Top 20 Best Albums of the 00's

I've come to accept that for this decade, a Best Albums list is a dead enterprise. Not only is it full of the great artist of the 90's, it feels like a holdover of concepts developed in the 90's. I could and will go a step further: it feels like a holdover of concepts developed in the 20th century.

Without an "Alternative" to take over, a ska or an electronica to point to definite trends, an Alanis Morissette and Courtney Love to "challenge the notions of women in rock." Without a punk or a hair metal or a disco or a new wave or a British invasion in this decade, we can look back at the last 10 years of music and say, conclusively: What happened? It wouldn't quite be right to say not much, but it certainly requires a different framework. Suddenly I've become an old man reminiscing about the old days at age 27.

Technology happened. First in mp3's promulgated, then Napster, then iPod. More simply than that, the computer happened. Everywhere. We all had one, and we all began to play our music on it. We didn't hold albums and records, and we rarely played them all the way through. This is what I mean - I'm admittedly attached to the concept of the album, and my #1 album of the decade is like an album's last stand - a brilliant fly in the face of the pallbearers of the Album's coffin.

That album - Green Day's American Idiot is also fantastic. I won't divorce my personal taste from this list, but it's worth noting this album isn't entirely a reflection of my tastes. For one, one very deserving album is not on it, the album I once listed as the best album of 2003 and an album I've written extensively about: Lucinda Williams' World Without Tears. I think of it as an all time great. I also think there's no room for it here.

For other artists who were "90's" artists like Lucinda, I had to be careful. PJ Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is as great as an album in the top 10, but I already had two albums released in 2000 by artists who were integral to music in the 90's. To say nothing of the fact that Harvey's two subsequent records - Uh Huh Her and White Chalk probably could have been on this list somewhere.

But they're not, neither is Sleater-Kinney's One Beat, Aimee Mann's Lost In Space, Liz Phair's Liz Phair, or Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, though I loved them all. Their great times are behind them, I suppose.

Somehow I also talked myself out of including Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP - it too was released in 2000 and not especially relevant. I can't quite say why, but it didn't seem right on this list. Neither did The White Stripes Elephant or The Killers' Hot Fuss, though they may feel right to other list writers.

This list feels right about what we went through in this decade, and it had some great music. Let us sit back and appreciate what we had, even if it feels, sometimes, that this decade had the long shadow of its previous, parent century restricting any of its freedom. This list is dominated by 90's artists who got angrier, rowdier, older, and wiser - and is, indeed, topped by one who did all of those things, gloriously.

The 20 Best Albums of the 2000's

1. Green Day American Idiot (2004)

For a minute, the rage in 2004 reached the fury, electricity, and relevance of our great musical past. This is the album that out-sold their 90's standard bearer Dookie, dared to add conceptual weight and operatic tendencies to their approach, and for all purposes, worked. Even when songs like "Extraordinary Girl" lost you in their attempt at story and consistency, the consciousness of the record elevated everything around it. "Holiday" sounded like profound rebellion and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" took anxiety into the 00's pop pantheon like no other single did, becoming a ubiquitous anthem of the down and out.

That can be said of the record, too, whose true subject is the ultimate failure of rebellion, the hopelessness of those who "beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies." Not only was it the true record of the dawning of the rest of our lives, it had the bravery to see the clouds in the dawn.

2. D’Angelo Voodoo (2000)

It seems strange to reward an album released merely three weeks into the decade, but here it sits, a brilliant, unforgettable anachronism - a sonically explosive r/b record built on musicianship, endless jams, soul grooves, and the audacity of an artist. D'Angelo used his liner notes to decry the state of modern r/b, so he took it back a couple of decades. "Playa Playa" overwhelms with horns and harmonies, "Devil's Pie" adds a turntable, and "Left & Right" brings in Method Man and Redman - it moves as far forward as it plunges backwards. Its climax too, the breathlessly naked (like its video) "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is the ultimate soul catharsis - a building of music and ideas expressed in beautiful confession.

3. TV On The Radio Dear Science (2008)

TV On The Radio managed to incorporate everything, yelling, "Hey Jacko, fuck your war" in one breath while intoning poems to the dead over synth and guitar noise in "Halfway Home" with the other. 2008 seemed to me, in a way, as the best year of the 80's - when we embraced our synth and performer greatness and lost the hairgel and spandex. TV On The Radio is the document of how much we've learned - appropriating guitar and keyboards where we need them, hip hop if it fits - but only to serve the poetry, the goal of the record. Science and Science intone and demand answers, yet look to the future, seeing the "Golden Age" coming round. The record ends with a ballin' masterpiece, "Lover's Day" that is sexually explicit alright, but it's also so sweet about what it is - a simple declaration of "I'm gonna take you home."

4. Beck Sea Change (2002)

I get into trouble for telling people my true feelings of Beck - that I found Odelayand Midnite Vultures empty, ultra hipster excuses to start dancing and not feel bad about it. I think Beck's run in the 00's outdid his work of the 90's, by so much, and it's because he gets released in Sea Change to explode with meaning, with sadness, with the realization that "These days, I barely get by." It was a smash - it turned Beck from a weirdo with a two turntables to an artist of range and feeling. It turned the line "I'm tired of fighting for a lost cause" into a radio friendly refrain, even as it made you long for a drink. Sea Change was perhaps incorrectly labeled our modern-times version of Blood On The Tracks, but there's no denying that if this decade need a document to express how people truly, deeply felt, they could begin with the acoustic strumming that opens "The Golden Age," and end with the guitar that learns to "let it pass by the side of the road."

