Beach House, Teen Dream
CEO, White Magic
Nite Jewel, Am I Real?
El Guincho, Pop Negro
Owen Pallett, Heartland
The National, High Violet
Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me
Ra Ra Riot, The Orchard
Delorean, Subiza
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Before Today
Kisses, “Bermuda”:
– Farmers Market (Thursdays, Bartlett between 21st and 22nd streets). Finally, a farmers market in my neighborhood, and it opens just in time for breakfast!
– Dishammer, Under the Sign of the D-beat Mark. For some reason this record made me very happy in 2010
– Healthy San Francisco. I got your public option RIGHT HERE
– Matt Taibbi. Reminding everyone what real journalism is like. His reporting for Rolling Stone this year is essential, as is his book Griftopia.
– Deathspell Omega, Paracletus. In fact, Deathspell Omega period
– Ocrilim. If Sunn0))) was actually cool and interesting, it would be Ocrilim. The best album is Annwn.
– Dispirit. A local band
– Metal blogs have arrived. Invisible Oranges, Metal Sucks, Lurkers Path, That’s How Kids Die and others are doing a great job of filling a void in the music press.
– Quitting Facebook. I quit Facebook this year — highly recommended.
– San Francisco Federal Credit Union. Screw the megabanks, go local.
Dishammer, “Invocation”:
Durutti Column, “Stucki”
CFCF, The River
Oni Ayhun, “Untitled (OAR003–B)”
James Blake, Klavierwerke
Mario Basanov, Caribbean Girl
Sun Araw, Off Duty and Boat Trip
Charanjit Singh, Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat
Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Macho
Tensnake, Coma Cat
Tame Impala, Innerspeaker
The Radio Dept., “Heaven’s On Fire“
Oni Ayhun, “Untitled (OAR003-B)”:
James Blake, “Klavierwerke”:
Tame Impala, “Half Full Glass of Wine”:
– These New Puritans, “We Want War” video. Slow motion videos can either be awesome or insanely awesome. “We Want War” is the latter.
– Girl Talk, All Day. We played this a bunch on tour and it made me feel like I didn’t have a job but also would never need one. Which is probably one of the top ten life scenarios of 2010.
– Liz Phair at The Independent, October 10, 2010. Liz Phair > egg sandwiches. No, really.
– Kid CuDi, “Don’t Play This Song.” I first heard this track while driving through crazy fog on Interstate 8 in the Arizona foothills at 2 a.m., which was probably the best possible context I could have imagined. CuDi perfectly captures a sense of calculated self-destruction.
– Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty. As soon as I heard the title of the new Big Boi album I knew I would like it. “Tangerine” and “Ain’t No DJ” are my favorite cuts.
– Sleigh Bells, “Riot Rhythm.” This track is filthy. And I mean that in the best way. Make sure you are at least ten feet away from my face when the drums drop.
– Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. A phenomenal album from one of the most innovative musicians of our generation. Production-wise, this is my favorite Kanye record to date.
– Usher feat. Nicki Minaj, “Little Freak.” This song is my guilty pleasure. The fact that a classic Stevie Wonder synth line can peacefully coexist with Usher’s persistent ménage à trois requests never ceases to blow my mind.
– Arcade Fire, “We Used To Wait.” A friend of mine told me I would cry when I watched this video and I didn’t believe her until I was sitting in front of my laptop choking back nostalgia sobs.
– Big KRIT feat. Yelawolf, “Hometown Hero.” “Hometown Hero” features two of the most talented lyricists to blow up this year. I’m just waiting for someone to make a movie based on this song.
The video for “Coastin'” by Zion I feat.K. Flay:
K. Flay, “Crazytown”:
Lyrics Born, As U Were
Joyo Velarde, Love and Understanding
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Chromeo, Business Casual
Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
Far East Movement, Free Wired
Trackademicks, The Remix Tape, Vol. 3
The Black Keys, Brothers
John Legend and The Roots, Wake Up
Zion I, Atomic Clock
Video for “Like a G6” by Far East Movement feat. The Cataracs, DEV:
– Myron & E live with Kings Go Forth and The Selector Kirk at Elbo Room, SF
– The Pendletons, “Comin Down”/”Waiting On You” 7-inch
– Roy Ayers, live at Yoshi’s, SF
– Sweater Funk, every Sunday night at Li Po Lounge, SF
– Track the Movement, with Jerry Nice and B. Cause, first Saturdays at Showdown Bar, SF
– 45 Sessions One Year Anniversary, with DJ’s Platurn, Pump and Headspin, Enki, and E da Boss at Layover Bar, Oakland
– Change the Beat, with DJ Centipede and Mophono, every Tuesday at SOM SF.
– GrownKidsRadio Episode No. 18: “Natural Self Feature”
– El Guincho, “Bombay” video
– Groove Merchant 20 Year Anniversary LP
The video for El Guincho’s “Bombay”:
“Simple and Sweet,” from Starbooty by Roy Ayers and Ubiquity:
Bassnectar, “The 808 Track”
The Black Keys, “Tighten Up”
Drake, “Fancy”
Jay Electronica, “Exhibit C”
Flying Lotus, “Do the Astral Plane”
E-40 “B*tch”
Wiz Khalifa, “Black and Yellow”
Fat Joe, “Ha Ha”
Civil Twilight, “Letters from the Sky”
Rihanna, “Only Girl (In the World)”
The video for Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow”:
Omar Khorshid, Guitar El Chark
Niagara, Niagara
Congregacion, Viene
Neu! vinyl box set
Franco Battiato, Fetus
Iron Curtain, “Terror Story”/”Anorexia” 7-inch
Can, Future Days
Brain Ticket, Cottonwoodhill
Chrome, Alien Soundtracks
Fabulous Diamonds, Fabulous Diamonds II
Video for “Parallels” by The Soft Moon:
Beach House, Teen Dream
El Guincho, Pop Negro
Girl Unit, I.R.L.
Teengirl Fantasy, 7AM
k**O, Espanish Boogie, Vol. 2
The Ruby Suns, Fighting Softly
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Ariel Pink, Before Today
Tensnake, Coma Cat
Glasser, Ring
The video for “Lover of Mine,” off of Beach House’s Teen Dream:
Girl Unit, “Wut”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc6ZqhJWRhE
Tensnake, “Coma Cat (Original Mix)”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW2RACqNi9E
Check out our Year in Music Bay rock roundup featuring Weekend, then dive into their faves …
Big Troubles, “Freudian Slips”
Terry Malts, “I’m Neurotic”
Grave Babies, “Gouge Your Eyes Out”
Speculator, “Fuck This World”
Minks, “Funeral Song”
Procedure Club, “Feel Sorry for Me”
Tamaryn, “Love Fade”
Little Girls, “Delaware”
Young Prisms, “Sugar”
Fluffy Lumbers, “Harry Dolland’s”
The video for “Love Fade” by Tamaryn, starring Alexis Penney:
The video for Weekend’s “Monday Morning/Monongah, WV,” directed by the group’s Shaun Durkan and Kevin Johnson:
arts@sfbg.com
YEAR IN MUSIC Hot blonde hits the spot when it comes to those super-chilled depression doldrums. Jean Harlow and Joan Blondell were the fair-haired girls during the 20th century’s major downtown. As for 2010, it kicked off with the comic train wreck of party girl Ke$ha — plying us with tartly delivered, tarted-up hip-hop-ified electro and a bona fide pop classic in her chart-topping “Tik Tok.” It ended with the entertainment press hanging on every syllable from rom-commie good girl Taylor Swift, the pretty prodigy with a country storyteller’s set of close-for-comfort tales to tell.
In the meantime, that other over-saturated blonde, Lady Gaga, consolidated her grip on an enthralled mainstream, hammering out Monster’s Ball performances and releasing little apart from her Pussywagon-fueled “Telephone” music video, delightfully overstuffed with killer-lesbionic antics and girlfriend-in-arms Beyonce. Shape-shifters and wig-changers like M.I.A. and Peaches worked the edges of pop, while Gwen and Britney sat out the year of the solo blonde. Plenty of other babes in Popland were fully prepared to serve up sensation, even as Swift worried for mothers everywhere (and perhaps herself), “Oh, darling, don’t you ever grow up, don’t you ever grow up/ It could stay this simple.”
