marathonpacks’ 2008 Year-End Lengthy Write-Ups

A bit late, I know. But I’m assuming that many people reading this feel like the first day back to work is really the first day of 2009. So.

I’ll leave my appreciations for School of Seven Bells, Ssion, Women and the Dø to reside on my other blog. Like the past year, this post is a gathering of my thoughts on stuff released this year, singles and albums, that made me think the most. Not everything, but something. Sorry to Britta Persson, White Hinterland, Of Montreal, and Kanye (maybe later), but I’ve got to get on with my life now. And the internet has to get on with its Animal Collective. Regular programming will resume in the next day or so and stuff.

Q-Tip “Gettin’ Up”

The phrase “gettin’ up” has three implications for me, and, I’m assuming, for Q-Tip. The first is a simple act of connection: “get up with me later,” that sort of thing. In this song, the stakes are a bit higher, though. Tip’s begging a girl to come back to him, and promising he’ll be good. That it will be good. The second meaning…well, this is Q-Tip we’re talking about here; the guy who, better than any rapper who’s ever lived, is able to make something as simple as a crush sorta nasty, but wholly charming at the same time. Who wants you to “relax yourself, girl, please settle down,” before, well, it has to do with lots of lovin’, and it ain’t nothin’ nice. But the third meaning of the phrase? That’s pure 2008, Q-Tip officially staging rap’s best-ever comeback on the date that we elected our first black President. When I hear “we can start a clan/ just like the Kennedys,” followed by comparisons to “Ruby Dee and Ossie, Martin and Coretta,” I hear Q-Tip, with perfect timing, using this stage to talk uplift.

The Kills “Last Day of Magic”/ Hot Chip “Ready for the Floor”

As “Last Day of Magic” opens, Jamie Hince’s guitar assails, and burns; it’s a call-to-arms, one person telling the other that the ship is sinking, and the impending end will probably take them both down with it. “We’re two parties. Two parties ending” is about a relationship going down in flames, portrayed through the device of two particularly nasty galas imploding upon themselves. This is where “Magic” finds its strength: in its layered, alluring portrayal of austerity, fear, and high-fashion seduction. The album title Midnight Boom came from Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans,” and part of the inspiration for “Magic” came from Raskolnikov’s harrowing bedroom scene from “Crime and Punishment.” Now, look at the cover of the album. Get it? “Magic” is so intense, so taut, so elegant, so undeniably stylish. It’s two lovers brought together by aesthetic passions, sitting on a tattered mattress in a shit room, avoiding eye contact as their self-obsessed world burns around them.

Rewind several months, and we find “Ready for the Floor,” and a couple at the other end of the spectrum. Two somewhat shy people, carving up the wall at a club. One tells the other that the time is now. To do it. To say it. Like Marvin Gaye did. That warm feeling in the pit of your stomach. Is it giddiness? Pure panic? Are you turned on? Ready to vomit? Don’t think! You’re someone’s number one guy!!

Deerhunter Microcastle

One of the many references associated with Crytpograms and Fluorescent Grey, originating from Bradford Cox himself, was to the dark, grotesque fiction of Dennis Cooper. Having never read Cooper, I took Cox at his word, of course, but I had my own literary lens through which to view Deerhunter’s music, and one that’s only become more appropriate with the release of Microcastle: Edgar Allan Poe. The lyric “I had dreams/ That frightened me awake” from “Never Stops,” and the spectral, haunting quality of the otherwise incredibly propulsive “Nothing Ever Happened” (the album’s two best songs), eerily evoke Poe’s fascination with the mind’s crippling capability to create terrifying alternate realities and convince us they’re what’s really happening.

