Naught in Love: The 100 Best Albums of the 2000s (100 through 91)

PopMatters recently reached out to me and a horde of other writers to compile a list of the best music of the naughts, asking for top ten lists and assigning selections based on some secretive tally that the magickal editorial doktor Brice Ezell comprised in his lair.  This was a task that both myself and PM intentionally put off at the end of the decade.  For me, the scope was just too vast.  More music had been released during that decades than perhaps in all previous ones combined, and it was also what many would call the prime period for music consumption for a young man (ages 18 to 28).  There was so much room for error and misremembrance, and frankly the selections that kept running through my head made me look like the worst type of hipster plankton. 

Yet, the naughts are fascinating because for all the vastness of its archive and the stellar quality of many of the selections on this list, it really wasn’t a terrific time for music.  It was a period in which music mattered so much, but was valued so little.  Music was everywhere.  We constantly retreated into earbuds to ignore the world for it, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and  a first world reduced to the rubble of permanent precarity in all out class warfare.  Lyrics became far less relevant as the words that slipped from vocalists mouths’ either sounded too opaque, too sincere, or too in touch with those anxious influences.  Thus, much of the best music was that which circumvented language altogether to distort the voice and rupture its capabilities in defining an era.  Autotune, chopped and screwed lines, pitch-bent genders, and glitchy stutters proved how disoriented and disconnected we truly were, and how preferable that was to being in sync with the fucked reality of a kind of permanent dystopian end-of-history narrative.  However, if we were to look at all we really have to show for the decade in terms of era-defining scenes or movements, the outlook is equally grim.

If the music got worse and less aligned with its peer network, I’m of the (admittedly minority) mindset that music writing actually got better- the blogs pushed the conversation forward, online zines scoped depth print mags never dared, and writers challenged each other in public, indirectly including everyone in conversations that had previously been decided to the backs of those who might disagree.  Depth of knowledge certainly progressed as we dug deeper into the crates.  Music began to cross-pollinate, unafraid to dip its legs into pop/dance/experimental terrains it previously wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching.  Nearly every couple of months, we were treated to return of some big thing we had treated unkindly on the first go-around (prog!, Balearic!, yacht rock!,  Italo-disco!) and thus our scope of music’s historicity grew exponentially.  

Upon review, many of the things I got caught up in at the time (dubstep, dancepunk) seem vastly overhyped and timestamped while others I enjoyed as guilty pleasures (electroclash) or rarely at all at the time (mainstream hip-hop) proved to have massive staying power in my collection.  In my tendency to get carried away, I expanded the top 10 proposed by PopMatters to a cool 100. 

In the PM writer forums, a list of “best albums” that I submitted circa 2010 or so was criticized by other writers for a lack of diversity, which I found to be fair (and a little embarrassing).  Yet, I created this list with no foresight or caution towards representation and it just so happened that many of the albums with a more naturalistic lasting affect tended to fall equitably amongst releases by women, artists of color, and others not of the lumpen (white) indietariat.  Which I think speaks even better of the present moment than of the era in question.

What follows is by no means comprehensive and I’ve got scrolls and scrolls of unheard/sat-upon lists to fill the 10 year vintage blog for many moons to come, but it’s a decidedly improved picture of the decade than the one I would have painted five years ago.  To avoid the “Radiohead” syndrome many lists suffer from, I’ve limited myself to only one album per artist.   Plenty more topics I’d love to go in depth about from the era (maybe even a book’s worth?), but for now here’s a teaser for a hundred albums worth your time:

100. Chicks on Speed- The Un-Releases/ The Re-Releases of the Un-Releases (2000 Chicks on Speed/K)

Larry Tee’s Electroclash comp promised high camp and ironic poses to save the earth, which sounded A-Okay to the music’s sponsors, its fashion spreads more numinous than records sold (something that surely caught the eye of YBA affiliate and mediocrity czar of the naughts Queen Gaga).  But poised right in the middle of Tee’s collection is a toxin-filled little catwalk ditty by conceptually-minded German electropunks Chicks on Speed called “Fashion Rules” which calls models “Bacteria inbred in fashion schools”, Gucci “victim luxury” and offers advice to the fashion industry thusly; “Off with their heads is what we say/Marie-Antoinette, it’s the only way”.   Which is quite a nice way to shit on a party you’ve been invited to that seems to be getting too cozy with the status quo.

Chicks on Speed were not immune to the humor or fun-seeking of their peers, but unlike that disaffected lot they actually sounded like they had a stake in the game.  Their best was a messy Faust Tapes style splattershot LP called The Un-Releases, an off-the-wall masterwork that injects the actual spirit of postpunk into the ’79 to ’82 obsessed scene.  With its half-baked sketches and incidental dialogue bits, The Un-Releases has a hallucinatory documentary feel to it.

“It was interesting watching what the Spice Girls were doing because everything was so plastic.  You knew they had producers, but you didn’t know who the producers were. We wanted to turn that inside out and say we are a produced band,  but we want to look at the way the mechanism of production works”- Alex Murray Leslie of Chicks on Speed

All the wires are showing, but they’re all connected to jacks of the band’s best material- the brutal millennial room-shaker “Turn of the Century” (intended as gabba to ward off the Fascists, according to an interview of the band by the late Steven Wells in the NME), creatively repurposed takes/rescue assignments on Delta 5 and B-52s songs, and the glitchy cyberpunk nightmare “Night of the Pedestrian”.  Inbetween are blipvert-length cameos by various European producers of note and pedigree (Pan Sonic, Florian Hecker, DJ Hell, Anthony “Shake” Shakir, G.D. Luxxe).   But perhaps, the most novel take is the euro-feminist-lesbian take on Cracker’s jocular “Eurotrash Girl”, in which the girls attempt to reclaim the offending term as their own rallying cry.

99. Chromatics- Plaster Hounds (Gold Standard Laboratories) (2004)

Deep, dark, and dubby is usually a prescription to get on my good side and Chromatics did it particularly well.  Perhaps the first example of a band whose ironic name would switch throughout their career and eventually become sincere, Chromatics are ashen gray on Plaster Hounds.  It’s filthy lo-fi carcinogenic scuzz, music that just sounds unwell.   The band would eventually veer from monochrome to the glistening and colorful but still damaged Italo-synthpop of their Italians Do It Better material (and eventually becoming the sound of the surprisingly influential Drive soundtrack), but it’s this earlier rawer material that stands the strongest in their discography.  Recorded either at the tail end of real lo-fi or the dawn of digital imitation, the album gleans a hint of retro, importing cues from no wave scratches and Cabaret Voltaire sub-frequencies.  Its driving force though is complex and prickly rhythm with cymbals that sound like they’re made of broken glass and stick magic that sounds like broken bones from the Zero Kama camp, a sound so perfectly shitty that Ancient Methods should pay top dollar for the masters for their next release.   There’s also intimations of what was to come in the disco beat and solemn piano of “Ice Hatchets”, which for a second feels like it’s going to float off in starry-eyed “In the City” splendor until you realize that it’s anchored by the heavy starkness of their own design.