Nothing was ever quite as simple as that song, “Never Grow Up,” in a game-changing yet politically conservative 2010. America’s girls were riveted by Swift, the million-plus-selling teen queen who could sing (depending whether you liked her Grammy coupling with Stevie Nicks or chalked it up to an off night) and write, judging from her recent Speak Now (Big Machine). Swift’s chief critic Kanye West may have put out a more musically exciting album, but in the battle to see who can artfully reveal the most and still remain compelling, Swift might be K-Whoa’s match. You must love a high-profile 20-year-old who tells us how she really feels about, say, alleged ex John Mayer, singing, “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” and “I’ll look back and regret how I ignored when they said, ‘Run as fast as you can,'” in the appropriately soggy “Dear John.”
Mocking rocker “Better Than Revenge” is better, despite the cheesy megaphone-like vocal effects, as Swift takes her poison pen to perceived romantic rival Camille Belle (for former flame Joe Jonas’ affections) and cleverly, self-consciously complains, “She thinks I’m psycho/ Because I like to rhyme her name with things/ But sophistication isn’t what you wear, or who you know/ Or pushing people down to get you where you wanna go.”
Jonas (“Last Kiss”), West (“Innocent,” yawn), Taylor Lautner (“Back to December”), and even industry insider-newsletter scribe Bob Lefsetz (“Mean”) all supposedly enter Swift’s sights. But the real tribute to her skills lie with infectious story songs like Speak Now‘s title track, and its opener, “Mine,” songs that would be an asset on any country-pop performer’s recording — and not at all beholding to Behind the Music speculation or tabloid gossip. Now if only she could hook up with one talented, directional producer with a musical opinion — when it comes to country-pop, Daniel Lanois comes to mind, but why not Rick Rubin or even Jack White? To be as memorable as country music’s singer-songwriter greats, Swift needs to find challenging sounds to pair with her provocative lyrics.
Ke$ha lacks little in the provocation department. “Now that I’m famous/ You’re up my anus/ Now I’m gonna eat you, fool!” she whinnies in the title track of her Cannibal EP (RCA), the disappointing rejoinder to her debut, Animal (RCA). It’s as throwaway as a Mr. T punchline, but the rhymes also plug into the fear and loathing inspired by Kesha Sebert, who has gone from a hick-from-the-sticks, baby celeb-in-waiting to Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie in The Simple Life to an icon worthy of YouTube parodies and frothing hater commenting. Sure, she looks a hot mess, as personified by her trash-talkin’, fall-outta-the-sack, smashed-dolly turns with “Tik Tok” and “Your Love Is My Drug.” Her image seems to define “hot mess”: picture hipster Barbie gone wild — and drunk on old Lil’ Kim raps — and then dragged over miles of rough road. Yet the criticism Ke$ha catches — Rolling Stone described her debut as “repulsive, obnoxious, and ridiculously catchy” — reads more like easy misogyny, and at moments bourgie envy, of the type that’s so often aimed at the highly visible village slut.
Streaming the archetypal ho to Swift’s less-sullied like-a-virgin, Cannibal nevertheless feels like leftovers, doubtless culled from the hundreds of songs Ke$ha is said to have written in the years leading up to Animal. The girl isn’t above slapping the glib “man-gina” tag on a dismissible male in “Grow a Pear.” But even this brief EP has a few insinuating tracks: the jokey “Blow,” with its silly-giggly allusions to — ooh, naughty — backdoor fun, crackin’ hoedowns, and “letting the crazy out”; baby-house hit “We R Who We R,” a going-out-hard anthem infinitely preferable to the Black-Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”; and the sassy proclamation of slatternly white-trash, um, identity, “Sleazy.” The latter two tunes’ adenoidal raps are reminiscent of both Ke$ha’s spiritual cool aunt, Peaches, and even her very remote agent-provocateur relation M.I.A.
“I was happy being the retarded cousin of rap,” M.I.A. told Billboard this year. “Now I’m the retarded cousin of singing.” Likewise, who isn’t tired of complaints about Maya Arulpragasam’s ragged performances and bumpy raps — she makes a virtue of the rugged and raw with Maya (Interscope/XL), easily the most musically compelling recording by any of the aforementioned divas (with production by Blaqstarr, Rusko, Switch, Diplo, and Sleigh Bells’ Derek E. Miller, among others). The iPhone and Google shout-outs; dark, grating, and metallic samples; and a gory, not-altogether-successful Romaine Gavras video for the hardcore-inspired “Born Free” add up to what might be considered her most American album.
Maya is an intriguingly self-titled reassertion of identity, made amid growing fame and privilege — all things she was somewhat absurdly criticized for by Lynn Hirschberg in her “Trufflegate”-spurring cover story in the May 25 issue of The New York Times Magazine, a piece that takes M.I.A. to task for her frank — and ironic — comments, castigates her as both politically naive and artistically manipulative and offers up several head-scratching, what-year-is-this observations like “the record business in 2010 demands touring to ensure record sales” and “the oddity of using a garment linked to mercenaries to convey a very different message seemed to elude Maya.”
If M.I.A. felt needlessly crucified by Hirschberg, then she should sign up for the latest great idea coming from another original, Peaches. On the heels of her unjustifiably neglected I Feel Cream (XL, 2009) — and a super trooper performance at the Regency during a major power outage — she reprises her one-woman take on Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Peaches Christ Superstar, in SF this week. Faith is blonde and semi-mohawked here, as Peaches performs the entire album — much as she did as a 15-year-old singing along with the record — with Chilly Gonzalez on piano. This after the production was first scuttled because it wasn’t conventional — and a woman was playing all the roles.
Considering the steamy mess of projects in Peaches’ recent past and future—a decade after her debut, The Teaches of Peaches, she’s cowritten songs with Christina Aguilera for Bionic (RCA); appeared in the Flaming Lips’ version of Dark Side of the Moon (Warner Bros., 2009); contributed to the upcoming R.E.M. album, Collapse Into Now (Warner Bros.); recently debuted a career-encompassing, mega-vagina-riddled opera, Peaches Does Herself ; and played laser harp with her band Sweet Machine — 2010’s blondes can only hope to be as prolific as she is, 10 years along.
She’s still dreaming, too. “I feel like quoting a Feist line,” Peaches says by phone from New York City, referring to her ex-housemate’s song, “Mushaboom.” “Hopefully, ‘my dreams will match up with my pay’ so I can bring these productions to audiences. I get complaints from fans on Facebook and my blog, ‘Why do you do everything in Berlin? Why don’t you bring it to my town?’ It’s the dream of money.”
PEACHES CHRIST SUPERSTAR
Sat/18, 8 p.m., $30
Herbst Theatre
401 Van Ness, SF
arts@sfbg.com
YEAR IN MUSIC Sometimes it appears that metal is aging backward in time, like a jean-jacketed, beer-swilling Benjamin Button. A cannibalistic hunger for old tropes sends budding musicians traveling deeper and deeper into the past for inspiration. By the beginning of 2010, the corpse of thrash metal was well and truly picked over, and as a legion of teenage “retro-thrashers” began to wear holes in their all-white high-tops, a new reverence emerged, one that looked beyond the aggression and speed of the middle 1980s, hearkening back to an earlier, heavier time.
This appetite for headbanging history was nurtured by 2010’s profusion of reunion tours. Emboldened by the music’s broadening audience, aging musicians the world over have been emerging from seclusion (voluntary or otherwise) and honing in on ticket territory that recently belonged to their younger colleagues.
Traditional doom metal was robustly resurrected; cult late-1970s acts St. Vitus and Pentagram both graced the stage at DNA Lounge, with mixed results. Considering the promise evinced by its summer 2009 appearance at the same venue, Pentagram was disappointing, though a last-minute lineup change was made the scapegoat. St. Vitus was another matter, thundering forth on the strength of guitarist Dave Chandler’s dive-bombing psychedelia and singer Scott “Wino” Weinrich’s booming baritone. The renewed vigor of the legendary L.A. outfit made the recent death of original drummer Armando Acosta especially poignant, though he had not played with the band for some time.
Metal was robbed of another sainted figure this year: Ronnie James Dio, whose inimitable voice and boundless energy made him one of the best-liked musicians in the business. His performances remained impeccable almost to the bitter end, which exacerbates the sense of loss. Fans can take comfort in the fact that he died during 2010, a year that witnessed a veritable renaissance of exactly the kind of late-1970s metal Dio did so much to popularize.