This same thing happened on Cryptograms and Grey, but they come full flower on Microcastle, a massive leap forward for Cox and Deerhunter in terms of accessibility and professionalism. I don’t mind admitting that I feel I might have jumped the gun a bit with my adoration of Cryptograms, either, especially after revisiting recently Grey’s comparative aesthetic consolidation . For so many people, there was just incredible promise inherent in that band, and the sounds they were coalescing: bits of the Jesus and Mary Chain, krautrock, Marilyn Manson/Trent Reznor, Sonic Youth, Perry Farrell, dozens of others. Others were anticipating the rise of a new, and decidedly strange, indie-rock “star” presence. Cox, a very au courant horror figure —parts Poe and Cooper, part William Burroughs, part Hammer-era Christopher Lee—never shut up, and love him or hate him, he was someone to whom people paid attention.

Microcastle returns significantly on that investment. If not for another album about non-entities, Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, it would be my favorite record of 2008. Yet just like Nothing, Microcastle’s time of release can’t be separated from its actual content. It contains a synthesis of influences, and an aesthetic approach more generally, that speaks to a current code that values dabbling and evocation: it’s swoony like the girl groups but throbs like a faraway party, guitars sound radically different from one track to the next, sometimes from one minute to the next. “Saved By Old Times” reminds me of “Season of the Witch,” and “Little Kids” recalls Porno for Pyros, and the ambient drone bits from Cryptograms—which, frankly, felt like noodly posturing more than anything—have been replaced with gothic singer-songwriter bits, constiuting an album-middle as quiet as a winter weeknight. And through it all, Cox’s voice hovers, and slithers like a vapor coming in under the door.

Hercules and Love Affair S/T

The identity that disco offers is sustained by the beat and its twin, desire; it could conceivably go on forever, like our dancing, if the music is right, but it will never be permanent, fixed or naturalized. Therein lies the freedom disco constructs out of our subordination to it.

If dance music and queerness were as crucial to your formative years and current identity as they are to Andrew Butler’s, you’d want to create a mythological disco symphony as well. Hell, you’d have made one in your mind, thousands of times, after leaving a self-styled Coliseum where partially-clad bodies writhed at the whim of a deity, unseen and above. The musical pantheon Butler’s debut as Hercules & Love Affair draws from, and the manner in which it explores love and romance, are far from canonical, but the sentiments expressed within the music are nothing if not universal. H&LA is the best and most creative American dance album of the year, but it’s also the best autobiographical concept piece of 2008, a high-concept tale of heroism, romance, creative wish-fulfillment and the capricious fancies of youth wrenched from the personal and presented as fundamental.

“I came out when I was 15. That was also when I first got into dance clubs and started to date DJs. I was in this big masculine body, I played football and other sports and at the same time I was extremely sensitive and emotionally vulnerable. I was attracted by the Hercules story because it was about embracing the femine within the hyper-masculine.”

H&LA is a disco album, but disco has never been about just music. It’s about love and passion transcending the boundaries we erect to keep each other separate, and more specifically, the necessity of ambiguity and alternate readings of norms and traditions. Disco is whole-body eroticism and unabashed romanticism.

Butler researched Greek mythology in college, and was taken with the idea that Hercules, the manliest of the gods, was left alone, wandering on an island at the end of his life, searching for a lost lover (I’m taken with that idea, too, and if you’re not, I frankly don’t know why you’re still reading this). “Hercules’ Theme” is not a tale of regret and woe, however. Exactly the opposite: it’s a slick, minimalist Philly Soul funk march with a robo-rhythm, fluttering strings and a stuttering horn chart. But it’s the sultry and gender-neutral vocal from the stunning Nomi Ruiz that makes the song unabashedly original. On the chorus, she sings “yeah yeah yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah,” but it might be “nyah nyah nyeeeeeeaaaaaah,” to match the nursery rhyme simplicity of the song’s lyrics:

he took us to town
he pushed us around
little boy Hercules.

he wouldn’t give in
and let the ladies win
little boy Hercules.

Nothing’s stable, not even the song’s lyrics: the above was typed from the album’s liner notes. Nomi actually sings “we took him to town and pushed him around” in the song itself.