Also Recommended:

Mi Ami- Watersports

Various- After Dark

98. Pinch- Underwater Dancehall (Tectonic) (2007)

Right off the bat, Pinch commits a number of cardinal sins on Underwater Dancehall. A) Lyrics B) Lyrics specifically over his then year-old –yet-already-classic “Qawwali”  C) Lyrics over the dark anthem “Qawwali” that asks its listeners to “push that negative energy aside, rude boy”.    Dubstep was perhaps the first dance trend in history heard mostly outside of the clubs.  To these ears, it sounded intensely dark and desolate- if not explicitly negative then at least somehow aligned antithetically against the positive.  However, Underwater Dancehall is an appeal to transcendence, for it takes a somewhat inaccessible scene’s obtuse and somewhat forbidding  tones and makes pop out of them.  The half-beat has always sounded to me like a hesitation marker, as if the complex riddims were aching to be jungle, but bound by their own repression.  Perhaps that’s why to me the best dubstep has always been the early, dark stuff, the kind that speaks most to dance music’s utopian failure and the anxiety of accepting the toxic realism of apocalypse over peace, love, and ecstasy.  This kind of defeated approach feels better suited to the pop theatrics of the album-oriented-nuum of something like Underwater Dancehall than to a night out partying.  So, it’s a bit of a surprise that Pinch’s debut full length was one of the only of its kind at the time (later crossover records by the likes of Darkstar or Magnetic Man bastardized the classic dubstep sound to accommodate pop rather than forging its sullen grimaces and Adderall gait onto a pop façade).

Once upon a lifetime, I stumbled my way through a review of this album,  which happened to be probably the 4^th or 5^th dubstep thing I’d ever heard (I’d downloaded all the cuts from the Children of Men soundtrack, which actually would be a great time capsule worthy of this list had the soundtrack not left two of the best cuts- Digital Mystikz’s “Anti War Dub” and Pinch & P Dutty’s “War Dub” off the actual album).  One insight that still sounds apt though is the comparison to Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, both smartly produced, sophisticated crossover albums full of guest vocalists and little compromises to achieve their vision.   At the time, Underwater Dancehall seemed like the start of something, but its legacy now declares itself as more of a standalone. It’s sad we didn’t get to hear more albums like this.

Also recommended:

Martyn- Great Lengths

Kode9 feat. Spaceape- Dubstep All Stars Vol 3.

97. The Strokes- Is This It (RCA) (2001)

The point at which the reader either thinks “Oh, okay, he admitted it” or “Well, this jag’s drank the Kool Aid; time to read something else”. The album that either soundtracked at least one perfect memory  of life in the early naughts or that inescapable dull dross that oppressed your ears and is partly to blame for a shitty song still stuck in your head a decade plus past its expiration date by a band whose name started with “The”.   The truth is, Is this It (and has history written a title that anticipates its iffy historical legacy more than that?) is neither bottom feeder nor perfect art.  It’s burgers and French fries.  It’s beautiful in exactly how it neither creates new desires nor sets out to destroy old ones.  It’s fucking normcore numero uno, selling us what had been in front of our faces all along, but that which we’d been too scared to admit we wanted.  Joe the Plumber for liberals.  The last Rock n’ roll forever hurrah proving rock n’ roll probably needn’t be around forever.  Our baseline.

Also recommended: Ketchup

96. Arpanet- Wireless Internet (Record Makers) (2002)

Within the first few minutes of 2002’s Wireless Internet, Gerald Donald as “The Analyst” predicts the worldwide dominance of mobile cell phones as the premier platform of future connectivity.  He claims that these wireless networks will be connected in such a manner as to establish of a worldwide surveillance and control apparatus, using the urban legend of the Beast of Belgium to illustrate its grasp. Phew.  Good thing that didn’t happen. 

Donald’s every movement, from his earliest work in Drexciya and Underground Resistance through his solo tinkering under the guises Dopplereffekt, Der Zyklus, Heinrich Mueller, Japanese Telecom, et al., has been a carefully constructed piece of a conceptual suite, positing electro as a kind of reluctant gateway into the future, but not always a future we’d welcome with open arms.   The cold, sterile, and clinical output of his dark melodies seem to paint in broad strokes, mutating the clockwork beats into a video game techno-dystopia (In Arpanet, the vocals assume no side.  Rather, they are neutral, like investors examining a claim).   As such, this is a hyperreal perception of reality as it was emerging, the vision of corporate control slipping through the cracks in our machinery painted in vivid neon-rotoscoped menace and moving in such stilted lurches as to appear more mechanical and anemic than one of Pierre Bastien’s automated wind-ups.  Later on, the likes of James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual  would stalk and critique the warmth of the information age, but Donald  denaturalized the marketing and reduced its mechanizations to just the wiring, putting that front and center. 

Also Recommended:

Der Zyklus- Biometry ID 

Various Artists- This is Not the 80s (excellent compilation of post-Drexciyan electro and electropop that falls outside the purview of the overly campy electroclash camp)

Turzi- Made Under Authority

95. Mordant Music- SyMptoMs (Mordant Music) (2009)

Somewhere on the other side of the dark side of the Autobahn is a town with “rabid solutions and bent institutions” where they drink “industrial slurry”.  There it’s “expensive to leave and expensive to stay”.  Mordant Music’s principle concern over ten years or so has been narrative and nowhere in Baron Mordant’s back catalogue is he more articulate in his ambiguity than on SyMptoMs.   Partly, this is because SyMptoMs is Mordant Music’s singer-songwriter album, his “vocal” piece. Once upon a time, eccentrics like Mr. Mordant used to put out albums like this regularly, the kind which didn’t neatly fall into a #trending subset of micro-genres.  This lot was too song-based or lyrical to be experimental, too off-kilter to be pop, and too interesting to be indie.  In the Roxy era, there was a word for it; art-pop.   There’s perhaps nothing more deserving of the title than something like the baffling “You Are a Door”, which seems to float as it’s sinking;  a bleeping, pulsing mess that wants nothing more  than to continue building until it can explode, yet is caged by its own anxiety.  Or the simple dewdrop synth-chords of the opener “Where Do You Scream?”, whose  dark critiques and simplicity remind me of early psych-folk a la Psychic TV’s A Pagan Day. Singular stuff.

94. The Mountain Goats- The Sunset Tree (4AD) (2005)

“I played video games in a drunken haze/ I was seventeen years young” is the kind of risible line you’d hear gushing forth from the (dashboard) confessionals of an emo singer, the kind that spawned the Livejournal era descended into Myspace bulletin posts descended into Facebook statuses descended into cryptic Instagram captions for food and color-washed photos of exes.  When John Darnielle says it on The Sunset Tree, he’s sincere.  There’s no trace of irony.  He intones with a crystal clear enunciation, the kind which makes a lyric sheet on an album like this unnecessary.  Surrounding it is an equally lucid production where the piano sounds present in the room, worlds away from the muddy lo-fi of Darnielle’s early recordings.