5. Radiohead Kid A (2000)

In a way, Kid A defines Radiohead more than even OK Computer did. This was the record, in 2000, was the album that turned the band into the chroniclers of digital technology's fearful, occasionally bankrupt ascendancy. It put conceptual weight into the notion of words and ideas that betray us. "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon," Thom Yorke sings on the album's opening, "Everything In Its Right Place," a song of such sinisterness you truly believe nothing to be in its right place. His aftertaste was ours - sour, ferociously angry, saddened, silenced. The paranoia would define a second significant Radiohead and Yorke decade, and Kid A would remain unequaled in their work.

6. Kanye West The College Dropout (2004)

The truly great, occasionally forgotten accomplishment of Kanye West is that he actually managed to sneak humanity back into rap - especially in a decade of so much posturing and look-how-every-chick-in-the-club-wants-me bravado. There is one song of that bravado on The College Dropout, and it actually doesn't say that every girl wants West, it says every girl likes to groove out to Anita Baker. "All Falls Down," the song that truly showed West's pop capabilities, is a song about the way images and self-consciousness are crippling, humanizing feelings. In a flow as smooth and inviting as West's, it felt like a true, welcome, even brave breakthrough.

7. DJ Danger Mouse The Grey Album (2003)

The moment technology really began to change music - Danger Mouse's still-not-quite-legally-released triumph is to take two albums and make them better. I mean that. I mean that because it bridged music in a way we didn't know we could do. It acknowledged everything we could do had already been done, so we had to work with what was there. And it made us realize our idols weren't that far apart - creating a digital idol all his own.

8. Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (2006)

It makes sense that in a decade of reappropriation, its greatest, most "artistic" new voice would come from one singing in a manner that made her sound like Patsy Cline - a throwback to the wild, soothing women of country's past. Yet Fox Confessor is an album of modern anxiety, a magnificently full treatise on the notion that speaking the truth takes all of you and can leave you vanquished, forced to speak. She sings of the "Star Witness" who sings when she runs, the widows of St. Angel reveling in their husbands' ashes, murder victims, and even John the Baptist saying what must have seemed - to him - the Truth. Yet by locking her ideas so deeply inside her inscrutable, luscious productions, she created a fascination that was entirely, wonderfully new.

9. Sleater-Kinney The Woods (2005)

Had it not been Sleater-Kinney's curtain call, The Woods would have been the album that turned Sleater-Kinney into psychadelic legends - or at least, to the extent these indie 90's holdovers could be. The Woods finds fury in a manner the already furious post-punkers didn't think they could grasp - not to the Punk recent past, but to the classic rock of decades ago, trading on Keith Moon drums, Hendrix guitar riffs, and pure protest anger. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein sang of ripping themselves open, and they do, on track after track, scream with more command and excitement than they'd ever done before. "The Fox" is so loud and virulent, that by the time they lead you wondering about political bs'ing in "Wilderness," you know longer recognize this band you loved. By the time "What's Mine Is Yours" adds some sex into the mix, you like whose shown up even better.

10. Blackalicious Blazing Arrow (2002)

Ten years after A Tribe Called Quest and Pharcyde, Blackalicious mastered the alternative hip hop creation. Blazing Arrow was and has been unsurpassed as the smoker's rap/soul record for the spoken word and poetry slam crowd, and might have been just as irrelevant and underground if it hadn't been so fun, so wild, and, most importantly, so vast and unrelenting. Blackalicious, and its loquacious, un-stutterable leader Gift of Gab spew forth rhymes at a pace that seems beyond comprehension, but find it evoking positivity (as in the Gil Scott Heron guesting "First in Flight") just as easily as it decries urban decay ("Sky Is Falling"), or wanders into stoner-rock with "Brain Washers," spoken word with "Release, pts. 1, 2, and 3", or experimental music with "Chemical Calisthenics." The album is 75 minutes of pure hip hop heaven, casting a light on the possibilities of rappers, poets, thinkers , and dancers alike who want to cram all they can into one, bold, encompassing statement. By the time the final, gorgeous soul number "Day One" promises to "get your soul back," you think it may in fact have done just that.

11. Girl Talk Feed The Animals (2008)

12. PJ Harvey Stories From The City, Stories From the Sea (2000)

13. Outkast Speakerboxx/The Love Below (2003)

14. Bob Dylan Love and Theft (2001)

15. Jay-Z The Black Album (2002)

16. Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001)

17. Madonna Music (2000)

18. The Dixie Chicks The Long Way Around (2006)

19. LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver (2007)

20. Queens of the Stone Age Songs For The Deaf (2002)

A scene I love

This week I watched Yi Yi, the Taiwanese movie directed by Edward Yang that in 2000 had the rare ability to beat out Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Best Foreign Film in several key US film awards, even in the year that Crouching Tiger was supposed to be the foreign movie that made it ok to like foreign movies. There's a lot to love about Yi Yi, and there's a lot that I did love, but there's one very brief scene I want to talk about.

In the scene, Ting-Ting, a thoughtful, quiet teenage girl who has not slept since her grandmother had a stroke prepares for a date. The teenage boy she's seeing was dating her friend, but since turned his affections towards Ting-Ting. She holds up a khaki skirt and a blue button down shirt in a mirror and contemplates them briefly. We then cut to her date, with Ting-Ting looking stately and beautiful in the same skirt and shirt. The topic of her outfit doesn't come up on the date, and perhaps Yang, who also wrote the movie, thought in his mind about Ting-Ting meeting Fatty, her date, and him saying "you look pretty" and that was the end of it. Perhaps he said nothing at all. One of the great accomplishments of Yi Yi is the ability to look at two characters ostensibly doing nothing and to envision a probable wealth of experiences before or after the moment we're witnessing that occurred between the characters were seeing. They are complex, but fully visible. As Fatty tells Ting-Ting during their date, all people's decisions and actions are beautiful, and movies help us live the lives of others in order to see this.

