I'm pretty sure that this was the first year since I started buying records (1999, Beck's Midnite Vultures: how's that for hipster cred? I mean, really, how's that? It's not like I bought the Prince records Beck was ripping off, but at least I waited a couple months before picking up Californication) that I didn't purchase a single new album. Maybe I'm just behind the times (Classics major and all); I ended up pirating the new Hold Steady, Lil' Wayne, and Vampire Weekend albums before they came out, and possibly (definitely in the case of the V-Dubs) before they were finally mixed. I probably haven't even heard how this year's best albums are supposed to sound.
What Dean X-gau said about David Johansen in 1979 ("Until now, you see, he'd never written any banal lyrics at all. Now he's got three or four.") applies equally to Craig Finn, and somewhat less to Dwayne Carter, in 2008. Finn's "Magazines" is Johansen's "Frankenstein" stripped of the terror that made the latter great. And Carter, while never banal, has fallen so far from his lyrical peak on last year's Drought 3 that he finally sounds as high as he is. I enjoyed Tha Carter III immensely, and have even compared "Lollipop" to Dylan at Newport, but if you call yourself the best rapper alive, you should be able to heed Fabolous' advice: "don't be murdered over your song before you ad-lib it." Especially don't be murdered by Fabolous.
So I know Napster was supposed to have killed the album long ago, but it wasn't until Tha Carter III and Chinese Democracy, 2008's most anticipated albums, sucked so bad that I saw the heart rate go flat. Lil' Wayne tops the singles chart without rapping, and tops the album chart with worse rhymes than he gives away for free: sounds like a deliberate fuck you, if not attempted murder, to the concept of the commercial album as a white elephant. And Jon Pareles' personal bias isn't leading him astray when he calls Chinese Democracy (my thoughts on which are available two posts down) "the Titanic of rock albums." The failure of these two to live up to their monumental expectations only underscored this year's lack of monumental albums.
And oh yeah, I forgot: Girl Talk, which I obtained legally, albeit for free (checked "I am part of the press" as explanation for my thrift; that's right, death of the press, too), and thoroughly enjoyed, even admired. Still, Gillis' style of sampling, so reliant on the familiarity of old hooks, can't say anything about the future of music.
And I'm not even worried about the future of music; I'm just saying that this year showed no signs. Vampire Weekend is pretty good, and if I get to hear them in full I'll probably dig the new albums by Deerhunter and TV on the Radio (not to mention Taylor Swift and Rihanna). But I already know that those aren't Purple Rain or London Calling; heck, they're not even Kala.
P.S.: If someone shows me how, I'll post mp3s of the songs I mentioned. But nobody seems to respond to these postscripts.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
2008
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2 comments:
Dear Science was a better record than any other to come out in the last several years, far better than sound of silver which was definitely the best last year. I mean I'll agree that this year didn't have the quanity of good albums that previous years did, but in my opinion, Dear Science made up for all of that.
I had hoped to make clear that this is about something more vague than "quality." As it is, I can't give those guys much credit for finally realizing that rock and roll is supposed to be fast and ending up sounding like the Talking Heads did twenty-five years ago.
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