However, to isolate these two lines from their stanzas or the narrative of the album as a whole is to do a disservice to the life-spanning portrait Darnielle carves here.  The line above is memorable because individual words on this album, in their clarity, cut out like bones from the flesh, wounds exposed often only in the panoramic rather than the closeup.  The lines in question are from the album’s most anthemic and instantly serviceable tune, “This Year”, whose chorus “I am going to make it through this year/If it kills me” provided an apt soundtrack to one of the roughest years of my, Darnielle’s, and denizens of other listeners’ lives.   This alone could have secured the album’s place on innumerable lists of significance.

With the broader scope of the storyline though, it’s easy to see how “video games” function as a cathartic escape, once removed from the oppressive reality of being trapped in a broken home.  The drunken haze becomes precursor to addiction and dependence.  And then there’s the enunciation on “Seventeen years young”, as opposed to the more standard “seventeen years old” (which is what Darnielle declares he is on “Dance Music”).  It’s in this desperate moment of hedonism, a tossaway line in any lesser song, that Darnielle feels the age he should feel, “young” rather than atrophied and prematurely aged by the stress of abuse.

Some say Darnielle abandoned the complexity of his earlier story-song structures (of which I’m admittedly not very familiar) in favor of naked autobiography on The Sunset Tree, but it’s more of a stylistic shift than a renege on depth.  The details may be stark, but the personal and contextual weight they carry makes them feel far more prescient than any ornamental language could.   Besides if Darnielle’s ultimate goal was to write a tragedy, all us music nerds would recognize it as the saddest story ever told if the only words were these from “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod”; “And then I’m awake and I’m guarding my face/Hoping you don’t break my stereo/Because it’s one thing that I can’t live without”.

Also Recommended: Cat Power- You Are Free

93.  Pamelia Kurstin- Thinking Out Loud (Tzadik) (2007)

A Theremin player this side of Clara Rockmore who’s every bit as talented, but way less stuffy than either Rockmore or her conservatory peers.  At this album’s release, Pamelia (who picked the offshoot of her birth-given Pamela out of a supermarket checkout lane book of baby names) had an Angelfire page full of goofy humor and fart jokes to accompany a genuine celebration of her artform, quite the opposite approach from the normal Tzadik-listening/The Wire-reading/chin-scratching  crowd, whose press releases read like rejected grad school theses.   Her C.V. spans David Byrne to Foetus to the score of remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still and she only learned the Theremin from dating the dude from Geggy Tah. 

Blah Blah Blah.  Kurstin’s brilliant Thinking Out Loud makes you forget that releasing a Theremin album in the 21^st century is about as relevant than as cutting a Moog LP or starting a surf rock band during said period, but there’s such beauty and gravity to these recordings (mostly live captures of performances in various European cities) that it shows you how inconsequential all that periphery of her background and the instrument’s novelty history is.  And for substance she doesn’t even fall back on the sad moan, the vibrato that naturally mews out of the instrument embedding it with a forlorn emotional resonance.  Nor does she play up the drama and bombast a la the aforementioned sci-fi.  In fact, Kurstin does the opposite.   Most of the record is understated, wandering, and shiftless.  She plays against a minimalist array of instruments and filters her sonic through some drone-inducing reverb or grimey feedback that makes the instrument barely recognizable.  Whereas once Theremin was employed as the go-to weird effect before becoming totally date-stamped, Kurstin remystifies it and scopes its broad uses via the lens of all that came after the good vibrations of yore.

Also Recommended:

Kreng- L'Autopsie Phenomenale De Dieu

Pierre Bastien- Mecanoid

92. Tool- Lateralus (Volcano) (2001)

What made Tool such an amazing force capable of enthralling legions of slavish teens to recite their tentpoles (the author includes himself in this category- “Carl Jung, Bill Hicks, fuck L. Ron Hubbard, Brothers Quay, pry open your third eye, man”) was that they were the band that could unite metalhead meatheads, artsy geeks, prickly poets, and the virginal lot who were really into counting the time signatures in Dream Theater songs alike.  They hid their proclivity under layers of accessibility and lyrics about anal sex (“Prison Sex”), fisting (“Stinkfist”), religious anal sexual abuse (“Opiate”), and, oh, probably a bunch of other stuff too.  In interviews, Maynard James Keenan, known affectionately on a first name basis by his fans, was coy about song meanings or dropping the names of influences.  In early online chats, the band would openly mock their fans for what they perceived to be simple or clichéd questions, breaking the hammy faux bond of the band who “have the best fans in the world”.   They revealed no faces in the album art, which was the main entry point into a band’s career before everything was a search engine away and instead replaced it with naked pictures of beautifully posed morbidly obese women.  They were pretentious, ambiguous, unapproachable and refused to play by the rock star gamebook.  As such, a code of entry evolved in Tool fandom. 

Lateralus is Tool’s fundamental downshift from their amplified stardom on the heels of their first two successful full-lengths.  It’s their proggiest and most musician-oriented release of all.  Song lengths are stretched out, with no less than five song passing the eight minute mark and three others over six minutes in length.  One of the six minute tunes is actually conjoined to another to form the album’s core (“Parabol/Parabola”), a slow burner with prominent digeridoo that has a full-on dubstep-style drop into a violent burst of melodic intensity in which the vocals plead, with no shred of irony or Hallmark sincerity, for the listener to “Recognize this as a holy gift/And celebrate the chance to be/Alive and breathing”.   A somewhat jarring new age sentiment that nevertheless carried a strong resonance seeing the band perform it several days after September 11^th outside of Boston.  That performance also included guitarist Adam Jones stretching out the chords from the suite’s third act into a a lamented 12 minute loop and Keenan getting booed by his adoring fans for warning them against the quick march into war.   The title track is constructed somehow so that the song structure locks geometrically with the Fibonacci sequence, a move which many called brilliant.  However, those who praise this form of composition are also saying that there is literally a correct mathematical formula to making astounding music. 

But Tool don’t demand respect just because they’re obviously unconcerned about what their fans or critics (such as Christgau, who bashed the band every chance he got) thought.  They’ve got the wares to back it up.  Whereas prog usually suffers because it tries to cram too much in, Tool rarely drop a note in the wrong spot or take a turn that doesn’t seem like the logical (albeit unexpected) step forward.. Lateralus is an easter egg for fans with its clunky egghead lyrics and elliptical patterns folding into patterns so obtuse that one needs to listen repeatedly to make any sense of them.  Or, as the album’s most accessible song, which switches time signatures 47 times, puts it “I know the pieces fit/ ‘Cause I watched them fall away”.  There’s something to be said for a difficult album that you put on again not just from the intrigue factor, but because you actually enjoy it.