The truth is the actions of that scene in which Ting-Ting picks out her outfit are related to that view of people as beautiful regardless of their decisions, and actually I immediately thought of three other movies and works that had a similar scene - a character in private determining what he/she would wear, and that outfit showing up later with little consequence. Still, every time I've seen this scene, it makes me realize that what I'm watching has been written with an eye of what people go through to convince others that we're ok, by coming up with details that conceal themselves. A writer and director going through the trouble of contemplating what their characters do when we're not looking, because we all do it, go through motions to make our insecurities concealed.

Here are the other scenes and what they meant. In The Sopranos season 5 episode "Sentimental Education," Carmela prepares for a date with AJ's principal while she and Tony are separated. We don't quite know yet that he and Carmela quite have feelings for each other, but we do see Carmela analayzing her looks in the mirror and are drawn, perhaps for the first time in The Sopranos, to the sight of Carmela's cleavage. Yet when we see Carmela at dinner, she looks beautiful, composed. Robert, the principal, compliments her on how natural she is. We know he's not wrong, but of course, even a sense of being natural requires effort.

Another. In the superb Swedish movie Show Me Love, directed by master humanist Lukas Moodyson, we're shown, like no American movie has truly captured, the behavior of teenagers who are as fully irrational, insecure, and who have not developed into full adults yet. Show Me Love has so much love for its characters, and you share that love with them. The movie is about two young girls who develop feelings for one another, but the moment I knew how much I loved it was in the observation of Johan, who becomes, briefly, the boyfriend of Elin, the gorgeous blonde protagonist. Johan, in a mirror before meeting up with his friends, obsessively fixes his hat so that it sits at the exact right angle on his head. This simple observation, to me, defines the life of teenage boys - so much effort into the presentation of who they are.

Finally, the most notable example - Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton. Swinton won an Oscar for her work, and I think so much of it comes back to the contrasting scene in which we're introduced to her character, Karen Crowder. In it, we see her being introduced to her company, speaking regally, keeping her act together, cross-cut with her at home, trying on her clothing, practicing her speech in the mirror, working out her professional gesturing, stumbling over her words.

When speaking to Swinton on the red carpet at the Oscars, critic Richard Roeper described this scene as showing Karen's "vulnerability." I don't think that gets at the scene exactly correctly - it doesn't show us her "other side," it shows us the mask Karen's corporate guise is hiding. It shows a person barely keeping a lid on her anxiety and panic. It shows her terrified of being "found out." This scene is, of course, longer and more intricate than the others, but it shows the same sense of consciousness. When an actor and writer combine to truly understand a scene in which a character gets changed - it understands the secrets we all keep just to do things described as "every day," the pressure to appear ordinary. Maybe as this scene becomes more recognized, it'll start to appear in works I find artificial, but for now, this scene is an indicator that I'm seeing a true work of art.

Pictured: Ting-Ting's lovely white dress in Yi Yi, Carmela's date in The Sopranos, the young women of Show Me Love, Swinton in Clayton

Massaging the History

This past weekend, in a dizzying music-festival haze, I got to watch Sonic Youth headline the Capitol Hill Block Party here in Seattle from a window in an office building just above the stage. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, the city of Seattle closes Pike between Broadway and 12th in Capitol Hill, turning one of its most bar, restaurant, and coffee shop heavy areas into what is basically a 4-square-block concert venue full of indie performers, overpriced Miller High-life tall boys, and Seatle's best hipsters wandering around (I found two people wearing my favorite Sleater-Kinney Dig Me Out t-shirt from 1997, no doubt in anticipation of a set by current screaming-girl-semi-punk reigning champs The Gossip).

Watching just above the stage in a semi-VIP stupor caps off a decade of rather insane devotion to Sonic Youth for me. I've followed every movement of their career since buying Daydream Nation as a junior in high school. I maintain that their work from 1985-1995, between Bad Moon Rising and Washing Machine is the longest, greatest streak of artistic relevance and perfection, with each record a triumph of rock's greatest not-quite-punk noise artistes. The band has now made 6 records since then, roughly one every two years, and that doesn't include any of their strict-noise-symphony SYR recordings that get them branded as pretentious.

Anyway, the career of Sonic Youth is not what I want to write about. Instead, from my office window, I found myself, in one blissful moment, yelling to Kim Gordon as she moved her immaculately chromed-out high heeled shoe to her foot pedal thing, "Kim! I Love you! And I love your dress!" She was wearing a tight chrome mini-skirty dress thing that made her look like a metal go-go girl. Kim Gordon, mind you, is 56 years old. When you look at her up close, as I was lucky to do in meeting her, briefly, 3 years ago as the band toured for Rather Ripped, you notice a few more wrinkles, and her petulant black-eyeshadow-heavy eyes that always look a little fearsome, a little unpredictable, and very very commanding.

Kim plays bass and guitar for Sonic Youth, along with her husband Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo. She sings lead on roughly 30-40% of the songs on each album. Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney once called her the greatest female influence of all women in rock because Gordon was, unlike most female rockers, an equal in her band - a guitarist on other tracks, a mind coming up with ideas, etc.

The truth is, she also is essential to the personality of every Sonic Youth record. Moore may sing on more songs, but in a way, he's a sort of bellweather for each album, the anchor by which Gordon's flights of fancy return to, and where Ranaldo's poetic asides - 1 or 2 per album - jet back to as well. This year, Sonic Youth released The Eternal, their 15th proper album, and initially, I was less interested in it than in any previous record. This week at Block Party, though, Sonic Youth - as they typically do when touring in support of an album - played almost the entire thing, and only 4 songs from their back catalogue, each of which was made before 1990. They proved to me a couple of things - that the album deserved an additional listen, and that they were just as good as they ever were.