No Age Nouns

It’s been a banner past two years for foggy reminisces of hardcore punk. Dave Longstreth, of Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors, created a painstaking, at times gorgeous, gallery-quality fever dream about Black Flag. He explains:

I tried to rewrite Damaged…from memory. I didn’t listen to the album or read the lyrics while I was doing this. I relied on memory and intuition mostly. I wanted to see if I could make this album myself — not as an album of covers or an homage per se, but as an original creative act, albeit a more particular one than most. Writing a song is pulling a shape out of the air, but I didn’t want to write just any song — I wanted to write a song that has already existed.

The result was Rise Above, a mottled, keening and complicated fusion of hazy memories; Longstreth’s voice, which resembled an opera singer’s gorgeously decaying vocal cords; and a tattered, partially recognizable copy of Remain in Light.

In 2008, MTV actually “played” the “video” for “Eraser,” a jangly, deleriously fuzzed-out paean to the doldrums of menial labor recorded by an L.A. two-piece named after an out-of-print SST instrumental avant-garde compilation. On Rise Above, Longstreth cracked open his hardcore unconscious and smeared the beautiful, grotesque contents in front of us. On Nouns, two guys named Randy and Dean, forever connected to a shitty all-ages venue called The Smell, filter what they remember of hardcore through eardrums pierced like torn tweeters. The lyrics are vaguely audible, the guitars rise like fumes, the drums are pounded primitively, yet the indefinite quality on Nouns isn’t the force-fed nihilism of The Decline of Western Civilization. Take another listen to the barely-concealed panic in Darby Crash’s vocals on “Forming,” only this time, turn the volume up until it almost hurts your ears. Do it twice. Now, take the headphones off and listen to what immediately lingers inside your head. Wait a day or so, and remember again. That’s No Age.

M.I.A. “Paper Planes”

The song of the year, two years running? Sure enough. There wasn’t a more relevant-seeming moment in cinema this year than this entire song appearing in Slumdog Millionaire, during a sequence (and entire film) that seemed constructed immediately after Danny Boyle first heard the song. I rather hurriedly wrote a post about the song late last year, which I wished wasn’t linked to and commented on as much as it was, because there’s plenty (plenty) I immediately wanted to change about it. Yet that post served a purpose for me, in a roundabout way: for most of 2008 and the tail-end of 2007, the vast majority of my Google-derived traffic has come from some iteration of the search phrase “MIA Paper Planes what does mean definition.” Poor saps got stuck with that post, too.

But can you think of a more well-deserved accidental renaissance than the one lent “Planes” by the Pineapple Express trailer this year, as a laconic stoner action-theme? When I wrote that post last November, Kala still seemed the province of critics and online geeks. A few months later, “Paper Planes” is booming out of Kilroy’s Sports Bar down the street from my house, where legions of sweaty Greeks (not the Mediterranean variety) are grinding to it while drinking watery cocktails.

Then, there were the year’s two best reappropriations of the track. First, Kanye West’s isolation of one lyric, to which he added echo and froze in place atop the iciest French-house synth pallette he had lying around, making one of the year’s best beats (and which would have been great on its own had it not been ruined by four sub-par verses atop it) . Then there’s Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit’s “Tengazako,” from a quite remarkable mixtape redolent of its own embrace of the best aspects of a globalized creative class. Myamwaya sings radiantly in Chichewa–the native language of his home country Malawi–over the Clash’s phased guitars. Of course, M.I.A.’s kids come in at the end.

With this in mind, a short and sweet redux of that original post. Indulge me:

For many men and women, especially youth, the questions specific to citizenship, such as how we inform ourselves and who represents our interests, are answered more often than not through private consumption of commodities and media offerings than through the abstract rules of democracy or through participation in discredited political organizations.