Also recommended: Battles- Mirrored

91. Britney Spears- In the Zone (Jive) (2003)

Somewhere a teenage me is baffled, weeping in the corner, unable to contemplate how I put Britney Spears directly above Tool in any superlative list.  God, someone go beat the shit out of that kid.  Of all the pop posers out there in the naights, Britney Jean was the ultimate faker.  K-Punk was wont to make the sacreligious comparison to glam.  There’s no deviation between image and persona for Britney.  She is a fabrication concocted for and by the tabloids, what’s now known as the insta-clickholes of the interwebs.  Every little piece of her pesona, on down to the Bush endorsement, is designed to provoke. Sure, Britney is troublesome and problematic and ace college essays-worth of wrong in equal measure, but she embodies the spectacle in ways that Gaga couldn’t ever wish for by embodying its crassest appeal, be it shtick, titillation, or, what I fall most for, sick beats, fat synth basslines, and perfectly succinct and economical pop.   Her naughts output is a slow embrace of herself as cyborg and cypher, culminating in Blackout, a close second contender for top Britney album in which she fully secedes to the machine and signs alms to being but a Chaplin-esque machination herself.

Let’s be honest about In the Zone.  “Toxic” sells the whole thing.   It’s the album’s obvious core because it’s one of the most perfect pop tracks of this or any entire decade.  I remember it debuting on MTV as an event and feeling a wave of adolescence drift away. 

To my stubborn young mind, Britney had been the epicenter of my high school musical alienation.  I felt no connection to the music of my peers, who seemed dangerously uncurious, including those who tastefully kegstanded to Sublime, puffed to Puff Daddy, spiced things up via The Spice Girls, or kneed each other in the parts of the anatomy that only metalcore dudes who find metalcore somehow tolerable share.  As soon as Britney was thrust into this environment, I was repulsed by the way she demanded attention, asked you to pick a side.  No one had asked for her, but she was soon to be inescapably everywhere, embodying every sexist trope of the American male fantasy (pedophilic virgin-whore voluptuous white blonde).  I was saddened as a number of my friends were outed as dupes of this dull sexual fantasy (even adding their own misogynstic twists to it- “heh, I only watch her videos with the sound off”, said the Tool fan).  Britney from the git-go was an antagonism whose cheap targets made her easy for me to write off.

But goddamn if I wasn’t hooked the moment Bloodshy and Avant’s mix came on with its screechy sample straight out of a 60s thriller, dark bass breakdown, howling interlude, vocoded drop, and post-disco string section.  Indie rock friends around me watching the video as it played for the first time proceeded to mock it, which compelled me into the unlikely position of defending it and, before long, declaring my unwavering love for it, dumbfounding said indie rock friends.   The song was undeniable.

If “Toxic” is the star performance, the rest of the album is a strong supporting cast.   The super-charged pop bravura of “Brave New Girl” is like something Bis would have parodied a few years prior, but could have never actually written themselves.   “Showdown” is a confrontational vamp whose infectious vigor can only side you on team Britney.   “Breathe On Me” is the kind of glorious post-Kylie 21^st century pop we all imagined we’d be listening to in the decade in question, but which we had to seek out instead in deep cuts.

The crucial difference between Britney and the more critically-lauded, but undersold pop stars like Annie or Cassie is the expensive production.  In an era where it became cheaper and easier to produce music than ever before, Britney kept the budget high and made sure not a penny was wasted.  Again, this is an aggravated stance from the left-leaning punk-central aesthetic of music, a celebration of the glories capitalism, fame, wonton indulgence, and status quo can bring.

If there’s a penultimate peak on In the Zone, it’s “Everytime”, a sullen piano ballad that seems perfectly out of place in an album of bouncy slinky pop.  Britney is always pretty soft on lyrical content, which could be a product of her limited vocal range.  On record, she sounds perpetually sexed-up, breathy and often playfully pouty, with a youthful timbre that suggest that she is perpetually playing out some pedophiliac fantasy, even well into her twenties and thirties.  “Everytime” drops this mode for a tune that could have just as easily been written for Tori Amos. 

The song was given some added weight by its now-iconic appearance in Spring Breakers, but even before Harmony Korine’s nightmare hedonic vision of a solipsistic video game dystopia  the song seemed to have a special voice aimed towards millennial teendom.  “Notice me…”, the very first line of the song begs, the equivocation left behind from every Facebook post since the platform’s inception shortly after In the Zone’s releasee.  “Why are we strangers when/Our love is strong?”: A heartbreaking anthem from the world’s biggest troll, written deep in the nerve center of the spectacle. Lonely Crowd 2.0, who could list every fact about their peers, but who know nothing about each other.   Britney’s not only our disease, but proof of how good it feels to be stricken with it.

See Also: 

Britney Spears- Blackout



STILL AHEAD:  Bitshift's best, Jaunty tech house, proto-chillwave, Timbaland's last hurrah, and (sigh) more indie canon.

God Unloaded: A Primer for the New Religion of the Gun

The firearm has replaced the remote control as the choice extension of the central nervous system.  The automotive/motor vehicle nervous system detailed by McLuhan has become inverted, a womb instead of a tomb, though no less unsafe at any speed than in its Naderian days.   Patriarchs must seek the death drive elsewhere, since mortality in an automobile is now sudden (mid-text, between latte sips, in the midst of absolute comfort).  The ego has not yet accepted its satiation, its ability to replicate the fertile cradle of the womb without the attendant mother, the mobile sanctuary module complete with Big Gulp/D-sized cup holders for Jumbo Cocoa Colostrum.

The remote control nervous system that followed the dominance of the automotive nervous system is essentially fossilized too, having been absorbed into the abstraction of the web’s singular consciousness, networked socially into the direct corporate transference of RSS feeding tubes. Whereas once it was a substitute for control, now the remote control, replaced almost entirely by the smart phone, is a habit-forming entity, a control in and of itself, a nerve network not by extension of the corporeal but as life support system for the body.

Now, the family unit, spoken for by proxy via the American male patriarch (feeling reduced to a mere shell casing by the existence of other voices at the collective dinner table), bows to the phallic luster of the gun. The cross was once wielded as a sidearm. Its symbolic efficacy was in the substitution of the Christ figure for the method of his destruction, but arched sideways the cross becomes a projectile weapon capable of expunging the lord’s holy vengeance silently through implied violence (more on the “implied” in just a minute).  The gun is a monolith, an amulet of the absolutism of mortality.  And in a culture that celebrates death and branding, the gun is God.

For the follower and the missionary of the church of holy death, the goal when holding one’s piece is to cock the hammer and ejaculate vengeance to assert power.  If the spray of bullets seems sexual, this is no accident.  The phallus has been weaponized against mates since the time of pri-mates and now its artificial parallax is being used, with no small degree sociopathic intent (and occasionally homoerotic desire), to hold other marginalized populations in submission.