Don't get me wrong, The Eternal is not as good as their 85-95 run of perfection, but it is a well made album by good professionals. The reason that the record is not great is the same reason that the band probably won't make a full out bad album - the band approaches each record like a painting, specifying their noise and furious anarchy to each track until it sounds just off kilter enough, but not so much so that it loses all comprehension as a song (although, it should be said, it used to lose all comprehension as a song. And when it did, as in 1985's Bad Moon Rising, it was a better album. Not that they should try and make that album again). If you listen to the opening song from 2006's Rather Ripped, , "Reena," you'll hear it - it's a song that isn't actually that interesting, Gordon simply singing a refrain of "You keep me coming home again," but the music and production of it turns it into a pretty serviceable, not bad rock song.

The Eternal finds Gordon actually creating the best songs with her at the helm since Washing Machine, and it's because she again finds her defiant, childlike, petulant, shrieking, vulnerable core again. Thurston Moore's songs on the record are, almost universally, unnecessary. Not bad per se, but unnecesary. Gordon's songs are necessary. On "Anti-orgasm," she breaks out a bitchy chanting that reminded me of Washing Machine's "Panty Lies," a Gordon classic. On "Sacred Trickster," she (and the band's jangly guitars with her) commands "I want you to levitate me!" with the sort of sexual ferocity she brought to her best tracks 25 (!) years ago. I kid you not, this song could have fit in on 1987's classic Sister except she wasn't as commanding then and didn't know what she wanted to say with the same specificity.

The greatest song on the record, by all accounts even the best song of SY's Block Party set, is its final number "Massage The History," which I think is Gordon singing in a voice she's never broken out before. She sounds old, vulnerable, her voice groaningly low, like a lover before bed, exhausted, singing to a flame, "wishing you were here with me, wishing we could massage the history, the history." I have no idea if it's correct, but in my mind, it's a song to Moore, of longing for the sense of familiarity they share by experiencing the entire Sonic Youth experience together. "You're so close to me" she sings like a long string of moaning in the song's bridge (or, whatever its "middle" should be called), and it's true - she and Moore are like one entity of rock noise and expression.

How did she make a song - and, indeed, a record of songs - full of this much feeling and discovery? The truth is, I've counted her out since 1998. Here is a brief trip back through the history of Kim Gordon songs in Sonic Youth's post-Washing Machine "adult" phase.


2006 Rather Ripped
Gordon sang the album's opener "Reina," and, basically, a couple boppity songs - a love anthem "The Neutral" ("He's not a poet or a mystic... he's just neutral"), and "What A Waste", the most accurately titled song ever at Gordon's helm. Her best number on here is the slow-burning, beautiful "Turquoise Boy," but like the album around it, Gordon on Rather Ripped plays the part of a competent rock professional. Her voice is at her most Neco-esque and straightforward.

2004, Sonic Nurse
"Pattern Recognition" is a strong album opener, but like the Ripped songs, is fairly straighforward. That's true even of wannabe wacky tracks "Dude Ranch Nurse" and "Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream," a giddy love fest for Mariah Carey, its chorus of "Hey hey little baby breakdown." That song is at least fun, but Gordon's squeaky-girl delivery is just a pose to contrast with the material. The truth is, I believed these good times much less than the good times of "Panty Lies" or Goo's "My Friend Goo," which are just as off-kilter, but you believed them. The album's beautiful penultimate number "I Love You, Golden Blue" is one of the best SY songs of this decade, but is as close as SY has ever come to a slow dance.

2002, Murray Street
I do believe Murray Street to be the great album of Sonic Youth's "adult," post-1995 phase - it's warm and happy, and you feel happy for them for being in a place to produce it. The Gordon songs are good - "Plastic Sun" is bitchy and loud, and "Sympathy For The Strawberry," at 8 minutes, is a build to be proud of. Still, are they as good as Gordon as her most unhinged? I can't say they are.

2000, NYC Ghosts and Flowers
NYC Ghosts and Flowers is perhaps the most underrated of all of Youth's albums ever - immediately dismissed by most, it's the last of their conceptually driven records, each of Moore and Gordon and Ranaldo's tracks aligned on the same notion of regret, mystery, ghostliness. The album is the most claningly abstract of the Sonic Youth recordings that aren't labeled SYR, but Ghosts and Flowers is mournful and haunting. Gordon has one No Wave ramble, "Lightning," that I never listen to. There's "Side2side" which is sorta neat, but is mostly a joke. Her real contribution (it's a short album) is "Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)," which is at its core the heart of the record - dismissive of her, if not the entire alternative movement (it is titled Nevermind, after all). I love it, but in its petulant half-growl, I'll just say I believe her more now.

1998, A Thousand Leaves
And this is where we lost her. A Thousand Leaves is the first Sonic Youth record to fail at its intentions and ushered in this modern, half-way there era of who they are. Lee Ranaldo's songs are extraordinary on the record, Moore's are solid, but from a different, melodic planet. The song "Hits of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsburg)" hints at who they are now - it's an 11 minute ode to a poet. Now Sonic Youth had become elder statesmen of the fine art community, so, they sing about fine art. Gordon to me on this record lost her mind, and not in an appealing way. "French Tickler" and "Female Mechanic Now on Duty" molest her themes of female subjugation and start to verge on caricature. "Female Mechanic" especially sounds to me like Gordon trying to call a do-over on "Washing Machine," arguably her greatest song, ne, work of art. The album begins and ends with more noise rambles - "Contre Le Sexisme" and "Heather, Angel." But mostly, the curious element is "The Ineffable Me," full of shrieks and spoken word and outre "shock" cussing: "A cushy job/ a pussy's job/ a cumjunkie's job/ makes my dick throb." Gordon has always pushed the sexual nature of her songs, and that's fine, but this seems like either a climax of all of her work, or producing those elements that borders on tedium. In Washing Machine, their previous record and last great work, Gordon's songs climaxed in "Little Trouble Girl," a song of sexual vulnerability (its teenage character finds herself pregnant), and you imagined leaving the teen of Gordon's subconscious lost and wandering to adulthood.