If consumption is really the way we define ourselves as citizens nowadays, could opting out of official systems of exchange then be seen as a form of protest? One step further, could creating your own forms of identification (homemade Visas), disposable modes of communication (“burner” cell phones), and currency be seen as aestheticized dissent? M.I.A.’s rhetorical fashioning of the Handgun/Cash Register, unveiled for the first time during the song’s indelible chorus and represented iconically in the liner notes, demonstrates that the sort of cultural currency represented on the cover is not what’s being exchanged here; what she’s talking about is the “official” sort.

Yet at the same time, there’s no danger, just a lot of swagger and a heaping helping of irony, like Slumdog’s kids using pity to grab a Franklin from the American tourists. A song about off-the-grid kids ripping off tourists and forging official authenticities became one of the most profitable musical commodities, through the most approved and official channels, of 2008. Yet at the same time, there’s no “misunderstanding” of the song’s “official” meaning happening at frats, or when girls in dorm rooms post videos of themselves dancing to the song, any more than Kanye’s and Esau’s own reappropriations. I’m pretty sure that M.I.A.’s okay with her latest bonafide hustle becoming 2008’s predominant aural icon.

Wale The Mixtape About Nothing

It’s easy to forget, but 1991 saw a big shift in the way music as merchandise is officially recognized and ranked, and how indie and “niche” forms like rap came to gain widespread recognition. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the rise of cable television facilitated a shift from a broadcast to a niche model of entertainment, and Billboard’s ratings system became a significant part of that shift. In 91, they merged with the Soundscan company to ensure direct technological access to actual scans of records from the vast majority of American retailers. Suddenly, strange things were appearing at the top of the Billboard charts, like N.W.A.’s violent, morally-irredeemable Efil4zaggin, released on small L.A. indie Priority, which knocked Paula Abdul out of the top spot. It seemed revolutionary, but Soundscan was nothing but a stat-juke, really, exposing a legal, commercial underground. Straight Outta Compton had sold in the millions, too. Just not “officially.”

Fast-forward to 2008, and hip-hop has merged with R&B to become, along with country and Disney pop, the de facto pop music. There’s still plenty of un- and under-exposed rap music, of course, like there’s always been. But there’s yet to be a new Soundscan to quantify the popularity of sub rosa downloading, approved and illicit, facilitated not by local record stores but spectral online start-ups with names like Rapidshare and Soulseek. People still buy rap these days, but only the sort that’s heavily promoted by major labels, and often subsidized by above and below-board ventures that have little to do with music and much more to do with trans-media branding. There are a few crucial voices doing brilliant things with the form, but they’re less and less likely to be heard on a broad scale unless they get scooped up by the Pineapple Express trailer.

Aside from serviceable records from T.I., the Roots and Young Jeezy, 2008 was a horrible year for rap, hands down. It was also a vote-splitting year for music in general, with no big-name, consensus-forming acts releasing albums except Kanye and TV on the Radio, leading to shit like Fleet Foxes emerging as Pitchfork’s consensus number one, and a batshit comeback like Portishead’s Third at #2. 2007 was comparatively huge: Radiohead, Kanye, Feist, Wilco, Spoon, the Shins, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A., Jay-Z, Arcade Fire, the National, the White Stripes.

The heterogeneity of this year, more than anything, resulted in a mixtape by a dude from Baltimore based on fucking Seinfeld solidifying as my favorite album of 2008. It’s part of the value of doing year-end lists, really: mapping the vagaries of an entire 12 months of music onto the canvas of my tastes. In another year (like last, for instance), Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing might have slipped completely under my radar as an attention economy gimmick for white people. Man, I’m glad Spoon and LCD didn’t release great stuff this year, because this is the signal rap record of 2008, a head-spinning, virtuosic compendium of rap’s myriad issues as it makes its way through the Web, awkwardly embraces dipshit teenage entrepreneurs like Soulja Boy, and pushes forward while consistently keeping a tether to its past. It’s indicative of the way things are nowadays, with the rise of the rap entrepreneur and the biggest recent beef involving whether Kanye or 50 would sell more albums on release day, that Wale’s impression can be summed up as, “respect has grown inferior to fuckin’ Soundscans.”