The gun spray cumshots are secretly normalized.  They are the common denouement of every porno and action film alike.  They are frowned upon “IRL”, but normative in the consensuality that allows them to become accepted and unspectacular when happening to marginalized targets, (life in the “ghetto”, “crimes of passion”).  As long as the deviance (bursts of bullet jizz) is sporadic and decentralized (“apolitical”), they can go on unabated.  To even address them in polite company would be a greater sin than the myriad oozing bodies dripping below the patriarch/phallic-cult devotee’s cold, brute determinism (final judgment outsourced to the crucifix end-user).

Men have come to prefer the cumshot in porn because its extrinsic nature allows no possibility of childbirth.  Just as well, cumshots feed into the survivalist cultural nostalgia for the hunter-gatherer society as well as the Greco-Roman warrior victory rapes by allowing sex without procreation or sex without fatherhood to persist.  Just as well, it provides relief for men who must endure a burdensome dependence upon women for the perpetuation of the species. Without people or animals to kill constantly, men are left without meaning, hanging with their third arm/firearm in the wind. When survival is easy for an unnecessary species, one must create threats to justify one’s place at the top of the food chain, proffering legitimacy by inventing bold conspiracy theories. Or play zero sum games that attempt to mollify/disarm purpose from either A) those (mothers) whose biological destiny is rich with meaning or B) those (oppressed groups) whose struggle frames them as the recipients of history.

But the sacral significance of childbirth is not lost on the desubjectivized Y chromosome subject.  Perhaps due to the distantiation of the post-hunter/gatherer male from motherhood and the eternal separation of the anus from childbirth, Phallus Dei must hold youth in high regard.  Indeed it will be youth who will need to survive when the Bush Doctrine of tactile preemptive assault is applied to the ensuant zombie apocalypse and we slay the undead before they’re undead with the help of our exterminating halo-tipped angels. (The fad for zombie-kill porn is the outsourced final judgment, which quenches the patriarch’s bloodlust in the form of general misanthropy. In Zombie fiction, the enemy is everyone and everyone must be bludgeoned or shot in properly ejaculatory fashion. Catharsis for those too polite to partake in mass shootings). 

With the sacralization of youth  at the expense of motherhood then, men of the gun-worship illuminati cult thus recognize Adam Lanza’s sin was in his target, in producing child porn, spraying the wrong targets and appealing to the wrong demographic, precipitating an event that mocked God’s free-market rationalism ( that event being the Situationist/Industrial music credo that absolute freedom was best exemplified in the Moor Murders/the surrealists saying the most surreal act is running down a street firing a gun at random/Ayn Rand with the blinders on going on about the versatility of heroic myth while belittling the poor as parasites and ushering in their destruction via the pesticide infinity of accumulative ritual power/Hannah Arendt admonishing proto-neocon Leo Strauss as being no better than the German fascists he fled/anarchism as libertarianism with arbitrary pipe bombs instead of self-sustaining militias/fundamentalism whose ends justify so many means that it teeters on nihilism). 

We need to protect guns from the people who would do them harm, hurting a gun being the equivalent of openly ripping the bible in the town square (It would never hurt a fly; it’d kill it dead). We’re half-afraid guns will punish us if we abandon them, like a lovelorn mate trapped in an abusive relationship (cue gender role reversal #1). We feel emotionally attached to the gun as provider, the life-taker that allows us to invert the intrinsic power dynamic of childbirth and send the (18 and above, please) products of the childbirth back into the womb of the earth’s tomb.  If they take our guns, the only option is massive upheaval, a temper tantrum at the mom/nanny/bitch who took our toys. Bukkake the heretics into mass graves.  These are the terrorists who would crucify Koresh, surrender Alex Jones to the fate of Milton William Cooper, leave poor Bernie Goetz to his white supremacist fanfic, and delibidinize Nichols and McVeigh (the American soldier must remain posed in rescue-ready portraiture, not rendered in an amputated, impotent hospital setting. More on him in a bit). 

Our martyrs are self-inflected wounds, bad guys we invent to justify murdering them publicly.  James Holmes and his head on the spike will welcome entrance in the suffering city, a place where everlasting pain is bred by the eternal endurance of gravity’s transience, the forever passing notion of inevitability rather than prevention (“there is no alternative”).  What happens is soon forgotten, 140 characters like Holmes gone in a flicker like discarded matchbooks pressed sporadically against the ground to keep the world aflame.  It’s all disease and no cure. Mass shootings become simulacrums, interminable war refracted through the capitalist green zones. Like collateral damage, all the dead kids must be scrubbed for the grand religious narrative, the forcefeel of emotional security.  We are safe because the guns that are in the wrong hands are in the right hands are in the left hands are in God’s holy temple. 

Our weapons, though expulsive, remain composed in the absence of the end-user/consumer/missionary subject. Lying flat on a table, a gun is at perfect harmony with the world it creates.  In their anthropomorphic inertia, guns exercise perfect restraint in all the ways that men cannot and are therefore the conservative platonic ideal; power as (literal) pillar, power as pure concentrated energy, a negation of Focault’s idea of power as a process. The substitute father/god figure of the gun is a paradigm of stoic virtue, the absence of feminine emotionalism and irrationality.  Crimes of passion are the vice of men. Guns are pure of intent.  And it’s intent that men value, specifically how well intent correlates to popular subjectivity.  Shooting a gun with noble intent is an act of heroism.  Shooting it with ill intent is something else entirely.

The gun assumes a gaze of authoritative respect; its very presence in a dimmed room demands submission to its fascistic whims. Its essentialist nature as a power object (decontextualized of the means of production) contravenes the existential rights of liberty.  The gun repurposes freedom as bondage to the gunowner.  Thus, worship of the gun is a master-slave relationship, a Stockholm Syndrome where the victim kidnaps himself.  Guns are almighty because they take life, they dominate us.  But as mere functional utilities, they do not do so on their own, they transfer their godlike powers unto us.  They are beholden to our will.  People kill people.  Guns merely confirm that men are killers. 

To present a gun in a room is to violate a human being who thought they were free. Guns perform the rape of consciousness even if rape by will is not enacted by its user.  To not own a gun is surrender, which is perhaps why several U.S. district counties have toyed with the idea of making their purchase mandatory (and coverage from getting shot by them is not compulsory, let the chips fall where they may: maternal value collapsed under the money shot of free enterprise).  Thus, the two roles left for women in the phallic utopia, victims and vigilantes, have been mischaracterized because they assume the freedom to choose even these limited roles.  A room with a gun in it is a room frozen in space-time, suspended from motion until the gun and its user define the terms of continuity.

What guns don’t do is pertinent, as psychic violence is perhaps its most common crime, but this is largely unprosecutable.  With a gun in the room, the violation need not be measured in physical holes.  Its first victim is speech.  A gun is in charge of the conversation and he who writes the scripts determines where the narrative goes.

If the gun is god, it is also father, as well as big other. The very thing preventing a lasting peace (a world without guns) is the presence of the gun.  If this mystic power did not exist, we would not need to use it to kill the men who yield it. But as a phallic weapon that protects male extinction in the age of artificial reproduction, the gun forms a lasting barrier to keep women contained (“safe”) and constantly refreshes the collective unconscious horrors that plague them (the hero creates a situation that puts the damsel in peril/”distress”, but is vindicated as he rescues her.  The heroism is rewarded and the peril is forgotten). 