The fervor for classic, “traditional” metal was on display this past summer at Tidal Wave, a free concert in McClaren Park that featured three reinvigorated acts as its second-day capstone, each interpreting genre-progenitors Iron Maiden and Judas Priest in its own particular way. Anvil Chorus was formed during the dawn of the Reagan administration, and “Blondes in Black” and “Deadly Weapons” served as catchy centerpieces to an expertly-played set. Bay Area treasures Stone Vengeance, an all-African American trio from Hunter’s Point, showed why it has been able to survive for more than three-decades, combining engaging enthusiasm, unimpeachable technique, and a deep-seated sense of humor. U.K. legend Raven was the headliner, belying its advanced years thanks to rapid tempos, vertiginous falsetto, and captivating NWOBHM licks.
Elsewhere, German legend Accept released a new album and set out on the road, and long-running S.F. veterans Slough Feg returned this year with The Animal Spirits, a potent full-length. And yet a love of melody, guitar harmony, sung vocals, and galloping drums is no longer limited to hoary veterans. This year also witnessed a crop of new bands that drew heavily on late-1970s and early-1980s inspiration to craft a compelling crop of fiery LPs.
Sweden’s Enforcer (Diamonds) and Steelwing (Lord of the Wasteland) and L.A.’s Holy Grail (Crisis in Utopia) all took advantage of their klaxon-throated singers to release albums that draw heavily on classic Judas Priest, with a particular focus on high-register vocal melody and a bevy of shredding. Breakout Olympia, Wash., group Christian Mistress took a slightly different approach. The group’s EP Agony & Opium leavens influential British outfit Diamond Head with the unique, melancholy delivery of singer Christine Davis.
If metal spends 2011 in this same archaeological mind-set, the Blue Cheer comparisons will start to fly fast and thick. But while some may decry the stultification that accompanies veneration of the retro, they cannot deny its curatorial power. Like Dio himself, the metal of the past is destined to live again, in the overburdened eardrums of the present.
arts@sfbg.com
YEAR IN MUSIC The past year brought dozens of excellent albums, and hip-hop sounds topped the list. This wasn’t inevitable. Please recall 2009, when critics cited precious little rap in their favorites, save for Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx … Part 2 and Mos Def’s The Ecstatic. But in 2010, both rockists and heads reserved space for Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot: Son of Chico Dusty, the Roots’ How I Got Over, Drake’s Thank Me Later, and Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma. And let’s not forget minor but important recordings such as Curren$y’s Pilot Talk and Yelawolf’s Trunk Muzik 0-60.
This winning slate confirmed that major label-backed rap is undergoing a renaissance. Nearly every artist made an impact by keeping their eye on the mainstream, from security guard-turned-bad actor Rick Ross recruiting Erykah Badu and Cee-Lo Green for his Teflon Don, to Bun B allowing Canadian teen idol Drake to call himself an “honorary member of UGK” on the former’s Trill O.G. Some complained that these rappers focused too much on claiming the hearts of soccer mama grizzlies and teens raised on Bratz dolls. But after years of boorish thugs peddling D-boy anthems and R&B gimmicks, this new pop sensibility sounded refreshing. (The sole exception may be Ludacris, who found success with Battle of the Sexes by offering a slick and familiar mix of strip club anthems and babymaker suites.)
B.o.B’s The Adventures of Bobby Ray was the most extreme product of these pop mirages. The Atlanta rapper scored two No. 1 hits (“Nothin’ but You” and “Airplanes”), but divided critics and fans by recruiting emo-rock burnout Rivers Cuomo and Hot Topic heroine Hayley Williams for his collection of gooey ballads. At its best, The Adventures of Bobby Ray had a charming innocence; at worst, it sounded like pandering. But at least it offered well-written tunes. In contrast, Nicki Minaj’s grating Pink Friday mashed bad 1980s John Hughes-approved synth-pop and soaring Rihanna choruses into a barely coherent mess. It proved that despite Nicki’s talent for ear-catching stunts, from her star turn as the bisexual chick who’ll do you and your man on Usher’s “Lil’ Freak” to her cipher-destroying rhymes on Kanye West’s “Monster” and Ludacris’ “My Chick Bad,” she was still a disappointingly underdeveloped songwriter.
Lost in the intense debate over the rap major domo was the demise of Definitive Jux. Once the mighty inheritor to the Fondle ‘Em tradition of B-boy nonconformity, and the source of key early-2000s works by Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock, and Mr. Lif, it sagged under the weight of subpar and underpromoted releases before label head El-P mercifully pulled the plug last February. The news lit up the Internet for a day or two and then was seemingly forgotten. When Noz from cocaineblunts.com asked Yelawolf if he was “heartbroken” over Definitive Jux’s demise, the Alabama rapper answered: “I didn’t even know it ended. Well … I’m not heartbroken about it.” How ironic that Yelawolf was once a lyrical-minded backpacker too, before switching to gritty tales of deep South meth dealers.
There were other disturbing signs that Definitive Jux’s indie-rap scene was no longer ground zero for fledging MCs, from conscious rap advocates Little Brother breaking up, to Minneapolis freestyle ace Michael “Eyedea” Larsen dying at the tragically young age of 28. “Underground rap is dead,” noted Sean Fennessey in a Pitchfork essay hyping Los Angeles collective Odd Future. “In its stead, a different brand of homespun rappers have taken hold. Consider Lil B and Soulja Boy, who have been prolifically working the Web … to achieve their own kind of teenage heroism.”
Underground rap is not dead. It thrives with Bay Area imprints such as Interdependent Media (Truthlive’s Patience) and national players such as Duck Down Records (Skyzoo & Illmind’s Live from the Tape Deck) and Alpha Pup Records (Nocando’s Jimmy The Lock). Some of these labels subsist on scattershot independent distribution. Others recruit majors to achieve wider market penetration, including Stones Throw and EMI Label Services (Guilty Simpson’s OJ Simpson and Aloe Blacc’s retro-soul gem Good Things), and Decon and E1 Music (Black Milk’s Album of the Year). And who can blame them? These days, labels need all the help they can get. However, the principal philosophy of economic and artistic independence as an end unto itself has been forgotten.
In Robin D.G. Kelley’s 2002 book Freedom Dreams, a rapturous appreciation of 20th century black intellectualism, he writes, “Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they ‘succeeded’ in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. … And yet it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations.” Kelley could have referred to the many critics that marked Little Brother as hopelessly elitist for insisting that hip-hop should address more than the spoils of drug wars; dismissed the late Eyedea, Sage Francis, and others as silly white boys for addressing suburban middle-class concerns; and buried Definitive Jux as a repository of uncool, impossibly dense super-scientific lyricism.
By many measures, the indie-rap scene has been a failure. Unlike the network of homespun labels built by punks in the 1980s, the indie-rap scene didn’t create a thriving community without considerable financing from youth-targeting corporations, lifestyle brands, and advertising firms. And perhaps its denizens wrongly castigated dirty South rappers as ignorant, claimed that mainstream superstars like Jay-Z and Diddy were sell-outs, and turned the underground movement into a kind of purity test — all past conflicts that continue to bedevil it today. Yet these dreamers courageously imagined hip-hop culture as not only a way to entertain people and make money, but as a transformative experience that can help instill positive growth and change lives. They built a culture that holds key lessons for future rap generations.
The blog-rap generation doesn’t hold any illusions of being alternative, unless it’s manufacturing limp blasphemy like Odd Future’s use of Nazi imagery. (As Anti-Defamation League spokesman Abraham Foxman told The New York Times in a story on the Holocaust documentary Shoah, “To most kids growing up today, Hitler could be Genghis Khan.”) They’ll use any trope to be successful, from falsely claiming that they’re coke barons to bragging about their limited-edition sneaker collection and how much weed they smoke. There’s a gleeful egalitarianism in their digital miscellany. The beats bang but are same-y and indistinct, and the voices are barely distinguishable. As Wiz Khalifa simply said on his breakout single, “Black & Yellow”: “You can do it big.”
Some critics separated wheat from chaff with technical criteria such as internal rhyme schemes and double-time flow, as if MCs were ice skaters or guitar wankers. But the best artists simply illuminated their money hunger by any means necessary, effortlessly adding interesting twists to tired rap clichés. When Drake crooned on Thank Me Later, “I want this shit forever, man,” he evoked a poor man’s Nat King Cole. And when Curren$y ranted, “A gee is what I am, a jet is what I be” like a Southern Popeye on Pilot Talk II, he was insistent enough that you almost believed him.