What was there, then, to make of "The Ineffable Me" (maybe it can take the best-titled song award from "What A Waste")? In a way, that song, pushing Gordon's approach so far forward made her lose it. Her songs are for the most part, until The Eternal, seviceable, good songs by a good person and a talented artist. Sonic Youth has always managed to be an incredibly stable band living incredibly stable lives (Moore and Gordon have been married for 25 years!), perhaps because they get their noise and confusion out through their music. Yet "The Ineffable Me" was too noisy and too confusing, too ineffable, and ultimately, too untrue. It's not until "Massage The History" that I truly glimpsed the Gordon that was left behind at the end of Washing Machine, and I marvelled at how truthfully she grew up into an adult.

Pictured: Gordon, and my head from our spot above the Block Party on Pike, Gordon sorta visible in the Silver Lamme thing in the middle of the stage.

Death waltz

I sat down to write about the songs that help me cope with loss, but I knew that would be a piece that would never mean very much to me. My father died two weeks ago today as I write this, a Monday, and the week that followed would be a difficult one. However, it's not as though a calm, unencumbered life was occurring before. My father was sick for 19 months, and this year, my father's "bad" times during treatment for his colon cancer were worse. Sometimes he'd need morphine and wouldn't be able to speak or interact much, except for the rare protestation to something, a sad muffled response to let you know he was still around, still processing everything he saw before him.

But maybe I'll go back a little bit further. I love music. I spend so much of my energy writing about music, trying recapture the experience of feeling, truly feeling, a great line, or chorus, or guitar part. I never thought that my obsession was anything out of the ordinary until I met people who were surprised and impressed with my own musical knowledge, but then again, I grew up in a house with my father and my older brothers, whose reaction to music was similar to my own. My oldest brother Josh, 7 years older than me, was my first example of listening - to awful, awful music. It was 1989, he was a fan of Janet Jackson and Tears for Fears and most of all Madonna, as were the vast majority of teenagers at the time. Then, my Dad, as he would until his death, listened to Bob Dylan and the Band and Van Morrison, artists we made fun of him for. So far, this is the same story of any children born to parents who, in their teenage years, found a promise and release in that sort of music as it was released. We will never know what it was like to live in a time when this music was the new music of the time.

When I went to college in 2000, my music taste was different from my father's, and then somewhere down the line, it got a little bit closer. I owned many Bob Dylan albums, more than anyone else I know, but less than my father. I have a fondness for the Band and Van Morrison without the same unconditional love and awe of everything they touched. Again, this is not especially the point.

In March of this year, I think, or maybe April, or maybe February, I was home, and my father was not doing well. I was there for a weekend and our interactions were almost all from his bedside. He was in bed most of the day, but would get up on occasion - to shower, to change into pajama pants, to do things that sufferers of colon cancer must do on a daily basis that they too will ask their children to leave the room for. Knowing what he went through at the end, this was actually a relatively functional time for my father.

But there was something else he'd get up to do - put on a cd. Other people might argue with the logic of putting your stereo on the other side of the room when you were sick, I certainly would have mine near me, but Dad wanted to get up to flip through his cd's and pick one. This day, it was The Healing Game, a 90's "comeback" cd of sorts by Van Morrison, and I must use comeback in quotation marks because it was an album, basically, for aging fans like my father who continue to pay attention to his career, and this album had a slightly larger fan base that who you would intuitively think that would encompass.

Dad listened to four or five songs from this record, and I recall hearing "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Sometimes We Cry" for years. This day, Dad put on his socks and played those songs as he walked around the room. When you're sick, walking around a room is something you must plan to do, work up to, think about, tell people about, and then finally do. If you do it like my father did, you push yourself to make it last for four or five songs. The final, of course, being "The Healing Game," to which I may always remember him sliding on the carpet, punching into the air, as though mocking Jake LaMotta preparing for a fight in Raging Bull, a movie for which my old video copy sat by a TV. Who knows when the last time Dad watched that movie was, but I know it was likely in his mind - my father's memory is like my own, and some things stay put.

I want to talk about the word "may" for a minute in the preceding paragraph. I may always remember Dad sliding on the carpet, punching the air, an act which had a certain significance to my father, who probably was in the middle of the knowledge that, finally, he will never recover from the illness that ails him. I can say I may always remember this image in this context because I don't listen to that song on my own. I don't even like 90's Van Morrison. The song is not one of the 8700 or so on my iPod, and will not come up on random. I've now mentioned my Dad's love of the song and album to many people and played it at my Uncle's house while we had a reception for my father's funeral. I thought of this many times, and when an association like that is rehearsed enough times, it forms a memory that is difficult to erase. Perhaps I would have forgotten that had he recovered and played the song in other contexts around the house, as he had for years - while cooking, while talking with me over coffee, playing in the background as we planned our day. Because those things won't happen again, and I will likely not play it, the song will not really have the chance to have its context adjusted.

When I was a teenager, I used to attach songs to all of my friends, and even make lists saying which song reminded me of which friend. Julian, my best friend from high school, was "Man On The Moon" by REM, because he loved REM and I helped him get an email address that referenced it. I think. Now, thinking of those page long lists of songs attached to people I have very little relationship with but remember pretty well, I can't think of any others. Though we often talk about the songs we attach to other people, we are typically using songs from our own lives and forcing them into a context they don't usually fit. It is July now, and many stations and music sites will talk about their "songs of the summer," of which, regardless of your taste in music, the first one that will likely pop in your head is a song called "Summertime," be it by Mahalia Jackson or Sublime or Will Smith. They were smart to force that context on you by putting summer in the title.