A gun’s strange black magick makes invisible its ambient terror, as well as its rape of consciousness, and simulcasts an inversion of itself as the preventer of terror and rape. As a tactile piece of metallurgy, the firearm’s structure suggests that it is a cause-and-effect apparatus.  Like shopping, part of the gun’s sense of security that is provided to the impotent male is the production of immediate results.  There is no red tape.  There are not multiple steps and layers of due process to navigate.  You go to the store, you buy the item and leave.  You go to the bad guy, you fire the gun and leave. Free market magick with no externalities.  And so many varieties with which to accessorize (the housewife gender role reversal #2)!

Hence, with guns, there are only cumshots and no comas, only bodies and no victim’s family.  The only residue is the cumshot/blood leak/ crime scene itself, with a quick fade on to the next scene. No interiority from the body bathed in sticky blood.  No lingering sense of anything lost or the humility of the victim. Thus, the byline reads that a gun’s purpose in society is to outsource crime prevention, not to hasten crime creation. A clever editing scheme. 

The narrative has correlatives in popular media; the retreat into video games wherein the only consciousness is that of the gun.  In many games and in particular first-person shooters, the user plays as the gun.  It is a tale from the gun’s perspective.  All enemies are obstacles, impediments, and roadblocks.  The only agency is that of the phallic monolith.  This is part of why gamers make the best misogynists and have been known recently to launch online lynchings in which they send pictures of themselves raping feminists who critique their favorite parlor/video games (time-honored favorites include the sport of broadcasting privilege, confident that the gun below their belt is job security).  The video game controller appears as if a vestigial remnant of the remote control nervous system, and syndromic of the wired-in network consciousness of the web’s shared nervous system, but it’s actually an extension of the monolith gun, particularly when playing the aforementioned shooting games.

Some of the most popular video games are games of war and it’s no secret that culture tries to reproduce the thrills of war in various contexts in order to assure the ascendancy of the gun-throne in the popular imagination.  Films that do not contain the threat of a loaded weapon (or a phallic substitute like a sword) fare poorly unless loaded with masked cumshots (grossout comedies), defamation of the childbearers (predatory or adulterous women), or the heterosexual romantic narrative which must conclude with the successful acquisition of a well-balanced man (in this fantasy, some character flaw is able to be corrected by the woman as long as there is no threat to his phallic authority).  However, films of war (whether global conflict,  personal revenge stories, or tales that brand phallic pathos as superego/superheroics) remain the heart of spectacle.  War is the dominant force of meaning and its nucleus is the gun.  Guns make war both necessary and possible.

At the center of the war is the soldier/martyr, the gun’s main frontline missionary.  He is the killer walking among us, trained by ranks to internalize the thing he has done upon his return home. As he walks about in a culture pretending that the war outside does not exist, he is the hidden proof, the redaction allowed to roam free in white space. With gun in tow, the soldier protects the homeland, and consequently assumes the role of father figure for the whole nation.  Ironically, the soldier must often exit his own fatherly duties to become father/protector for the nation, making him both absentee father and substitute father, deadbeat dad and figure of valor.  This act of sacrifice, trading one’s own family for the collective family, on the face of it seems noble, but its main consequence is further alienation from motherhood, abandoning the birth-givers to lay praise to the life-taker in the gun, anti-survivalism plunged ever deeper into void.  The cause is secondary, a homeland security blanket to throw over the desire to kill.

In the leisure society, the remote was God. God was happening to us, and we were standing in the shadow of His voice.  We existed because God allowed us to.  Now, the gun affirms our right to nonexistence.  For the disenfranchised, the gun is the equalizer. It is post-religion, post-passivity.  It’s no mistake that many of the most zealous phallic-cult devotees do not believe in evolution. Animals can’t evolve if they annihilate their own species or destroy their own ecosystem.  The gun is an economy of chaos, tired of the narrative of perpetual progress.  It’s looking for punctuation, the end of history.  

The gun works especially well in societies where individualism is prioritized since the gun inherently puts a distance between its user/missionary and its object.  With the gun in hand, one never has to die alone, because one can always feel secure that he can take someone else down with him.  With a gun, one can make sure that their sadness won’t fail to strike a lonely chord, that it won’t reverberate or not make a sound in the forest.  The gunshot is the sound of the tree falling.  The endless cumshots are the sound of the empire crumbling.

The gun is the amplifier and the silencer, but nothing else.  It is Manichean and defining.  The gun shows us a picture of the world as we believe it to be, not an experience of the world as we want it to be.  Thereby, it is an instrument of faith.  Guns continue to kill because our rash attempts to make the air unbreathable, the food inedible, the streets unwalkable, the climate untenable, and the culture impersonable and unapproachable are not happening fast enough.  Indeed, it is only a matter of time before we turn the gun on ourselves and end our practice of creating life to focus on ending it.  Then, we will become one with the monolith, the ultimate phallic god, the stiff corpse, at perfect peace with its surroundings.  At that moment, we will find peace in each other’s arms. Our story can then be told because it will have punctuation and we will have become death, creator of worlds.

Giger Counter

As an alienated youth growing up in suburban America, I heard the name HR Giger pop up here and there at various points. The name is deeply embedded in that culture of sci-fi/horror films, comic books, sexual confusion, and heavy metal music. Giger existed in that space where kids always dared to go, but adults were far too afraid to.  As a result, like the Heavy Metal magazines he used to contribute to, I never had the urge (or the expendable allowance money) to purchase one of his books and hide it from my parents (reactions to Dead Kennedys records and The Satanic Bible had not been favorable).  By the time I was old enough to purchase whatever I pleased, I guess I had forgotten about him or moved into different circles of interest.

Co-opted a million times without credit, Giger's style- embossed surfaces, machinal veins, metallic grays, cold and dead terrain, beautifully hideous mutation, grotesque reptilian eroticism, perverted innocence vs. corruption as infantilization- became pantheon, backdrop.  Almost so much so that his influence was underplayed in the world of the grim.  It's sad that only in death could I, and probably too many other, comprehend this.


Of course, he's probably best known for his Necronomicon paintings, which provided the blueprint for the atmospheric production design behind the "biomechanical" world of the Alien films.




The hyperactive amount of detail and the strong emphasis on foreground was/is a hallmark of fantasy novels and prog album covers, but unlike the worst of those, no one could accuse him of skimping on perspective.





Bit of Bacon in this one.






Brain Salad Surgery is probably better known for its sleeve than the music within, which is to everyone's benefit.  In fact, it might be the best album cover to a terrible album ever.


