Editor's Note: To see Robert Christgau's full 2010 Dean's List,
click here.
In 2010 I stopped hearing the death-of-the-album guff
that's been in the virtual air since the great Napster bubble of 1999. Not that
the album has retained its economic primacy, though for many musicians of
quality that was always a chimera anyway, good for a passing windfall or
auxiliary revenue stream in a career dependent on the rigors of touring and the
luck of the licensing deal. On the contrary, sales continue to dip. But the
album isn't about to go away, because it remains the most efficient way for
musicians to showcase their songbooks. If you take pride in your art qua art,
as musicians of quality tend to do, that showcase is satisfying in itself—and
conveniently, it also builds touring demand and licensing contacts.
Of course, the album form
does get messed around with plenty, and this year's Dean's List includes its
share of oddities: four free hip-hop mixtapes, a download-only girlpop EP, Girl
Talk's illegal art, and the longest of three overlapping 2010 albums by Swedish
teenpop grad Robyn. But there'd probably be more such oddities if I wasn't so
committed to doing things the old-fashioned way. As ever, I had no time for the
unmappable world of alternate versions, disco remixes, online retweaks,
mashups, videos, and interpretive dances on YouTube—byways many music geeks
wander daily. Yet even so I flagged down a couple of left-field surprises for
my catch-as-catch-can singles list: Die Antwoord's "Enter the Ninja,"
whose gruesomely jubilant video I imposed on visitors for months, and Ian
Nieman's "club mix" of Jason Derulo's "Ridin' Solo," a
catchy-generic focus track on songwriter Derulo's generic-period r&b album
that in Nieman's hyperextension became the centerpiece of—what a coup—Now That's What I Call Club Hits 2.
But if mapping pop music's
expanding universe is indeed impossible, that doesn't mean a guy can't have
serious fun trying, and the best way is still to bird-dog albums like
Scooby-Doo on a thermos of Dunkin.' Once again I found more than 80 A records
in 2010—records I expect to savor in 2015 or 2020 if I'm still alive and have
the time. Beyond Kanye West and Vampire Weekend, my top 10 differs markedly
from the critical consensus, which in my analysis—based on my webmaster Tom
Hull's breakdown of some 1000 online lists rather than the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll, scheduled to go live
shortly after this does—includes the Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, the
National, Deerhunter, Big Boi, and Janelle Monae. But the only one you won't
find further down on the Dean's List is Monae, and only Deerhunter continues
2009's prog takeover, when the Pazz & Jop top six included Animal
Collective, Phoenix, the Dirty Projectors, and Grizzly Bear. The unbearable
Grizzly Bear excepted, I didn't hate those records, though not even the Dirty
Projectors' sat as well with me as Deerhunter's this year. But as a seeker
after legible songs and compelling grooves, I did hate its hegemony. It'll come
back strong whenever that gang puts out new albums—some in 2011, probably.
Nevertheless, 2010's rough map suggests that it's less ascendant than I'd
feared.
Instead I see in the numbers
a hip-hop resurgence. I don't pretend to project the future from such
statistical "trends," which usually involve too much happenstance,
such as the simultaneous return to form of Eminem, Big Boi, and Kanye West.
Clearly more momentous than the 2009 tokens by Mos Def and Raekwon even if
they're slightly overrated, these three faves are the latest and most decisive
proof that hip-hop has supplanted rock as popular music's most aesthetically
fruitful genre. Right, happenstance happens—there was no Bob Dylan album in
2010, no U2 if I must, no Yeah Yeah Yeahs,
no . . . Coldplay? Also, distribution arrangements
complicate these analyses unduly. Still, isn't it striking that not one of the
over two dozen rock records on the 2010 Dean's List came from a major label
unless DFA's Virgin deal puts LCD over the line, and that Hull's top 40 adds
just the Black Keys and Broken Bells? Yet of the 17 Dean's List hip-hop albums
(last year there were just seven), seven were accounted profit-promising by the
guys with the obscene expense accounts.
"Def Jam payment
plan" bitching and all, one of these was my own album of the year, the
Roots' How I Got Over. No big crusade here—How I Got Over is getting more respect
than Eminem's Recovery, 2010's top seller, because
the Roots always get respect, and if momentous counts I can see why many prefer
West's ginormous not to mention prog-friendly effort. But for reasons I'm not
about to bloviate into a theory because I believe the main one is happenstance,
this just wasn't a momentous-type year. If I felt obliged to vote momentous I
would have gone with M.I.A.'s stupidly dismissed Maya,
which got spanked because it tried to be momentous and because unlike West she
proved unequal to her own celebrity. But my only obligation is to my ears, and
in 2010 what sounded best was the Roots' brave and sometimes painful
change-of-life hip-hop, a multivalent reflection on the pop lifer's danger
years, the late thirties. That's when, even if you're now Jimmy Fallon's house
band, you start to worry that you'll look and/or feel like an idiot devoting
your adulthood to what idiots consider a youth artform. So before I return to
hip-hop, I should mention that my number two album comes from the same
generational cohort: Welder, by
Nashville-based singer-songwriter and Sirius Radio morning jock Elizabeth Cook,
who at 37, after four fairly good albums, strung together 14 fairly perfect
songs about such country things as love, marriage, sex, rock and roll, farming,
and her sister the junkie.
My hip-hop picks skew
younger, although the Roots' contemporaries tend 35-40 and even the next wave
has 30 surrounded by now (Eminem, in fact, is 38). They include four
collections by 25-or-sos Nicki Minaj and Das Racist, three of them freebies, as
well as second albums by three 28-year-olds few hip-hoppers know exist:
second-generation Rwandan Shad from Toronto, medical writer turned rap prof
Dessa from Minneapolis, and spoken Cockney artist Scroobius Pip from London.