I once saw a "Summer Songs" list that included "Sherry Darling" by Bruce Springsteen, whose chorus, with a wailing sax behind it, sings "Well there's a hot sun burning on a blacktop." I can get behind this, that's a wonderful, hot night type of song, but again, the context is forced - I'll also enjoy the song and think of hot nights burning on blacktops in February or November. My friends have songs and artists they love, perhaps less than I love the ones I love, but probably very few things will "instantly remind me" of who they are or our memories; those things we force into place because this is the way in culture that we discuss music - as deeply associated with memory and experience.

Music is, of course, deeply associated with memory and experience, but the length of those experiences retaining in our memory is more of a questionable thing. For example, for years, my friends and I had dance parties in the house some of us rented in Boulder. We'd play "What You Waiting For" by Gwen Stefani or "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," or "Roses" by Outkast - a song which prompted a deep breath and fast-as-you-can sing along to its "Well she's got a hottie's body" lightning-speed bridge in the song's center. We'd play many other songs too, but the truth is even when I hear those songs now, I am not, as writers of music would have us believe, transported back to those nights in those living rooms, though I know and remember those times being wonderful. The song is just a song. I do not remember the clothes I wore on those nights either, the food in the kitchen, the hat my friend Dylan wore, and in a way, all those things are equally relevant.

We speak of music and our memories in a way that feeds our narrativization of our lives. We see our experiences as stories, and we feel saddened that we are no longer having dance parties to Outkast's "Roses" or sharing coffee with our fathers while Van Morrison sings in the background. Music can make you feel experiences of some kind while you listen to it, and so much music has moved me, I would hope that is self evident by now. Yet a song is just a song, and portable as it is, a song is easier to carry with us throughout our lives than the people we love and share experiences with, because experiences happen and vanish into collective storytelling. The song, as Robert Plant reminds us, will always remain the same.

So, when my father died, I had some thoughts that came out in tunes that floated around my head. "Thought you should know Daddy died today/ he closed his eyes and he left here at 12:03." This is what Poe sings at the beginning of "Exploration B," on Haunted, a wonderful album she made dealing with the death of her own father. Easy enough for me to recall, but I had no choice on the matter, and I certainly never listened to that record with my own dad, who would have hated the whole thing. I thought of Dionne Warwick singing "A chair is still a chair, even if there's no one sitting there" in "A House Is Not A Home." I don't know why I thought of that line, maybe others have a better idea. For my father's eulogy, I spoke about Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell" and shared a memory of my father speaking to me of that song's meaning. The association I think of when its mournful guitar begins playing is especially sad, but that now perhaps has more to do with writing a eulogy relating to that song. And this forever will not be the case. I played Dylan's "Buckets of Rain" and "Man In The Long Black Coat" too, and I suppose I don't know why either. Again, I feel I had no choice in the matter, this is what I wanted to hear, and you don't argue with a man in my position going through what I was going through, whatever that was.

Songs help you get through life, or they help me get through life, and sometimes you hear a great song and believe it was written to reflect your experience. Maybe it was. Maybe it's nothing like your experience. Maybe it has lyrics you ignore as inapplicable and focus on the lines you cannot get out of your head for reasons you cannot entirely put into words. My Dad is gone, and this was difficult, and the music remains, some that comforts me, some that I will have to keep on my shelf for a while. But a chair is still a chair, even if there's no one sitting there.

2008: The Best Year Of The 80s

I haven't yet decided if the return of neon greens and oranges and pinks into the everyday styles of current fashion make me feel old, nor am I now able to hear what I thought a year ago when I first heard “Electric Feel” by MGMT and thought it the completion of the 80’s triumphant return into pop culture. It’s been happening for a while, for years even – back in 2001, when Jennifer Lopez had a hit with “Love Don’t Cost A Thing,” people in the know declared her giant hoop earrings, her open-shouldered shirts and big sunglasses a triumphant return of the 80’s into our every day style.

But it wasn’t until these last couple of years, with techno back into the beats of top 40 hits by Kanye West and Timbaland, and with the blazing geometrical lines of fashion that the 80’s I know has returned – 80’s by way of the early 90’s. By then, in the pop of 1991 or so, the 80’s had become an embarrassing trash heap of trends. The hair metal bands (who, honestly, weren’t exactly of quality to begin with) had gotten into their 3rd for 4th generations – Britny Fox and Trixter had major radio hits instead of Poison and Dokken. Pop stars like Pat Benatar had given way to Cathy Dennis, and this was, without a doubt, a downgrade.

And the loud fashions – not exactly quiet in the 80’s – had turned into the bright neons that are back now. Last weekend at Sasquatch – a what’s what of indie fashion trends – had so much neon in every pair of shorts, t-shirt, shoe, and sunglasses, I thought that I had reverted back to 1991. Actually it’s all of pop culture that has.
But first a theory – 2008 was the best year of the 1980’s. This is something I believe. If there is one song that sounded “new,” or fresh, or “revolutionary” to rock music, it was one that could not truly be considered far off from the trends in pop too. I’m thinking of “Kids” by MGMT, a song I heard blazing from probably a dozen speakers wandering around the Gorge campround. Its iconic, “old sounding” synth is the sound that made it ok for indie rockers to dance again. The Killers and Hot Chip and Scissor Sisters had been laying the ground work for a couple years, but with MGMT, American Apparel and all of Seattle had a sound and a signature to hang their fashionable hats on.

And in 2008, there was so little difference between MGMT’s sound and Britney Spears’ – “Womanizer,” a plum gem of a robo-techno pop song, could stand side by side with it. Same with Madonna’s “4 Minutes” (which even more fetishized the early-80’s synth sound), Christina Aguilera’s “Keeps Getting Better,” Chris Brown’s “Forever,” Santigold’s “Lights Out,” Walter Meego’s “Forever,” Hot Chip’s “Ready For The Floor,” Chromeo’s “Fancy Footwork,” Rihanna’s “Disturbia,” Pink’s “So What” – each had a blast of synth that sounded just like things you might have heard 20 years ago, and though half of those songs were top 40 pop hits and half were indie rock songs, you could DJ a party straight through with them and get no complaints.

