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.