Six of the 15 artists are black and six white; the others are Sri Lankan
British-American M.I.A., Afro-Indian Trinidadian-American Minaj, and
Hispanic-Indian duo Das Racist. Nas's Damian Marley collab is more reggae than
rap; Die Antwoord's Cape Town electrohop, fronted by an Anglo named Jones
pretending to be an Afrikaner named Ninja, risks racist misprision at a pitch
Das Racist wouldn't think of. Then there's supercallifragilistic MC Paul
Barman, whose DIY label is called Househusband and who wrote one of his raps as
an acrostic, and Boston Irishman Esoteric's concept album about his dead dog
and ailing vocation. Note too that the roll call includes three women plus
Ninja's better half Yo-landi Vi$$er—not enough, but not the usual zero-to-one.
Get the idea? In general
black hip-hoppers make richer music than white hip-hoppers and major-label
hip-hoppers make richer music than alt hip-hoppers. But hip-hop as a whole is
every bit as unruly and rewarding a free-for-all as
[prefix-implying-"artistic"]-rock, and anyone who hopes to stay
on top of semi-popular music without it will miss the damn plane. Fold in some
dance records and DJ soundscapes and frost them with a Girl Talk mixtape that
integrates no-account crunk and pop-historical touchstones and suddenly
prefix-rock is looking kind of feeble. These days even the young adults who
overrate wall-of-noisers Sleigh Bells and outsider-who-came-in-from-the-lo-fi
Ariel Pink recognize that there's some truth to this, although beyond Das
Racist they seem insensible to alt-rap. But they grew up with hip-hop. Those
who didn't can either get on it or settle for Neil Young's Daniel Lanois album.
Ageist, moi? C'mon—I'm 68. In
fact, the greatest peculiarity of my 2010 top 10 is its three albums—three!—by septuagenarians. Sexagenarians have
happened—Bob Dylan, Orchestra Baobab—and once 91-year-old Doc Cheatham came in
12th with help from 23-year-old Nicholas Payton. But not this. Given my
skepticism regarding Johnny Cash's Rick Rubin years, I'd never have figured
that the barrel-scraping American VI would
prove Cash's death album seven years after his physical demise at 71. As for
Tom Zé and Peter Stampfel (OK, a ringer, he's 72 but Dook of the
Beatniks was recorded in 1999 and neither of his fine little 2010
albums—yes, there were two—is as strong), all I can tell skeptical
twentysomethings is that I know more about youth than they do about old age,
and that in these cases happenstance has occasioned miracles as vital if not
quite as juicy as Macy Gray making her best music at 40 or Robyn making her
best music at 30 or the Care Bears on Fire making their best music at 15.
Not that I believe these
assertions will staunch twentysomething skepticism, or that they should. Too
often right reason puts a damper on unlikely music. And while what Harold
Rosenberg called the shock of the new has long since degenerated into the
frisson of the new and the next big thing of the week, it's to the credit of
prefix-rock that there are still so many twentysomethings trying to carve out a
new sliver of turf within its expanding confines. My main problem with this is
that by now many in that cohort think the turf encompasses stuff I can't stand—metal,
prog, lounge jazz, Enya, etc. Not to mention classical music, which I can stand
but have zero interest in. But there's also the sliver problem—so often the new
turf, even when well-tended, is too narrow to provide sustaining nourishment.
Sleigh Bells, I wish you the best, really.
This charge cannot be lodged
at my considered choice for the most overrated album of the year. Janelle Monae
can do it all, and that is why The Archandroid has
created such a fuss. My riposte is that all she can do well is dance—her
songwriting is 60th percentile, her singing technical, her sci-fi plot the
usual rot. For me, the anti-Archandroid is Halcyon Digest
by Deerhunter, who after nine years and a typically muddled release history
decided and/or learned how to sequence 45 minutes of coherent music—in
late-'90s Sonic Youth mode only with fewer tunes and less sprawl, conjuring
form out of mess and emotion out of mood. It's not quite brilliant, but unlike
so many comparable projects, it definitely works if you give it the time a
record this beloved has earned. So while I'm pleased to note that in its
reactive way indiedom has re-engaged with pop songform after long declaring it
yucky, Halcyon Digest means more to me
than Surfer Blood's Astro Coast or Best
Coast's Crazy for You. It means less, however, than an
unnoticed songfest from England: the eponymous Allo Darlin',
featuring Queensland, Australia, twentysomething Elizabeth Morris, whose flirty
voice and storytelling flair render romance physical and indeed sexy where for
Best Coast's superficially sunny Bethany Cosentino it's atmospheric and indeed
foggy.
I've been bird-dogging
popular and semi-popular music for longer than two-thirds of the artists on the
2010 Dean's List have been alive. Of course I hear things differently than they
do. But probably not as differently as I did compared to my less-distant elders
in the late '60s. That was a time of schism; musically, this continues to be a
time of expansion, evolution, and sometimes mutation. I was fortunate to
experience it from the beginning, and far as I can tell, that experience hasn't
made me an idiot. In a new time of schism whose politico-economic evils got
closer to the pith of most people's lives than any artistic palliative could, I
wish more people my age—hell, more people over 35—understood that. It wouldn't
solve their problems. But it might ease them a little.
Editor's Note: To see Robert Christgau's full 2010 Dean's List,
click here.
His reviews of these albums can already be found or soon will
be at his website, robertchristgau.com, or at his Expert Witness blog at MSN
Music.
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