It happened in fashion it happened in music. In movies, the best performance of the year was given by Heath Ledger doing a modern, updated, more “real” and “intense” version of a performance given 20 years ago by Jack Nicholson. That’s a great place to start – 2008 was the 80’s revisited after the 90’s and early 00’s made us appreciate what was “real.” The 90’s were subdued, back to basics, “understated” to make up for the ridiculous excess that defined the 80’s. It’s safe to say our hairstyles have not reverted to where they were 20 years ago (they’re still where they were 30 and 40 years ago), but that just proves my point – 2008 was the year we did the 80’s without the embarrassing stuff. No hair metal. No hair spray. No mesh shirts and no tiger-print spandex. The movies had real acting, were directed by real directors. Our action heroes were Christian Bale and Daniel Craig, men whose grit comes from having a code and a seriousness that cannot be deterred.
Now we know how to do things the right way, and can actually enjoy the parts we should be ashamed of. It’s not kitsch, it’s a sort of acceptance of the fun before the “serious” set in, while retaining the best part of the “serious” 90’s and 00’s. The truth is, this music is better than the pop and indie rock of 1988, bands are more competent and, with 90’s business savvy, know how to produce a more complete product.

Which brings me to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the fantastic sunglasses. Whereas MGMT can accurately be described as “80’s influenced,” Yeah Yeah Yeahs go a step further – you could listen to “Heads Will Roll” or “Softshock” off of this year’s It’s Blitz and find it difficult to distinguish them from a song released in 1989 or 1991. I wonder if the improvement we made in 2008 has morphed into just a return to what we were. Sometimes I see these trends and feel old – I’ve lived long enough to see the world come full circle in pop culture. But then I realize this is where these trends have started – as nostalgia for a time when we took things less seriously, for the loud colors and excess of our childhoods. Now we’re adult enough to make these trends work. It’s Blitz is without a doubt the best album released thus far this year. How long can we maintain this 80’s trend? I don’t know, but I’m glad to be back in a pop culture and indie culture that’s enjoying itself again.

Sasquatch, celebrity, and a very good weekend

It took me hours at Sasquatch - the Northwest's annual, awesome three day music festival over Memorial Day weekend - to realize that the black sunglasses with hot pink/yellow/green arms were not purchased by everyone, but were provided by a sponsor for the weekend, 1-800-Quit-Now, an anti-smoking group. You couldn't tell the difference between those sunglasses (of which the green pair I owned as a 2nd grader in 1990) and the ones that must have cost $70-100 in the Volcom or Ray Ban or Oakley variety that everyone else was wearing.

How do I best describe these sunglasses? Very round in front, kitschily plastic, primitively assembled. Neon. Definitely neon. Everything is neon now, it turns out - board shorts in hot green, t-shirts of electric blue with a triangle in heightened shocking orange. For a while you could look from the hill down onto the mainstage and see fashion choices like a highlighter - a great neon yellow line from shirt to wristband to sunglasses.

I'm 27 years old now, and I have to assume I'm above the average age of this year's Sasquatch attendees, so I have to wonder if the throwback to all things late-80's/early-90's is kitschy to your average college student, or it's of the same recycled fashion trends that brought us back "boot cut" jeans and fuzzy corduroy jackets. Now I see fashion that reminds me of the font used on Joan Jett's I Love Rock and Roll album covers, or the opening credits sequence of Saved By The Bell. I try and get more information about how much Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs reminds me of Siouxsie Sioux and find virtually no one online has mentioned the subject - to me, it just seems the most obvious conclusion.

What a great time though. I thought often during the weekend about what a great idea music festivals like Sasquatch are - three days of nothing but listening to music, drinking, smoking pot, and doing nothing but meeting others and talking about music. I spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like to look at this concert from the eyes of a 19-year-old than of a 27-year-old. In fact, when I met people, I found that one of the most commonly asked questions - by me and others - was how old you were. It defined a person's perspective of the whole experience.

So now, I have two perspectives I don't understand in trying to frame what this weekend must be like to others - first, college kids, of which I am no longer one. Second, indie rock fans, of which I've always been totally confounded by. Let me talk about the shows that talked directly to the me's of the audience first.

Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor has been working out A LOT. He's huge! This was not what he looked like when he ran around in the mud during Woodstock 94 and knocked his guitarist over. He's 48 now, but with a good cropped haircut and successful brown dye, he looks ten years younger. More importantly, he looks like Bruce Springsteen. He jaunts with the same energy that never seems to dissipate, waves his hands in the air, runs around the stage with the same fervor. If the music wasn't so glum and noisy, it would feel like an identical show. That's high compliment - Reznor brought out his A material, and even made you want to listen to the work he's been doing since whenever it was you stopped paying attention to Nine Inch Nails (for me, it was since a casual listen to With Teeth, apparently 3 records back). Reznor sounds exactly the same as he always has, he remembers his strongest material even if it's songs you'd never thought he'd performed ("Gave Up" from 1992's Broken, or "Burn" from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack). Despite songs like "Terrible Lie" (Sample lyric: "Why am I seething with this animosity... Can this world really be as sad as it seems"), the result is totally, viscerally electrifying. Reznor's Nails launched an empire, not just industrial music, but in defining the entire expression of dismay and ambivalence by its fans. He deserves his King of Gloom crown still.