Far better, though far more NSFW, is his first album cover to the Shiver's Walpurgis:


did some other covers too:










Giger also designed some conceptual art for Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham's troublesome video for "Windowlicker"

He also took part in the occasional conceptual sculpture. This one, I think perfectly summarizes gun culture (which is fetishized in the milieu he served, but I've never seen it represented anywhere else in his art):




The one and only time I went to Limelight in NYC, I was struck by the Giger Room, which I believe was the industrial dance room and a uniquely novel space.  It was odd that they allowed people to dance and get stupid in a room with so much touchable installation art, particularly as the club was known to, ahem, distribute supplements to the nightclubbing experience vis a vis the friendly staff.  The only pictures floating around on the internet don't seem to do it justice:



Far more impressive are the Giger Bars overseas where you can relax by sitting on a tongue in the midst of a spine:



No doubt inspired in some part by the old Cafe L'Enfer from turn of the century France:




His work was so physical that it's not surprising that it leapt of the page in the form of actual artifacts, pushing the unconscious ever closer to the surface so that we weren't caught so off-guard when confronted with it.


RIP

Teklife

Music Crit Referent Decoder Ring

Referents:

Oneohtrix Point Never- Ambient/New age music with arpeggios
Giorgio Moroder- Beat music with arpeggios
Real Techno- Trying to sound like the Belleville Three
John Carpenter- Eerie synth whole notes
Goblin- Cool way of hyping prog
Fabio Frizzi- You've never heard more than one of his scores, so this can stand in for anything spooky sounding
Basic Channel- deep bass, house music, few changes, contains an artist who has a limited edition collaboration with a well-established artist that is a live recording of a one-off show in an art-installation setting
DJ Screw- this record contains either pitch-shifted voices or BPMs below 85
Industrial- gated reverb, feedback-laced snares
EDM- this reviewer primarily covers indie rock
Dubstep (in a pop music review)- 80 bpm hip-hop beats
Dubstep (in an indie review)- everything that's wrong with modern music
Dubstep (in an electronic review)- trying to sound like ideas exhausted circa 2005 (obsolete)
Post-Rock- Noodly guitars,dramatic chord changes and epic builds
Raw- Lo-fi
Hypnagogic- Lo-fi or sampled lo-fi
Drum N' Bass- Mostly techstep for people who weren't there the first time around
Record Store Day- 500 copies of limited edition vinyl copy of some major label record no one wants on vinyl, immediately sold out small press run of innovative new artist whose discography you gulp up
Best Album Since- This artist will never make good music again
Hermeneutics- You are reading a Tiny Mix Tapes review
Four-to-the-Floor- Rhythmically boring
As Good at Home as In the Club- Man, it's been a long time since I've been to a good dance night.  Does anybody know what kind of club would play things like this?  Oh, is that around here?  No, it's somewhere in Germany?  And if you're over 28 and not incredibly fit you'll look pathetic in there? Ah, I see. Online music criticism it is then.



and so on...

Thanks for the love

Echoes of Necessity

"Oh, I started making my own music in 1988 – just with a little Casio keyboard and a domestic tape player. I was so into it, but the problem was getting the technology, it’s almost impossible when you’re a young guy with no money. Nowadays, you get an app and you’re going, but then it was ridiculous: first working out what did you buy, and then how did you afford to buy it. So it was slow progress. It was all good experience though. Some of the things that I learned how to do, like overdubbing: I’d record stuff onto cassette on a normal music centre tape recorder, then pressing play, playing that through the music centre speakers and playing more stuff on the Casio keyboard, and while all that’s floating around through the air I’d be recording that through the inbuilt mic on a little ghetto blaster. You’re getting this really basic kind of overdubbing, literally catching a field recording, the ambience of my own bedroom being captured as it’s bouncing off the walls. Then maybe take that, put it back in the other tape player and repeat the process. By the end of it you’ve got this really weird, warped, muddy sound… BUT I read this interview with Boards Of Canada where they said they’d done exactly the same thing, and that their sound was influenced by doing exactly what I had."- Nick Edwards aka Ekoplekz in this great new interview at Fact

Hey, I did this too!  One day I'll fish out those old recordings.  The problem is that most of them have vocals, which weren't sung through anything, but directly into the built-in boombox speaker.  So it creates this effect of really cool, lo-fi, ambient field record sound with bedroom/basement acoustics undercut by some crystal-clear untreated pubescent voice yodeling on top of it. Maybe I can drown that out with reverb.  I doubt I still have just the backing tracks. 

Oh, and if you haven't checked out Ekoplekz's Unfidelity, I highly recommend it.  It may be his most cohesive (read: finest) recording yet. 

Study War No More No More

I come from a conservative little ratfuck town from upstate New York.  The town has since swung slightly Democratic, but for the duration of my tenure there it was reigned over by mean-spirited Republicans.  Of course, this meant that they were some of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq war.  I was home from college during the shock and awe phase and witnessed patrons of a local gas station frothing at the carnage like it was a backwoods air show. 

After undergraduate studies, I headed home rather than continuing on.  I had a few friends who were doing weird noise and art shows and we were trying to start a non-profit based around bolstering the experimental arts community in the area.  Thus, I plunged myself from the liberal utopia of Amherst, MA back into this disheartening northern corridor of Dubya Bush country.  While waiting for our arts venture to pick up followers or backers or any traction, I held down a few jobs, including one at a local Barnes and Noble with my friend Jeff, patron of many of the local noise bands and shows.

On the way into work, Jeff and I traveled down Route 9, which like other Route 9s of the world was bathed in corporate logos, one of those shitty rabid stretches that consumes all that is novel and distinctive in its path to homogenize the landscape into an opaque, ubiquitous portrait of a completely colonized West.  Last year, the best sushi place I've ever eaten at was slash-and-burned, the soil tilled for some kind of Panera or an Arby’s no doubt.  It should come as no surprise then that there were also two malls on this road, located adjacent one another, leading to an adolescence with such wildly diverse hangouts as “the good mall” or the mall with the cheap movie theater. 

One interesting thing about the malls was that occasionally a handful (and by handful I truly mean less than 10 people) would gather outside of them to hold protest banners at oncoming traffic, either pissing off the frothing jingoist natives or eliciting supportive honks from an exhausted few.    One cold winter day in early 2005, Jeff and I were feeling down from the general dystopian atmosphere of George Bush America’s and decided that we’d go offer to bring the protesters outside of the mall some coffee and show our support by sticking around with them a bit before work to shout at cars or whatever it was that they were doing.  I had protested the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq several times at college, even before those wars had started, but winter of early 2005 was at a time when even the liberal establishment was still largely supportive of the war,  so we figured the shivering old hippies could use a few extra bodies, even if  it was  only for an hour or so before our $7.50/hr obligation to corporate capitalism called us.