And then there was Kanye West and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He created a spectacle out of an hour-long justification for his obnoxiousness, invited the genre’s biggest stars to support his meanderings on chauvinism and virility (or “my black balls”) and, most provocatively, continued a public call-and-response with Gil Scott-Heron. The conversation began with West’s sampling of Scott-Heron’s melancholy “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” for his 2005 album Graduation. Then Scott-Heron replied by using West’s “Flashing Lights” melody for “On Coming from a Broken Home,” the bittersweet coming-of age tale from Scott-Heron’s valiant yet muddled comeback, I’m New Here.
West ended Fantasy by sampling a large section from Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken-word performance “Comment #1,” and retitling it “Who Will Survive in America?” The poem originally captured the COINTELPRO era and the U.S. government’s eradication of black radicals, but West seemed to use it for a different point. Perhaps he’s saying that fame serves as a protective armor against systemic racism and how “at the airport they check all through my bag and tell me that it’s random.” Or maybe he’s making a wry comment on celebrity culture as the only way to survive in America. Fantasy‘s cryptic epilogue perfectly summarized this year’s rap dreamers, lost in the pop Matrix.
arts@sfbg.com
MUSIC Why did Bay Area rock rule in 2010? As top 10 lists fall like snowflakes, there’s no reason not to count the reasons. The first for me is “Age Class,” by Weekend. Here is the sound of shoegaze sharpened into an attack. Evoking Loop on adrenaline (not amphetamine), the song is an example of a young band making an old sound new — it has age and class. The hook of the song resides in the way Shaun Durkan’s voice manages to match and maybe even outdo the ferocity of the guitar, bass, and drums as he repeats the core lyric: “There’s something in our blood.” As he draws out the word blood and makes it rise, he taps into something human, maybe sinister, and definitely at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll.
What is that something in the blood? It could be many things, but reduced to the realm of Bay Area rock, it’s imagination and vitality. Weekend’s debut album Sports is traditionally classic in formal presentation, and it serves notice of a group that is likely to become big. Like many recent bands, Durkan and bandmates Abe Pedroza and Kevin Johnson tap into the late 1980s and early ’90s whirlpools of shoegaze. But unlike many peers, they match it with dark, serrated edges characteristic of post-punk. Weekend may have various writers namedropping Joy Division, but for a trio of guys in their early twenties, they sound very much like themselves.
This command extends from sound to vision with Durkan and Johnson’s video for a pair of songs on their album, “Monday Morning/Monongah, WV.” Shot beautifully in widescreen, its suburban fable adds potent surreality to Larry Clark-like teen hijinks, simply by replacing taken-for-granted water with an oil-like black liquid. Clocking in at over seven minutes and successfully fusing two songs to each other to form one narrative, “Monday Morning/Monongah, WV” breaks out of standard music video tropes to work as a film.
Which brings me to reason No. 2: Some of the best current Bay Area music is wedded to a visual flair and style born from life rather than glossy magazines. For examples, one need look no further than Justin Kelly’s videos for Hunx and His Punx, and thrift-shop owner Hunx’s perverse looks — just this month, he debuted one that he’d nicknamed “Barefoot Contessa Egghead Dracula” onstage at a downtown museum, and in the summer, he landed in the pages of Vogue Italia and Les Inrockuptibles. Likewise, Skye Thorstenson’s video — self-contained as a vintage Warner Bros. cartoon — for Myles Cooper’s “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today” successfully cast the performer as a 21st-century Mister Rogers or Pee-wee Herman, and made him a pop phenom in the British music press.
Cooper may be big in England, and Hunx may be stripped bare onstage in Paris, but there’s a gap between their do-it-yourself feats and the mainstream music press as represented by Pitchfork. I’d like to say that sexual preferences-turned-prejudices have nothing to do with it, but while Pitchfork has celebrated the neo-rave twists of Teengirl Fantasy, they’ve shown no interest in Nick Weiss of that group’s new gay pop collabos with Hunx and with Alexis, tracks that perfectly fit into the site’s established fetish for synth pop.
On Twitter, Hunx pretty much called the dominant website out on its bullshit when it omitted him from its “Top 40 Artist Twitters” list. Packed with sharp observation about music and day-to-day moments, the Twitter feeds of SF musicians such as Hunx, Cooper, Alexis Penney, and — showcased in this issue — swiftumz offer more than self-promotion. They’re full-fledged creative diaries, and in some cases, spaces for comic or gay performance. It’s no accident that today’s most extreme example of a self-created musical Twitter or YouTube star — Lil B — also hails from the self-inventing Bay Area. On his own, jettisoning major labels, Lil B is a one-man Warhol factory, endlessly duplicating and multiplying and morphing his image.
In recent years, Pitchfork and other New York publications have tended to patronize the rock music coming out of San Francisco while staunchly championing the thrilling likes of the Drums and the Beets. This year, that practice had perhaps started to fade, maybe thanks to the sheer dynamic variety of sounds from San Francisco. At the tail end of 2010, Girls’ Broken Dreams Club hit the site’s “Best New Music” category, while Weekend’s Sports garnered a high rating, and the Soft Moon’s debut album was previewed and promoted in different contexts. Earlier in the year, Sonny and the Sunsets were blessed with a billing at Pitchfork’s fest.
These national nods count for something, and the past twelve months have also seen solid-to-exceptional releases from Moon Duo, the Fresh and Onlys, the Mantles, Tamaryn, and more. Still, while new albums by the Alps and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma were championed by New York’s Other Music, they’ve gone ignored on Pitchfork. Singular Bay Area labels such as Root Strata and Dark Entries are unveiling strange sonic worlds to excited audiences, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it if you went to national music publications for your information.
Meanwhile, Pitchfork’s influence — the inevitable wave crest of a sensibility (if you can call it that) cultivated by the echo-chamber of various blogs — has generated some truly dubious critical darlings in 2010. It’s one thing to simply not care for a lauded artist. That kind of thing happens all the time. It’s another, though, to listen to a celebrated phenom and feel that it is entirely bogus. Such is the case with How to Dress Well, whose Mr. Bill reinterpretations of ’80s and ’90s R&B have me racing for my Aaliyah collection and early Mary J. Blige recordings so as not to become wholly dispirited. Similarly, 2010 will also bear the scarlet letter of being the year that “witch house” broke, as the similar sub-musicality of Salem was taken seriously at face value — at least until some mind-boggling live performances began to circulate on YouTube.
Perhaps all too late, this critic inherently questions the value or existence of pop music criticism a little more with each passing year. At times, my disillusionment blooms into an outright alienation from an entire genre. I’ll come right out and admit that frustration with commercial hip-hop has turned me off with no change in sight for a while, and I feel similarly about R&B. Janelle Monáe’s android act leaves me cold, and no amount of pioneering or vanguard or even artistically challenging production moves by Kanye West will get me to successfully ignore or bypass the fact that he annoys the fuck out of me. Is this dubious? Maybe so. Tell me why. I’d like to feel enraptured by these genres, but right now, I don’t.
Still, this disappointment has been countered by a sense of excitement about music on a local scale, and also a hope that actual songcraft — as embodied by Kisses, whose sublime song “Bermuda” made them a brief Pitchfork flavor-of-the-month — may yet have a comeback. Even as the likes of How to Dress Well and Salem seem to wage a war against musicality that has nothing to do with punk and everything to do with navel-gazing hipster tedium. Let me put it this way. Weekend is coming up, Girls is here for your broken heart, Hunx is around for other parts of your anatomy, and a Soft Moon is on the rise. It would be sheer foolishness to complain.
marke@sfbg.com
YEAR IN MUSIC “But not this time. This is our time. This time you’re going to hand them a business card that says ‘I’m CEO … bitch!’ “
Thus screams Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) during the hilarious club scene in this year’s seminal The Social Network. They’re supposedly at a space in the Mission (actually L.A.’s Exchange club) in 2004, a horridly stereotypical affair featuring bland industrial architecture, a dance floor full of blonde “woo!” girls in black cocktail dresses, writhing go-go gals with pink boas, oversized martini glasses, illuminated cocktail tables, coke sniffles…. You know, the Jungian ideal of Douche Central.
(The music the two actors are screaming over — Dutch Euro-trancer Dennis de Laat’s 2010 remake of Cassius’ 2002 French millennial-funk track “The Sound of Violence” — is a bit of a joke too, although I’m not sure if de Laat was in on it. Contemporary progressive house and Euro-trance, alas, are still perfectly suited for scoring tacky Internet wheeling and dealing in 2004.)
