s this generation’s Prince or Bowie.
Still, it’s as though this only set the stage for the ascension of all of the great Yeah Yeah Yeahs music to join my iPod. By the time my iPod crashed in October, there were 10 songs of theirs in my Top 30 most played, and in the top 4 were these, the first four tracks on this year’s It’s Blitz, the songs that absolutely defined my year. From the energy of “Zero,” the dance defiance of “Heads Will Roll” and the soft lycra-led dance ebullience of “Softshock,” you see a side of YYYs you never would have predicted but seemed to be there all along – the part that embraced the dancing, synth-raised pop lover in all of us. “Zero” is a song that must be blasted, and was, I think, the song of the summer. “Heads Will Roll,” which opened that Sasquatch performance, capitalizes on all of Karen O’s aggression only to command you to “dance til you’re dead.” “Softshock” could have been made by Pat Benatar, but only if she had been this awesome.
And “Skeletons?” Well, “Skeletons” got me through the rest of the year, its synth simplicity that is like the sun setting and feeling alone, Karen O’s voice trembling in polygraph tremors on that “e” of the minimal line “Skeleton: me.” You’re moved with the drum sticks and synthesizers, bowled over by the intimacy. The disappointment of It’s Blitz is that YYYs didn’t have the conviction to make an entire album of the synth-heavy 80’s sound. The triumph is that these songs entered and completely dominated my world, shocking me into realizing they hadn’t been part of who I was all along.
2. Goodbye 20th Century by David Browne, and We Got The Neutron Bomb by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen
I released myself from the need to read books that fit into certain categories this year – I’m not sure if I read any novels to completion or finished a memoir. I think I finished Go Tell It On The Mountain, which was great, and read some short stories and essays. But really what I did was allow myself to admit the books that I treat like candy – stuff that informs me of the works I can’t get enough of. Sonic Youth has always been a band like that for me – noisy, wildly different, daring, and esoteric enough to feel like by being such a big fan of theirs, I was in on the world’s greatest, most powerful secret. David Browne, a former music critic for Entertainment Weekly, wrote Goodbye 20th Century, and I wonder if he understands what a gift he gave me. These songs and albums that I’ve appreciated now for ten years since I was introduced to them became so much fuller in the wake of stories about their creation – Thurston Moore and Lydia Lunch scaring bus passengers as they essentially devised “Death Valley ‘69” on a bus ride home! The pop and yell Lee Ranaldo yells out during “In The Kingdom #19” was from Thurston lighting a firecracker! Ranaldo reminiscing that he loved the title of Washing Machine because it felt, to him, “like cleansing ourselves of Dirty” (Dirty being their astonishing 1992 album that showed the Youth in peak, marketable grunge form – and clearly could not last). This was an astonishing portrait of a band at their vital peak.
Couple that with the wacky, rollickingly entertaining oral history We Got The Neutron Bomb, and you have a great one-two punch of fringe music writing. Neutron Bomb tells the story of the LA punk movement of the 70s and 80s as one long overlapping interview, gathering bits and pieces from books, tv specials, interviews, and compilations from the voices who experienced the time. It plays like VH1’s old Legends show, that told a story entirely through the voices of people recalling them. I remember the moment each of the interviewees spoke of David Bowie walking through LA wearing a dress. Just that movement started young fans like Pat Smear and Darby Crash, who then, not being able to play a note, took the stage plunging a microphone into a jar of peanut butter, and then, somewhere down the line, became The Germs, who I’m told are still touring. In Goodbye 20th Century, Lee Ranaldo, bored during an early, terrifying performance of “The Burning Spear” strapped a drill to a microphone while they were playing. That drill is still in the final take. That’s the artist spirit I love, and could revel in forever.
3. Rewatching my favorite movies: The Sweet Hereafter, Mean Streets, Nashville, Playtime, Full Metal Jacket
The rest of the world’s been onto this for years, and it sounds stupid, but something struck me rewatching each of these old movies – the first time, however long ago it was, was never enough. With Full Metal Jacket, I realized it had been since I was in high school ten years ago since I’d seen the whole thing, and yet I thought of it as a favorite of mine. Seeing it now is to reveal all of its meticulously composed, brilliant layers. With The Sweet Hereafter, watching it in full for the first time since, I think, 2002, I saw a more delicately composed, mystically invasive story than I’d seen previously. And with Nashville (hmm, maybe I saw it in 2001?), it’s like I was shown a different world, Robert Altman’s overlapping dialogue making me think that though he’s telling you 2 dozen stories at once, he’s just as interested in the ones even further on the fringe - the security guard talking in the corner, the person working at a sales counter waiting for a superstar to roll through.
It’s like I fell in love with movies again. With songs, you hear them over and over again, get acquainted with each sigh, each turning of a phrase. A great movie is (duh) just as precisely filled with glorious moments, but I was afraid I’d dilute the impact of the full product by seeing it over and over again, and wound up with a shelf full of movies I never watched. That and they’re so much longer than songs. Yet watching each of these movies again this year made their impact more full because I was freed of the confines of expectations with the story, and I could marvel at the journey to get there. Could this be the beginning of me turning into someone who sees certain movies over and over again? I guess I wouldn’t mind so much.