Expecting very little out of the visit, we were shocked to find that among the 6 or so folks at the protest that day was none other than the Pete Seeger.   I’d heard he had some farmland up in Beacon at one point, but figured he probably didn't get out much.  The guy was in his late eighties after all, so I had relegated him to the kind of celebrity who’d only garner an occasional supermarket citing like the other ones who weirdly owned property in the area (Steve Martin, Liam Neeson, Ric Ocasek, Uma Thurman, et al.).  Not only was Seeger a regular down in front of the galleria though, he was also incredibly warm and cordial, welcoming and excited to see young blood passionate about the anti-war movement.   I initially felt bad for him, standing in the freezing cold way too old to be doing this sort of thing, mucus encrusted to his face showing that he was fighting some kind of cold. But this wasn't just a stop-off on the way to the office for him.  This was where he lived.  Not at the mall, but on the streets, outside the system, railing from the outside at whatever was in.  It was clear that if the corporate state the military industrial complex was not taking a day off, he wasn't either.

We eventually called in late.  We were having a blast waving signs and singing songs.  Nowhere in my head did I think it was changing hearts and minds, but I think in that wholly colonized vista, being the one billboard for something that was not on the menu elsewhere was still an important task and I think Seeger would agree. 

His profile was low later in life.  Even as Springsteen gathered a ton of celebrities to commemorate the man on his 90^th Birthday (in which a gaggle of Vietnam era yuppies who stood by complicitly as the 21^st century slaughters began paid for expensive tickets to see what they could have gotten for free on the side of the road on any weekend in Poughkeepsie), the coverage of it was oddly neutered of any political dimension.  A New York Times article even weirdly insinuated that with Obama’s inauguration, Seeger’s ilk had won, which only further proves how marginalized and invisible the actual left has become in the neoliberal age.  Yet, rather than retire in this hostile environment, Seeger continued on at the most grassroots level- perched aside the road while passersby yelled and spat at him.

There’s very little in my life that’s much cooler than having had the opportunity to sing “Down By The Riverside”, “This Land is Your Land”, “If I Had a Hammer”, and “We Shall Overcome” with Pete Seeger, just as millions had done before.  The world has certainly changed since he had started singing them 70 odd years ago, but Seeger was wise enough to know that this was not reason enough to accept the world at face value.  If anything, this is why the idiom of folk music, which is not a progressive medium at all but rather one built on an unfaltering and somewhat conservative tradition, is still a useful idiom; it presupposes a persistent underclass bonded by the commonality of song. When the forces of popular historicism try to alienate the urban poor of neoliberal Detroit the destitute Appalachians of the turn of the century, folk as medium was invented to bond them in populism (which is why hip-hop, which privileges the voice, a much easier instrument to learn than the banjo/guitar, has regularly been touted as a "new folk" since the 80's). 

Year-End List, Backwards Gazing Edition

Over at the 50/40/30/20/10 Year Vintage Series of Blogs (see the right hand side links),I've been quietly documenting what I consider to be the "full" picture of each successive year.  Even after devoting the span of an entire year to documenting and discovering music from these time periods, I've still managed for fall short on the broader scope of music.  The lengthy list of releases I was not able to check out from each year is vast and likely filled with great stuff.  Though I do believe we are living in the age of the glut, it seems that this glut was always there, except meted away to the shadows. 

I'd be lying if I said that I had enough time to absorb all of the music I showcased on these sites. Each was a rough combination of things I've known inside & out for years and things I was listening to for the first time only moments before (as well as everything inbetween).  Therefore, the lists below are for fun, and in no way definitive.  I put together a list of what I consider to be the best albums of each successive year divisible by ten (I left out 1963, a time before the "album" as we know it came of age).  I declined to do the same for "tracks" or "singles" since such a list would be such a mess that it wouldn't even be mildly authoritative and it'd take every ounce of strength from calling bullshit on myself. 


Top 20 Albums of 1973

Kraftwerk- Ralf &; Florian

Led Zeppelin- Houses of the Holy

John Martyn- Solid Air

Can- Future Days

Bob Marley and the Wailers- Catch a Fire

Stevie Wonder- Innervisions

Vangelis- L'Apocalypse Des Animaux

Faust- IV/The Faust Tapes

Hawkwind- Space Ritual

Roxy Music- For Your Pleasure

Pierre Henry- Machine Danse

Lalo Schiffrin Enter the Dragon sdtrk

The Temptations- 1990/Masterpiece

Eno- Here Come the Warm Jets

Lou Reed- Berlin

Herbie Hancock- Headhunters

Roy Harper- Lifemask

David Bowie- Alladin Sane

Terry Callier- I Just Can't Help Myself
Brainticket- Celestial Ocean

Top 20 Albums of 1983

The Cocteau Twins- Head Over Heels
New Order- Power Corruption and Lies
Swans- Filth

Duet Emmo- Or So it Seems
Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark- Dazzle Ships
Cybotron- Enter
Mark Stewart and Maffia- Learning to Cope With Cowardice
Killing Joke-Fire Dances
Liquid Liquid- Optimo EP
Wild Style OST
The Art of Noise- Into Battle EP
Husker Du- Metal Circus EP
Sonic Youth- Confusion is Sex
Richard H Kirk- Time High Fiction/ Cabaret Voltaire- The Crackdown + Doublevision EP,
Whodini- Whodini
Colourbox- Colourbox
Einsturzende Neubaten- Drawings of Patient OT
Slayer- Show No Mercy

Malcolm Mclaren- Duck Rock/ D'YA Like Scratchin
Howard Shore- Videodrome OST

Top 20 Albums of 1993

Seefeel-Quique/More Like Space EP/Plainsong EP
Foul Play Vol III EP
Aphex Twin- On/ On Remixes EPs/ Caustic Window- Joyrex J9 EP
Smashing Pumpkins- Siamese Dream
Omni Trio- Mystic Steppers 1/2 EP, Renegade Snares
Wu Tang Clan- Enter the 36 Chambers

PJ Harvey- Rid of Me
Slowdive- Souvlaki/ 5 EP
4 Hero- Journey from the Light/Golden Age
Stereolab- Transient Random Noise With Announcements
Biochip C- C8 EP
Jeff Mills- Waveform Transmissions Vol. 1
Bjork- Debut
The Mover- Final Sickness/Mescalinum United-Symphonies of steel 1
Tool- Undertow
Leaders of the New School-TIME
Mercury Rev- Boces
Main- Dry Stone Feed

Orbital- 2 (Brown Album)
2Pac- Strictly 4 My Niggaz

Top 20 Albums of 2003

Broadcast- Haha Sound

Dizzee Rascal- Boy in Da Corner

Manitoba- Up in Flames

Kelis- Tasty

Polmo Polpo-Like Hearts Swelling 

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti- Worn Copy

The Bug- Pressure

Sweet Trip- Velocity:Design:Comfort

The Postal Service- Give Up

Various- Lost in Translation Soundtrack

William Basinski-Melancholia

M83- Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts

Ellen Allien- Berlinette

Lawerence- The Absence of Blight

Britney Spears- In the Zone

Lightning bolt- Beautiful Rainbow

Jaylib- Champion Sound

Ricardo Villalobos- Alcachofa

Luke Vibert- Yoseph

The Neptunes Presents...Clones