That over-the-top scene made me think about how far dance music and club culture have come, both in terms of mainstream acceptance — throw in a verse by Drake and a goofy bassline and “The Sound of Violence” could be Ke$ha’s next paycheck — and alternative options. Despite a few fun parties and a strong sense of underground unity, 2004 really was a low point for dance music, the spinning-wheels moment before a host of now-ubiquitous styles like dubstep, minimal techno, global funk, and nu-disco hit the scene. Sure, the current pop charts are a commercial dance juggernaut of kookily styled, sexlessy sex-obsessed, materialistic Auto-Tuned clubkid wannabes, hating on haters and looking for love all up in the VIP. But this is fine! First, thanks to the Internet, it’s all so easy to ignore. Second, anything’s better than the whine-rock males that electro-pop replaced. And third, pop homogeneity has helped bring about an alternative renaissance of brain-tickling party music and club events for people who want more out of nightlife than Cristal bottle-service and a new Facebook profile pic.
In fact, it was a bit hard to keep up with all the ingenious debauchery in 2010. Despite the continued recession — more probably because of it — partying was rampant, with new venues like Public Works and Jones and revamped ones like 222 Hyde, Holy Cow, and SOM joining established spots (happy 25th, DNA Lounge!) in presenting some of the most innovative programming in the world. I can’t tell you how many times I heard New Yorkers, Londoners, and Berliners sigh lovingly and praise the scene here.
It sure didn’t take a lot of traveling, though, for me to see how good we have it right now, partywise. The homofuturist techno of Honey Sundays, Tormenta Tropical’s spiky electro-cumbia, the twisted funk of Loose Joints, Some Thing’s post-ironic showtunes, Icee Hot’s UK bashment, DJ Bus Station John’s various bathhouse unearthings, Kontrol’s live minimal showcase, Phonic’s classic tech and house, the global funk of Afrolicious, Frequency’s Dilla-influenced hip-hop, Change the Beat’s future-bass soul, Love Letters’ intelligent techno, Nachtmusik’s dark wave, Ritmos Sin Fronteras’ global house, Braza!’s deep samba, Ritual’s anarcho-dubstep, Go Bang!’s disco bliss, the young queer twists of Hard French and Stay Gold …. I could go on and on — suffice it to say the only bad nights out I had this year in the city were the ones I can’t remember. (Even my brief forays into the Lady Gagay bars of the Castro were at least, er, exotic.)
And this was the first year in a long time that local partiers loudly chafed against our city’s ridiculous 2 a.m. curfew for bars lacking an exorbitantly priced late-night license. Could it be time for another push against this aspect of the city’s constant War on Fun? The pushback would be intense. Some tragic shootings and other violent acts were associated with nightlife this year (even if they only happened near a club, kill-joy NIMBY’s jump at the chance to blame partiers and don’t have the capacity to distinguish among different kinds of parties). Nightlife naysayers got away with some pretty ballsy moves this year, including the cancellation of the enormous Lovevolution outdoor party. Yet, as slightly cynical as I am right now about the possibility of political change, I’m hoping the vitality of our scene is starting to build some positive momentum toward at least letting SF parties keep going as long as those in New York, Atlanta, and Chicago. Hi, world-class city here, right?
In the larger view, 2010, to me, was the year that the Internet finally came of club age. I know, I know, you’ve heard it before. By making almost everything available at once, the Internet erases the distinction between mainstream and alternative culture, between pop and underground. This year that felt truer than ever, and the change seemed like it was finally taking effect on a broad cultural level — whenever I tried to explain to someone in their teens how rave culture was a deliberate rebellion against commercial culture, or how independent music differed from that put out by major labels, they looked at me like I was from the ’90s!
But in 2010, DJs and musical archeologists tried to fill in that almost with a vengeance — they wanted everything, from the past as well as the present, to be available on the Internet. Uploading and sharing history-altering vinyl rarities was this year’s badge of honor. I found myself hearing so many songs on the dance floor that I’d forgotten, I’d sometimes enter a kind of dream state, unsure of my own historical timeline. The “wave” phenomenon, which brought utterly unheralded synth and proto-goth acts from the age of hand-to-hand cassette culture to light (and various dance floors) was the most literal manifestation of this, but there were others as well. Old-school SF DJs who’d spent years building their record collections — Gavin Hardkiss, James Glass, Solar, Jenö, Garth, Ken Vulsion, Steve Fabus — sounded incredible this year, both for their vinyl gold and mixing acumen.
Across the board, DJs slowed the tempos of their sets, as if all the rapidly accumulating sonic history was dragging them back, their laptops churning from the weight of it all. Tunes somehow became wider, thicker, luminous. Suddenly songs were fields. This led to some fantastic developments — presaged by the reemergence of UK disco and “electro-funk” DJ pioneer Greg Wilson after decades of silence, and anticipated by releases from our own King & Hound duo, the edit scene was bananas, with a plethora of music makers releasing contemporary-sounding versions of forgotten classics. (Edits are made by rearranging or removing a song’s individual parts, unlike remixes that usually rebuild a song from the ground up).
Going one step further, recombinant folks like Soul Clap, Wolf + Lamb, Tensnake, and Mr. Intl took individual elements of half-remembered, half-heard soul, funk, house, and R&B gems and combined them with each other in uncanny ways — a little acid house melody here, the sax solo from a Chris Isaak song, a Cure bassline, a New Edition drum breakdown, a snatch of Vicious Pink there — as if populating a timeframe that didn’t quite exist.
Funnily enough, all this digging up and soldering together helped produce a heady, signature sound that crossed genre borders — dubstep (somewhat sadly) slimmed down its postapocalyptic multiculti bombast and became more psychedelic and introspective; future bass ripped a few bong hits and got more soulful; minimal techno astringency disappeared into full-on sing-along melodies; indie acts like Toro Y Moi, Delorean, Caribou, and Crystal Castles embraced rave and glitch aesthetics; abrasive hardcore electro and filter house politely fled the scene. The overall effect was breezy, brainy, and Balearic.
And yes, somewhat monolithic. Pity the poor fool who tried to be different. The overheated reaction to the coining of “witch house” as a genre — think glitchy crunk beats distorted with spooky effects and the occasional static-masked rap — showed that the current scene has no taste for standouts (perhaps that’s why there was no world-dominant club this year as well). We’ll see how well “moombahton” (don’t ask) fares in the coming months, but for now it’s enough to navigate the smart, chill wave cresting on SF dancefloors. We’re all CEO, bitches.
Hang time: High on Fire’s “Hung, Drawn, and Quartered.”
Cool, ain’t it? The fun just keeps coming in chilly-chilly-chill SF. Here are a few more musical note-worthies.
BART DAVENPORT
Soulful and sweet as it comes – thanks to the Oakland singer-songwriter. With Brian Glaze and the Night Shift, the Dry Spells, and DJ Lithuanian Prince. Thurs/18, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.
HIGH ON FIRE
Get an earful of this week’s “Year in Music” cover dude Matt Pike and his Bay power trio, High on Fire, a band that has gone far beyond being, as Guardian contributor Mike McGuirk put it, an “outlet for aggression/Yeti poems Pike uses in place of his defunct first band, Sleep, San Jose’s most seminal export.” With Drunk Horse. Thurs/18, 9 p.m., $16. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750.
HIGHTOWER
The SF thrashers throw a benefit for Bordertown-Oakland Skate Park. With the Ferocious Few. Thurs/18, 9 p.m., $5. Thee Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. (415) 503-0393.
› kimberly@sfbg.com
Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966) not Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol, 1967). For that matter the Plastic Ono Band rather than the Beatles, and Brian Wilson before Paul McCartney. Scott Walker, not Paul Simon. Arthur Russell, not David Byrne — though regards to the Talking Heads. ‘Fraid no Bruce Springsteen but plenty of Neil Young. The Band not … well, Bob Dylan hangs on despite the unfortunate I’m Not There (2007), the seeming party-stopper in a never-ending stream of Dylan books and arcana. Prince, in lieu of Rick James, bitch.
Low-budg bedroom production, not Chinese Democracy (Interscope). Not reggaetón but Krautrock. Not Afro-Cuban but African. Not doo-wop but girl group. Nope to Phil Spector but yes to Lee Hazlewood or, better, Lee "Scratch" Perry. Stock on the Replacements and Hüsker Dü is way down, but Bad Brains and Black Flag shares are up. Sorry, the Who isn’t all right but Zep’s song remains the same. Nevermind Nirvana but hello, Sparks — and no, not Jordin Sparks. And oddly enough, not the Tubes or Huey Lewis and the News, but Journey — and specifically "Don’t Stop Believin’."