Like a minor-league Kanye, Wale Folarin is also a college dropout with tastemaking fans (Mark Ronson), with a strong desire to make his deepest feelings heard: instead of Kanye’s high-profile blog rantings, Wale reps for the social networking sites that, by themselves, create their own bizarre, disembodied form of music celebrity, as his “connects.” When you think about it, his Seinfeld gimmick isn’t too far from something that De La Soul might have done. What Wale does with it is quite brilliant, though, and in its own way a comment on the hip-hop landscape every bit as important as De La Soul is Dead. He uses Seinfeld’s nihilism of minor differences as the primer for his cynical take on hip-hop culture, in which anything approaching real support for the music and artists has been rendered as invisible and mercurial as the mp3s themselves. Or, as he explains at the end of the opening track (which of course, employs a variant on those bubbling stand-up basslines): “most niggas love nothing, so I made this tape.”

Me typing that word—you know which word—necessitates a momentary digression toward another view of the album’s core concept, which of course plays perfectly to a middle-class, pop-culture savvy, irony-appreciating contingent. Oh, and white kids. I’m not going to argue the point that part of my appreciation for Nothing lies in the fact that Wale and I like the same television show, and that he’s able to recontexualize, in a purposefully academic manner, Seinfeld’s dialogue and themes in really fun and inventive ways. In fact, I embrace that point, because it plays into one of the major joys I get from rap music as a creative idiom more generally. The cut-and-paste aesthetic ideology that hip-hop emerged from allows for performers to make very frank, and highly persuasive, arguments in many more ways than other types of music. They do this, more often than not, by reshaping slight bits of seemingly disparate stuff to create something new and hopefully invigorating.

Even more importantly, the cadence of rapping (especially when compared to pop singing) allows rappers (if they want, of course) to engage listeners in direct, specific ways: the ways that teachers, pastors, or debaters do. There’s no surprise at all that people were more frightened of N.W.A.’s possible impact upon youth than they were of Scarface or Saw or Pulp Fiction. From an aesthetic (not sociological) perspective, music is a more intimate and immediate form than film, and rap is the most visceral pop music to ever exist. When I listen to rap, I find myself wanting the performer to convince more than entertain me (and I know these don’t have to be mutually-exclusive).

I know that other people listen for very different things in rap music, and this is not to say that I don’t enjoy lighter fare. I also know that this opens me up to criticism from, well, critics who will accuse me of expecting things from rappers that I don’t expect from rock singers. To which I say: of course I do (idiot), because rappers are working in a different medium, and their art should come with different expectations. I don’t need rappers to be moral, upstanding citizens any more than anyone else. But I’m not going to deny that, in terms of music, there are few things that appeal more to me than a rapper with something to say, and a fierce desire to say it, and the ability to make it sound compelling to someone other than himself. More than any rap album this year, Nothing fills all those criteria.

Its track titles read like Seinfeld show headers, complete with self-referential jabs at what Wale sees as rap’s rote predictability—“The Remake Of A Remake (All I Need),” “The Skit,” “The Cliché Lil’ Wayne Feature”—but Nothing is much more than just the product of a smart-ass sideline sniper. It’s shot through with sharp, humorous insights delivered by a guy who can flat-out rap his ass off. There’s no more illustrative couplet than the one from “The Crazy”: “I’m not saying that I’m Nasir/ I’m just sayin’ rap’s dead when I’m not here.” Only a guy who thinks hip-hop culture needs a tabula rasa would make a mixtape brazen and high-spirited enough to feature drops from Bun B and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss. But only Wale, I’m convinced—who seamlessly switches between incredibly serious, ironic and meta, smart-assed and playful—could actually do something this fucked-up and goofy really well.