4. “A Woman A Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All The Children Go” and “April” PJ Harvey
For the most part the world has moved on from PJ Harvey by 2009, and perhaps that’s the way of how we talk about music. She released a collaboration with John Parrish this year, A Woman A Man Walked By and toured with him singing songs from that album and their previous collaboration, 1996’s Dance Hall At Louse Point. Dance Hall is a favorite of mine, wilder and looser and more demon-full than even Harvey’s harshest work. A Woman… is not as solid and has, I think, about a half album full of the first material of Harvey’s I’d ever truly call inessential.
Yet two songs were Harvey at her mercurial best. “April,” which is like a late night torch song, sung in an old-woman-y rasp with a weird 20s funeral organ cranking behind her. Yet as the song reaches towards a solemn, wrenching climax, it shows Harvey still as a master of composition, creation, of concept spread into four minute songs. Likewise, the title track gets Harvey’s feisty, inscrutable wildness just right. Talk-singing over a blazing power-chording acoustic guitar, she sings of a “woman/man” with “chicken liver balls,” and cries out, “I want his fucking ass! I want your fucking ass!” It’s the defiant, fearless, goofy, aggressive Harvey I’ve loved for as long as I remember, coming through in all her glory.
5. “Anti-Orgasm” and “Sacred Trickster” Sonic Youth
Reading an interview with Lee Ranaldo recently, he stated he thought The Eternal was the best Youth album of this decade, citing its creation as a more jam-based indie record (it was their first with an indie label in 20 years). I wish I could agree overall, much of it is not especially interesting. However, the Kim Gordon led songs are the best for her in over a decade, and the first two of the record are flat out astonishing. “Sacred Trickster” jangles with atonal guitars and propulsive surprise. Singing “What’s it like to be a girl in a band? I don’t quite understand!” Gordon sounds playful, surprised, rejuvenated and completely essential again. And “Anti-Orgasm” really is the jam-fueled indie song Ranaldo mistakes the whole album for – loud, ferocious, drums and guitar and voice exploding with snarky SY anger and mischievousness.
6. The Rolling Stone Best of the 00s Albums List Issue
I’ve spent so much time thinking about what the 00’s were as a decade and compiling a Best of the Decade list for albums and movies. Yet it always struck me that we were foisting a personality that never quite fit onto this decade. Seeing the list Rolling Stone published this month really drove home what the decade was – which is to say, full of the great voices of decades past comingling with this decade’s. Radiohead’s 4 albums appeared on it, so did two from U2 and two from Bruce Springsteen and two from Bob Dylan. So did Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine and PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. I felt like I didn’t have to pretend that everyone from the 90s made music this decade, and this list, with Radiohead’s Kid A claiming its top spot, didn’t exactly match mine. It did register smart, witty opinion on the ten years that preceded us. Other lists seem full of albums I’ve never heard of. What is a list if it’s that persnickety? Read this list and remember why you loved the music that truly existed in these last ten years.
7. Star Trek
I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. My brothers and I would watch episodes, play with fake phasers, and discuss our favorite side characters over dinner. J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek – dare I say it, the best movie of the year – was the episode we always deserved, full of guts, effects, characters, drama, fascination, excitement, justice, and nobility. Abrams knew his reboot would have to be solid and exciting to restart the franchise in a time where everything (even Melrose Place!) seems to be rebooting. He did that and so much more.
8. Yi Yi (2000)
Somewhere deep in the nether regions of my Netflix cue was Yi Yi, a movie I only remembered because in 2000 it kept beating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Best Foreign Film honors in smaller film awards. Watching it, I hadn’t expected it to be the type of movie I’ve fallen so in love with lately – observational, taking in one interesting character’s experience after another, silently, as they go through more and more human scenarios. Yi Yi loves everyone in its world, deeply, even if they don’t love each other. Roger Ebert wrote this year or last about how when he cries in movies, it has to do with the kindness people show each other. I completely agree, and in Yi Yi, a wife who cries to her husband, a grandmother who strokes her granddaughter's hair, or a son speaking to his dead grandmother about how he loved her, these were the things that brought out wells of emotion I love experiencing for fictional characters. Because their experiences aren’t fictional at all.
9. Purple Rain (1984)
This September I saw a midnight showing of Purple Rain, and though it was just a normal showing of a movie and not quite a Rocky Horror event, audience members cheered at the musical numbers, and one superfan even knew the dance moves to all the Morris Day and the Time songs. What Purple Rain is, truly, is a fairly dumb story used to serve as context for extraordinary musical performances. That made Purple Rain the great evocation of Prince’s performance artist magnetism. How about in “Baby I’m A Star” when Prince catwalks up a small set of stairs to find a glowing guitar and shreds it shooting off priapic beams of light into the audience? Or when he humps the stage in “Darling Nikki”? Or stands with will-he-go-on solemnity before introduces “Purple Rain,” ya know, for that “real feeling” effect? Prince was a great showman at his prime here, and junky 80s story and bad acting or no, you can’t take your eyes off him when he performs.
10. “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance” Lady Gaga
The year when all rules were out the window for pop hits. Watching Lady Gaga now, I’m convinced she’s at the forefront of a major pop movement, in which she can wear a corset, or date Kermit The Frog, or reference Hitchcock in a song, winning with her mystery over giant pop audiences and art-indie hipsters at once. This may be the next revolution (evolution?) of music – everything that comes before is suddenly accessible. And how did Gaga accomplish it? Through fun, pop hooks that explode and burn you without you ever minding. “Poker Face” is one of the great singles of modern times, I do not overstate this, and it bookended the year with “Bad Romance,” which indulged Gaga’s art-destruction outrage which must have been the most giant chorus ever created. Viva the future!
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