Now repeat, twirl around, pat your head whilst rubbing your stomach, click your heels together twice, and commit the aforementioned to memory: this is your new rock canon.
Just trust me on this. I’ve read a lot of music stories and CD reviews in ’08, and since I’m missing the crucial math gene, I can’t quantify the exact number of times the hallowed names of Arthur Russell, Neil Young, or Brian Wilson have been invoked, but believe me, they have, more times than group-think-phobic music writers care to admit. And that’s not to say the artists and recordings these canonical creators have displaced are now worthless: even admitting that a canon (or three or four) exists, let alone articuutf8g one, can be a dicey proposition — whether you’re among lit professors or cruising music crit circles. The very idea evokes exclusivity, hierarchy, neocon grandstanding, worries about exclusion, and allusions to dead white men. "I think most professors would not want to say there’s a canon but if you teach a course on American literature there are still things you want to teach," opined one tenured prof pal. "They’re critical of a canon but they still are creating a canon. It’s very implicit and unconscious in some ways."
Yet anyone who’s cared deeply enough about pop to critique it can’t help but notice the seismic shift in the ’00s — even as the state of criticism seems to wax and wane with the fortunes of a music industry still searching for an uploadable business model; music mags busily folding or scrambling for lifestyle advertising; and newspapers gutting their staffs and substituting arts criticism with reviews wrought by, say, sports copy editors. Meanwhile blogs generate a still-fluid mixture of earnest criticism, bracing truth-telling, and hands-free promotion. A canon — or the very idea of classics and common musical references that all agree on — presupposes a foundation of critical thought, and who can afford to judge amid the hand-wringing desperation of today’s music marketplace?
Who instigated this changing of the guard, this revised rock ‘n’ roll canon? Tastemakers, tastefakers, marketing minons, and branding blowhards? Writers, DJs, musicians, music store staffers, promoters, and Robert "Dean of American Rock Critics" Christgau? All Tomorrow’s Parties, Arthur, Pitchfork, and the Chunklet writers who dreamed up issue 20’s music journalist application form ("Would you admit to not actually being that familiar with your frequent points of reference you name-drop [e.g., Captain Beefheart or Gang of Four]?")? This very humble independently owned, independent-minded rag? We’ll never admit it — because the very notion of forging a new pop canon in this fragmented, un-unified, de-centered vortex of music-making, consumption, and collecting seems utterly ridiculous, if not downright moronic. Yet a generational aesthetic realignment has occurred, and as a wise friend once told me, shift happens.
• BEAT SUITE Benga, Diary of an Afro Warrior (Tempa); Flying Lotus, Los Angeles (Warp); Portishead, Third (Mercury/Island)
• EXOTICA Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna (Social Registry); High Places, High Places (Thrill Jockey)
• J-HEAVY Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO, Recurring Dream and Apocalypse of Darkness (Important); Boris, Smile (Southern Lord)
• LIVE LOVES Fleet Foxes at Bottom of the Hill; High on Fire at Stubb’s; Jonas Reinhardt at Hemlock Tavern; MGMT and Yeasayer at BOH; My Bloody Valentine at the Concourse; Nomo at BOH; Singer at Rickshaw Stop; Stars of the Lid at the Independent
• LOCALS ONLY The Alps, III (Type); Faun Fables, A Table Forgotten (Drag City); Tussle, Cream Cuts (Smalltown Supersound); Dominique Leone, Dominique Leone (Stromland); Mochipet, Microphonepet (Daly City)
• PLEASANT NODS Beach House, Devotion (Carpark); Growing, All the Way (Social Registry); TV on the Radio, Dear Science (Interscope)
• POP NARCOTIC Crystal Stilts, Alight of Night (Slumberland); Magnetic Fields, Distortion (Nonesuch); Times New Viking, Rip It Off (Matador)
• PSYCHED Guapo, Elixirs (Neurot); Mirror Mirror, The Society for the Advancement of Inflammatory Consciousness (Cochon)
• PUNX Fucked Up,The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador)
• YESTERDAYS La Dusseldorf, Viva (Water); Graham Nash, Songs for Beginners (Rhino); Linda Perhacs, Parallelograms (Sunbeam); Rodriguez, Cold Fact (Light in the Attic); Dennis Wilson, Pacific Ocean Blue (Sony)
› johnny@sfbg.com
There is a riddle wrapped in the central enigma of Stephen Kijak’s 2007 film Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. That riddle is Julian Cope. Dozens of musicians, including David Bowie and Brian Eno, listen to the elusive Walker’s music on-camera and testify to its impact. But Cope, who effectively revived Walker’s career and laid the foundation for his current cult legend status by compiling the ultrarare 1981 retrospective, Fire Escape in the Sky: The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker (Zoo), only communicates with Kijak via an e-mail that the filmmaker weaves into the web of commentary. In a movie dedicated to slowly revealing a famously mysterious figure, Cope cameos as an invisible man.
Cope’s role in 30 Century Man got me thinking about his position within popular music, a train of thought that led to the subject of musicians as creators and guardians of musical canons. In the ’80s, I’d bought albums by Cope’s group, the Teardrop Explodes, and early solo recordings such as 1984’s fox-y Fried (Polygram, 1984), where he wears a turtle shell and nothing else on the cover. Some close friends were so devoted to Cope that they named their first son Julian, but my interest in him fizzled. Checking back decades later, I soon realized that through writing, he’d generated new waves of enthusiasm around the "supreme Magic & Power" of Krautrock (via the self-published 1995 tome Krautrocksampler [Head Heritage]) and Japanese psychedelia (via Japrocksampler, published in 2007 by Bloomsbury). His Web site, www.headheritage.co.uk, spotlights a favorite album each month and uses list-making as an opportunity to uncover unique tracks like Bloodrock’s 1970 death-rattle ambulance anthem "D.O.A." — a song one of my high school teachers used to introduce poetry to a class of burnouts.
Deemed a "rock musician, author, antiquary, musicologist, and poet" by Wikipedia, Cope is likely the most visionary canon creator or canon editor among those musicians given to the practice. The man who once sang a love song to Leila Khaled is now more ambivalent about terrorism — and about Cluster, even if Krautrocksampler helped remake their reputation. But his musical guides might also be sonic versions of the ancient megaliths he’s also studied and written about at length. Before I even began reading Cope’s notes on rock’s various formations, they’d put a spell on me — in other words, they influenced my listening habits. He’s like a benevolent musical version of Dr. Julian Karswell, the rune master in Jacques Tourneur’s 1959 film Night of the Demon.
Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne is a musician-canonist whose aesthetic has fewer aspirations to deep authority than Cope’s, but one that roves more freely. While Devendra Banhart is often credited with the rediscovery of pastoral folk priestess Vashti Bunyan, it was Stanley who first introduced her recordings to new generations: she appears on Dream Babes, Volume 5: Folkrock ‘n’ Faithfull (RPM), a 2003 entry in a ’60s girl-pop series he began in 1994, as well as his 2004 compilation, Gather in the Mushrooms: British Acid-Folk Underground, 1968-1974 (Castle Music). A keen expert regarding cult figures such as Joe Meek, Stanley recently traced Bon Iver’s current fringe hero status back to Thomas Chatterton in a piece for the UK Guardian. Saint Etienne’s revelatory 2004 contribution to the mix series The Trip alone has turned me on to the Left Banke, Gloria Scott’s neglected 1974 disco classic What Am I Gonna Do? (Casablanca, 1974) and its arranger, Gene Page, and Serge Gainsbourg’s 1970 Cannabis soundtrack (Universal, 2003).
The musician as critic, if not canonist, has a long tradition in the United Kingdom: Stanley wrote for Melody Maker before forming Saint Etienne, for example. Cope might be viewed as the butch authorial corollary of Morrissey, who has waved the banner for such alternate history icons as Sparks, Klaus Nomi, and Twinkle, the latter the subject of a Stanley RPM compilation. The rock star- or DJ-as-curator trend also manifests via compilation series such as Fabric and festivals like All Tomorrow’s Parties. When My Bloody Valentine curated the 2008 New York installment of ATP, to some degree the musician-as-canonist idea came full circle, as the most evasive band from the mid-to-late-’80s reappeared amid a flurry of reissues from the era. If you’re frozen at the Googleplex crossroads of music circa 2008 and looking for a new old direction, it helps to ask a musician. (Johnny Ray Huston)
• Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)
• Coconut, Hello Fruity (Allone Co.)
• Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours (Modular)
• El Guincho, Alegranza! (XL/Young Turks)
• Bruce Haack, The Electric Lucifer (Omni Recording) and "Party Machine" and "Icarus" from Haackula! (Omni Recording)
• Tim Hardin, 1 (Water)
• Nite Jewel, Good Evening (Gloriette)
• The Present, World I See (Loaf)
• Michael Rother, Fernwärme, Flammende Herzen, Katzenmusik, and Sterntaler (Water)
• Arthur Russell, Love Is Overtaking Me (Audika)
• Various artists, Space Oddities: A Compilation of European Library Grooves from 1975–1984 (Permanent Vacation)
• Ricardo Villalobos, Vasco (Perlon)
One of the hot discs in Oakland back in 2004 was In Thugz We Trust (Rap-A-Lot/Asylum) by Thug Lordz, a duo of mob music veterans Yukmouth and C-Bo. It was dope but it underscored a problem: all the big Bay-associated artists established careers in the ’90s, before radio play and major label action dried up. During the pre-hyphy drought, it was tough to achieve any fame outside the hood.
Fast-forward to post-hyphy 2008: the canonical list of Bay Area rappers has expanded considerably. Despite receiving no local airplay through an ongoing dispute with KMEL musical director Big Von Johnson and continued hedging by Atlantic to release his album, Mistah FAB managed to dent national consciousness with his hook on Snoop’s single "Life of Da Party." The increasing clout of SF independent label SMC raised newer acts Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin to the regional stardom necessary to go further. Winner of the Guardian‘s reader choice poll for hip-hop, Beeda had one of the most successful discs of the year with Da Thizzness, while Stalin’s Gas Nation topped the rap best-seller list at Rasputin Music the week of its release, Sept. 23. Other acts like Eddi Projex have cracked the airwaves to remain hot, while the Jacka — whose career began at the tail end of the ’90s as a member of C-Bo’s Mob Figaz — had the biggest local single of the year, "All Over Me," from his highly anticipated album Tear Gas, due in March.
The older acts haven’t disappeared, however, as witnessed by new discs from San Quinn and E-40. A notable development of the past two years has been the solo career of former Delinquent G-Stack. Taking a page from Mac Dre’s book, Stack has developed new personae like Purple Mane and George W. Kush to release four purple-themed compilations, plus a solo EP, preparatory to his SMC full-length, Dr. Purp Thumb, slotted for February. Along the way, he’s begun developing newer acts like Deev Da Greed, a co-owner of Stack’s 4 the Streets Entertainment and, along with Qoolceo and Tay Peezy, a member of the HEEM Team.
"I can rap but that wasn’t my dream," Deev confesses at the Grill studio in Emeryville. "When we opened the label, I was in the lab [the studio] a bunch, so I was, like, let me do a verse." Despite these casual origins, Deev acquired serious buzz this year with his effortless flow — he just floats over any beat — and clever wordplay, co-signing Stack’s fourth comp, Abraham Reekin (4 the Streets).
The accidental rise of Deev illustrates the difference four years has made. The glacial pace of change during the pre-hyphy period has become torrential as fresh acts like Stevie Jo, Philthy Rich, and Yung Moses continue to bubble to the surface. This is partly technological — the fruit of a Pro Tools and YouTube generation — but it’s also inspirational. Unlike the first half of this decade, there’s a place to rise to. The prospect of attaining fame as a Bay Area rapper is still unreasonably difficult, but FAB and others have at least proved the prospect still exists. (Garrett Caples)
1. J-Stalin, Gas Nation (Livewire/Thizz/SMC)
2. Beeda Weeda, Da Thizzness (PTB/Thizz/SMC)
3. G-Stack, My Purple Chronicles (4 the Streets)
4. The Jacka, Fed-X, and AP.9, Mob Trial III (Sumo)
5. Mistah FAB, Playtime Is Over (Demolition Men)
6. Shady Nate, The Graveyard Shift (Demolition Men)
7. G-Stack and Deev Da Greed, Abraham Reekin (4 the Streets)
8. Livewire Da Gang, Pay Ya’self or Spray Ya’self (Livewire)
9. Ise Lyfe, The Prince Cometh (7even89ine)
10. San Quinn, From a Boy to a Man (Done Deal/SMC)
Wooo! Wooooo! No, I’m not a giant faggotty owl. I’m the ghost of recent San Francisco underground dance floors past — equally faggotty — and I controool you. Or at least I did, until that brazen neon bitch from American Apparel showed up on the 2k8 guest list, with his matte lamé leggings, Adderall diet, Marvel comics mask, baile funk BFF, and Ableton plug-ins.
Gurl, I got caught with my ZOMGs down, and it was total fap fap fap.
For more than a decade, I fierce ruled the insular world of club tunes, dividing them up into techno, house, and hip-hop, with some occasional ’80s nostalgia on the side. I froze all dance genres in the booty-phat ’90s with my snap-hand, casting off up-and-comers with a haughty high-hat spray of laughs. Breakbeats? Electroclash? IDM? Nu-rave? Trance? Specter, please. Passing fancies, they all got swallowed up with ghostly ease. Despite my aging denizens — no more backflips at the breakdowns, no more weekend trips to Body and Soul in NYC, a lazy wash of Rihanna remixes and Mary J. mash-ups — I held all the club cards, and it felt mighty real.
I just never thought the children would use my own tools to destroy me.
Sure, I peeped those Misshapen mid-aughts electro youngsters at the fringes, flashing their disabled glasses and pajama-like outerwear on Lastnightsparty, snapping up Justice remixes on BIGSTEREO, laughing along with Hipster Runoff. And, yeah, I knew that high-school crunkers fetishized "da club"; that feisty programmers refreshed techno; that global styles stewed together in dubstep; that iDJs resurrected ancient categories like grunge and hair metal, irony slowly melting into earnestness.
But all that was old news, relying on even older genres — I mean, electro’s like from what, 1972? — and most of those darned kids, I figured, would end up directly beamed into MySpace, never setting a single fluorescent Nike onto me. The few who found their way to the "real" underground — my underground, with my same five goddamned DJs — would still have to bow down before me.
Oh, how wrong I was. I never opened up to any of the newer energies — I was afraid, I got petrified — despite their thrilling old-school affinity, preferring to keep my exhausted thralls lockstep in an endless search for purity, the enslaving chimera of "authenticity."
"Fuck that," said the children, and exploded. This year, especially, the local scene saw an infusion of youth like it hasn’t seen since rave. And like rave, there’s just no stopping the march of the Smurfs — with more to come, if the wide-eyed, underage flood at LoveFest was any indication. Everything’s escaping my control! Lazer bass! Bloody Beetroots remixes! Banger freaks! Electro-cumbia! Disco perversion!
I’d blame the hipsters, except I helped create them, d’oh. And even if, in this onslaught of danceable enthusiasm, some of that old underground feeling seems to be lost — the yearning for an inverted hierarchy to escape the real world, the notion of a special dance floor family — it’s still kind of thrilling. Maybe I, the ghostess with the mostest, should float down from my high horse and show the new gen how to dance properly.
MARKE B.’S TOP 10 EARWORMS OF 2008
Frankmusik, "3 Little Words" (Island Music)
Ane Brun, "Headphone Silence (Henrik Schwarz Remix — Dixon Edit)" (Objektivity)
Clubfeet, "Die Yuppie Scum" and Gold on Gold (both Plant Music)
Mark E., "Slave 1" (Running Back)
Foals, "Olympic Airways," Antidotes (Sub Pop)
SIS, "Nesrib" (Cecille)
Buraka Som Sistema, "Sound of Kuduro" (Modular)
The Golden Filter, "Hide Me" (Dummy)
The Very Best, "Sister Betina," Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit are the Very Best mixtape
The Notwist, "Boneless," The Devil, You + Me (Domino)
When I saw the promo blurb for rock critic Dave Thompson’s new book I Hate New Music (Backbeat) a couple of months ago, I figured I’d found a kindred spirit — someone who could explain once and for all why U2 and the Foo Fighters were evil, Radiohead was hopelessly overrated, and the Kings of Leon or whoever were irrelevant. Someone who could articulate why even a bad Humble Pie or Thin Lizzy album — you know, like Renegade (Warner Bros., 1981) — is likely to be more memorable and entertaining than this week’s featured review on Pitchfork. (By the way, I just checked, and right now, it’s the new album by the Killers. I’ll take my creaky cassette of Humble Pie’s Smokin [A&M, 1972] over them any day.)