TV On The Radio. It turns out 2008's Dear Science was so universally hailed by critics, TV On The Radio has fans who are college-aged now. I don't know why this thought never occurred to me, but it hadn't - the band's labyrinthine, evocative and meticulous lyrics must have connected with a younger audience, because by the time the band reached "Golden Age," everyone sang along. Part of me resented everyone knowing TV On The Radio, an art rock band who forges along with a personality that's so unique, they seem to be remaking rock around them. The set was extraordinary - a great plunge into the great catalogue the band has built up with increasing fanfare. For once I felt like the right age at the show, but then, it turns out, so did the rest of the audience (which, of course, also had plenty of members much older than I am).

Kings of Leon. Kings of Leon have been around making well heard underground rock for so long, it took me a minute to realize - with the entire audience singing along to the ferocious "Crawl," played second in the band's headlining set - that this is one of the most successful rock bands in the world right now. Only By The Night, the band's 2008 release, is still in the top 20 nearly a year after its release, and somehow has spawned three hit singles (by whatever measure you use to call something a "hit single," however the singalongs to "Crawl" and the sorta-filler single "Use Somebody" are plenty great indicators). Still, Kings' appeal is to the drunken frat boy in all of us, a grunge and PBR version of The Rolling Stones. The band is heavy on filler - it becomes fairly clear the difference between a serviceable song like "Notion" and a truly, unmistakably great song like "Crawl" or "The Bucket" or "Black Thumbnail" (which loudly, brilliantly closed the set) is still quite massive: the former you enjoy because you're at a concert, but it just takes more work to love. Caleb Followill looks like a baby-faced version of Ozzy Osborne, or a rocker-faced version of Bryan Adams, but he holds a crowd like no one besides Karen O, who I'll talk about in a minute.

Santigold. Santigold is the plucky, adorable Brooklyn indie sensation whose awesome 80's throwback single "Lights Out" can currently be heard on a Sprite commercial (why, Santi, why?). Her set is even more 80's - a sign of smart branding - two dancers in high-wasted gold shorts and big round plastic shades, dancing ever so erratically, but mostly standing as blankly as a Robert Palmer backup dancer. She sounds just as wild on stage as she does on record, managing to hit all of those bird-call "kee-kee-kee"s on "Creator" without having to cough or anything. Santigold probably has a big indie following now, but with her hip-hop/punk/pop/dance sensibility, she's the sort of artist that people would need to go out of their way to dislike.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Without a doubt the greatest performance I saw all weekend was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I haven't seen them before, and I've read since their arrival with Fever to Tell in 2003, about Karen O's fiery onstage antics, but I hadn't thought much of them besides being another Patti Smith also-ran. She is, but so much more. With her shocking green tights, heavily-triangled neon and white mumu cinched off at the waste, and single pink glove with glow-in-the-dark stitching (see it on stage in the picture above), Karen O also is the indie college kid's female president of sorts. She has a trancelike smile, and her antics aren't "antics" so much as they are an expression of herself. Say what you will about the band, this woman has presence. Not only can you not keep your eyes off of her, she makes whatever song she's singing into a dizzy, energetic, whatever-goes evocation of the current revival of 80's and 90's synth kitschiness. Suddenly the highlighter slashed crowd has someone to lead them.

But more than that, Yeah Yeah Yeahs impressed me not just as a great band - something I've never thought of them as before - but also of a band who's smartly at the top of their times. They rode the early-00's guitar revival back with Fever to Tell, pulled real Siouxsie Sioux 80's punk into 2006's Show Your Bones, and this year released It's Blitz, a techno-dance influenced album that follows the indie trend set by MGMT and The Killers to let some fun back in the rock paradigm, something that's worked so well I believe it's truly behind the early 90's revival that's so taken over fashion. I loved the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' performance so much, I bought It's Blitz on the way to work the day following the concert, and I realize that because of O, and because of the great, spitty sangfroid at the center of the record, it's pure Yeahs, and more importantly, a pure evocation of what youth trends are doing to music right now. In the early part of the decade, albums like American Idiot by Green Day and The Woods by Sleater-Kinney helped show rock at the forefront of anti-Bush political anger. Now people wnat to have fun again. The Yeahs anger then actually isn't that far away from their fun now.

I'm never going to be younger again, so, I'll never know what it's like to be a 19 or 17 or 21 year old at Sasquatch, but I know that the music I loved in the 90's I thought of as the first music of its kind, a type of thing that all of music history had worked up to create. Now I see things more as trends, great bands happened in the past and great bands (albeit less of them) happen now. I often have said that 2008 was a great year for music and was, in its way, the greatest year of the 80's - 80's trends tookover music, fashion, movies, and in 2008, we did all of them better and without as much to be embarrassed about. This might be the first time I haven't thought it was better to be a teenager in the late 90's, when rock music was at a different type of peak - because life as a music fan, as led by Karen O's smile now, just seems like such a great time.

I read one review when I got home about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs set that described the band and O's magnetism as something that "hasn't been generated since Nirvana." This, to me, was clearly a teenager writing - a common problem of rock writers, constantly overstating the excitement of seeing a great artist. Karen O, despite my frustration of not finding her original, is a true rock star - and in any case, even if she is repeating Sioux or Patti Smith (which she is), or Chrissie Hynde (which she is not, despite many claims - the similarities end at the haircuts) there are so few fiery rock women of this vein in rock history, a little repetition could potentially not be such a bad thing. I had always looked at the Yeahs a little competitively - taking some fame that should have gone to PJ Harvey or Sleater-Kinney, but this view undersells O tremendously.

She sang an acoustic version of "Maps," the band's two-cord love song that everyone seems to know, and introduced it as the "Yeah Yeahs love song," and played it softly with an acoustic guitar. The song was already clearly quieter than the band's entire catalogue, and is hardly the first or best love song ever written, but O's drama and disarming smile is such that on stage, holding a finger to the audience on each "Wait - they don't love you like I love you," everyone not just sang along but felt along. If music like this is continuing to repeat all that we love and know of music, then let us forever have more of the same.