Wale’s made sure he was going to be heard no matter how crowded the attention economy was; his most repeated lyric here—more an improvised interjection, really, as well as a song title from his last mixtape—is “please listen to me. Please listen to me.” I don’t think I listened to another track as much in 2008 as “The Freestyle (Roc Boys),” on which Wale’s wordcount outpaces Jay-Z’s own by 10 to 1, as if he’s trying to force himself into the spotlight through sheer loquaciousness. Where Jay used the beat to relax and reflect on life at the top of the mountain, Wale murders the track, trying with all his might to work his way up. Second most listened-to was no doubt “The Kramer,” the most insightful and engaging analysis of the n-word’s unseen consequences this side of Chris Rock.

Nothing’s key track, however, and the moment that most situates the album in 2008, is “The Perfect Plan.” It’s Wale’s broadside against self-obsessed rap fans, at whose hard drives he lays the blame for the rise of Soulja Boy (his stated nemesis on the record) and the decline of true lyricists, a camp within which he, obviously, situates himself. He chides 2008’s holy trinity of Wayne, Kanye and Jay-Z for not supporting art and artists in lieu of high-concept, capital-driven spectacle-producers—“rather than singing our praise, they do/ raise the bar to a level unattainable”—and admits embarrassment that Soulja Boy fans lay out money to support him more than most other rappers’s so-called fans. It’s not an airtight argument, of course, and Wale contradicts himself as much as any heated debater (at times, like on “The Manipulation,” on purpose). In spite of this, and really because of it, Nothing is incredibly compelling. At the end of “Plan,” he condenses his plan, developed from the disconnect between fan entitlement and artistic labor, thusly: “I just rap ‘cause I’m s’posed to, nigga this what I know/ I conclude: buy my music, no more free downloads.”

So much of rap music’s vitality comes from its contradictory rhetoric; the past 30 years of hip-hop culture has served as a public venue to discuss a variety of stances on violence, misogyny, racism, art and commercialism, class warfare, and dozens of other things. Wale, who built his reputation on giving away his music for free, is stating on a freely downloadable mixtape his aversion to commercial culture as well as his clear desire to immerse himself in it (this is the guy whose biggest yet hit has been “Nike Boots,” after all). Before Nothing dropped earlier this year, Wale—who includes his brief feature from the Roots’ Rising Down as the second track here—signed with Interscope, which will release his label debut in 2009. Hopefully.

It’s a strange moment right now in hip-hop: the structure of the industry leaves room for only a few major stars, and brilliant, yet star-power-free groups like the Clipse (whose stuff is much darker than anything N.W.A. ever did) have to resign themselves to eternal sales in the low six digits. But the fucked-up state of affairs, and a bigger and more variegated audience than ever before, means that the weirdest shit can also rise to the top: When else could we have seen a brilliant trickster figure like Lil’ Wayne and a wildly creative self-promoter like Kanye West emerge as not only the two biggest rap stars in the world, but also the most compelling public personalities in music? I’m not being pessimistic when I say that I think Wale’s chances of selling T.I. numbers instead of, say, Blackalicious numbers, are slim. He’s one of the most skilled, fun and intelligent rappers to come along in quite some time, but in that regard, he also sort of feels like a throwback to an earlier era. It’s clear that he thinks of himself that way: part Nas, part Chuck D., part Black Thought, part Q-Tip. But is that enough anymore, without some sort of extramusical gimmick, performative freakishness, or, brazen commercial strategy? Nothing shows that Wale, aside from being a tremendously talented performer, is also differently attuned to the current state of affairs in rap and pop than most anyone right now, and ready to talk about it. All I can say is that if his next album is anywhere as compelling as this one, please listen to him.

Filed under: 2008 Retrospective  Deerhunter  Hercules & Love Affair  Hot Chip  M.I.A.  No Age  Paper Planes  Q-Tip  The Kills  The Mixtape About Nothing  Wale  Year-End List