Well, for all its potential, I Hate New Music reads less like a searing manifesto and more like a batch of shoot-from-the-hip essays on assorted classic-rock topics: the double album, Queen, 8-tracks, the double live album, and so on. Only briefly does he touch on some of the more distressing trends that have taken hold over the last decade or so, like the impact of Pro Tools, which allows home-studio mavens to polish turds as convincingly as major-label artists. Or the simultaneous rise of online music distribution and the sad, slow demise of the local record store. Releasing music is now easier than ever. Getting paid for it or, if you’re a listener, wading through it all is harder. Actually, it’s impossible. (It doesn’t help that I’m currently living in Indiana, where it’s still 2002.)
I don’t want to hate new music, and though I may be crotchety beyond my years, I really don’t hate it. Not all of it. I was genuinely excited by all the albums on my humble year-end list — and a handful more that didn’t fit. And in an encouraging trend, only two of those entries are reissues. It’s just that I don’t care if music is actually new or just new to me, and there’s always going to be more of the latter. I finally got the American Music Club this year, which happened to have an excellent new disc. But I also finally got, or discovered, Lee Perry’s, Omar Khorshid’s, and Peter Laughner’s solo recordings, a slew of weird CD-Rs on the barely legal (or not) Dolor Del Estamago label, and the deluxe reissue of the Allman Brothers’ 1972 double-album Eat a Peach (Mercury). These things excited me as much as anything with "2008" stamped on the back.
Anyway, while I disagree with Thompson that rock died in 1976, I do agree it’s getting harder to weed out the survivors.
1. Various artists, Always Something There: A Burt Bacharach Collectors’ Anthology 1952-1969 (Ace)
2. Joe E., Love Got in My Way (Eabla)
3. Outlaw Order, Dragging down the Enforcer (Season of Mist)
4. American Music Club, The Golden Age (Merge)
5. Bohren and der Club of Gore, Dolores (Play It Again, Sam/Ipecac)
6. GridLink, Amber Grey (Hydra Head)
7. Soilent Green, Inevitable Collapse in the Presence of Conviction (Metal Blade)
8. Nadja, Desire in Uneasiness (Crucial Blast)
9. Esoteric, The Maniacal Vale (Season of Mist)
10. Singer, Unhistories (Drag City)
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The more we move forward chronologically, the more we regress musically. Popular music in 2008 proved this point loud and clear. So much for the hope of diversity and new thought promised by the Internet/information age. Whether it was the already-worn-out classic rock of previous decades, recycled to gullible new generations via Guitar Hero, etc., or the unoriginal, so-called "new music" artists churning out retro-sounding hits, this year’s pop has so completely eaten and re-eaten itself, it has regurgitated itself into a corner.
This year offered up some envelope-pushing and genuinely new-sounding music, especially within such genres as hip-hop, psyche/noise/experimental, and tech-house. Yet the majority of music fans opted, despite access to much new music via the Internet that they don’t even have to pay for, to blindly buy into the hype fed to them by their favorite TV shows, Blog tastemakers, or Facebook buddies. And I am not just singling out the American Idol–watching drones who made Jordin Sparks a star, or their tween siblings/offsprings who catapulted the Jonas Brothers to pop stardom.
The supposedly free-thinking hipsters are as bad, if not worse, when it comes to keeping unoriginal music alive and well. Examples of celebrated so-called new-music makers of 2008 that I am talking about include the Black Keys (’70s rock), Santogold (’80s pop/new wave), Hercules and Love Affair (’70s disco), TV on the Radio (’80s alt-rock), and boring buzz band of the year, Vampire Weekend (early-’80s band Orange Juice with a dash of Afropop). At least with the 2008 return of Portishead and My Bloody Valentine and the continuation of groups like REM and Radiohead, we got the music firsthand from its originators. Meanwhile mashup media darling Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals (Illegal Art) only further proved that his retro taste in music — from crappy recent-year Dirty South anthems to cheesy ’80s synth-pop — totally diminishes his genuine talent as a producer.
For the most part, 2008 proved that while you can give the masses access to all of the greatest sounds out there, most will simply buy into the trends fed to them. Oh, and speaking of tired trends and musical styles, would someone please get Kanye West and T-Pain to an AA (AutoTune Anonymous) meeting, pronto.
1. Paris, Acid Reflex (Guerrilla Funk)
2. DJ Quest Questolous (Zebra Quest)
3. Nas, Untitled (Island Def Jam)
4. Mochipet, Microphonepet (Daly City)
5. Del tha Funkee Homosapien, The 11th Hour (Def Jux)
6. J-Live, Then What Happened? (BBE)
7. Azeem, Air Cartoons (Oaklyn)
8. Mike Relm, Spectacle (Radio Fried)
9. Raashan Ahmad The Push (Om)
10. Foreign Legion, The Secret Knock EP (Hungerstrike)
Imposing baritones, orchestral sweeps, and curious couplings of drama and whimsy — honestly, could we ask for better components to soundtrack a year of such 11th-hour intensity, a year of struggle and strife and the unspeakably surreal, mercifully offset by glimmers of giddiness at the prospect of something altogether new? The gift of hope delivered to us on Nov. 4 was a lovely early Christmas treat, but let’s face it: all of that waiting made 2008 a year of epic proportions. How fitting, then, that I ticked off the months with a steady stereo stream of theatrics, and that guiding most of them was the spirit of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl refugee who subverted pop music by embracing the machine while still trying to tear it down and start anew. The godfather of cowboy psychedelia, the architect of the saccharine underground, the original pop iconoclast himself: Lee Hazlewood.
Hazlewood’s greatest gift — both as a solo artist and as the cranky-baritoned foil to the sugary Nancy Sinatra — was his ability to take the supposedly disparate genres of pop, country, and lounge music and rub them against one another to riveting, highly cinematic effect. Heaped in heavy echo and bolstered by gushing string arrangements, delivered with the skill of a raconteur and bristling with unexpected juxtapositions, his music remains as head-swimmingly oddball as ever.
This year saw the return of three leading carriers of Hazlewood’s quixotic torch. Lambchop’s OH (Ohio) (Merge) offers more cryptic, disheveled elegance from the Nashville band, while the twisted lounge and heavy-ballad wooziness of Tindersticks’ The Hungry Saw (Constellation) gives a worthy update to Hazlewood’s signature tearjerker "My Autumn’s Done Come" — vibraphone and all. Not to be outdone, Nick Cave temporarily tables his more-recent chest thumping for big-screen melodrama on a few moments of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (Anti-): on "Jesus of the Moon," in particular, he and his Bad Seeds serve up Hazlewood-worthy western-skied balladry.
Cue the strings! With its sumptuously reverb-steeped production, punchy brass, and colossal orchestrations, the Last Shadow Puppets’ The Age of the Understatement (Domino) proves to be just as indebted to Hazlewood’s studio wizardry as it is to its obvious Swinging London signifiers. Local chanteuse Kira Lynn Cain floats out haunted refrains of the legend’s twang-cabaret on her billowing beauty The Ideal Hunter (Evangeline), while the desert panoramas of Calexico’s Carried to Dust (Quarterstick) provide a testimonial to the power of Hazlewood’s beloved mariachi horns. Seekers of the heir apparent to the vocalist’s wry, croaking country wordsmithery should look no further than the parallel honky-tonk universe of the Silver Jews’ Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City). Lastly, Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan pick up the familiar Nancy and Lee story line and flip the script: on their Sunday at Devil Dirt (Fontana International), Campbell assumes the male, Svengali role of Hazlewood, writing all of the words and arrangements, and Lanegan becomes the gravel-diva counterpart to Sinatra. The result is ravishingly weepy orchestral pop and off-kilter country-blues rambles. Would Hazlewood approve? Total-Lee. (Todd Lavoie)
•Spiritualized, Songs in A & E (Fontana International)
•Goldfrapp, Seventh Tree (Mute)
•M83, Saturdays = Youth (Mute)
•Frightened Rabbit, The Midnight Organ Fight (Fat Cat)
•DeVotchKa, A Mad and Faithful Telling (Anti-)
•Sigur Rós, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust (XL)
•Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid (Fiction/Polydor UK/Geffen)
•Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (Anti-)
•The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age of the Understatement (Domino)
•Hot Chip, Made in the Dark (DFA/Astralwerks)
