Thursday, July 17, 2003
Random thoughts on my top 50 of 2001, part 2.
*
Wait, I’m not done with Starsailor yet. Why weren’t they as big as – at least the Verve? Their respective singers have that similar plaintive, crying quality to their voices, and their musics have a shared urgency. Maybe they can be, yet; the Verve didn’t really break through until, what, their fourth album? Hopefully Starsailor didn’t shoot their entire load on the first album.
*
“Fuck. The. Frail. Shit,” Jadakiss opines in his opening. Later, he pronounces “salmon” as “sal-man.” He and his compadre Styles spit an absurd amount of grime all over “We Gonna Make It, talkin’ ‘bout the game, the streets, and hope. That’s the key to this record – the title just seethes hope, but angrily, with a chip on its shoulder big as Montana (“you know dead rappers get better promotion”/”Jadakiss, muthafucka, I’m’a see you in hell”). Most of ‘01’s best lyrics are all here, in this one single. And the production, all Bootsy-ish slap-bass funk underpinning swirling swings, is masterful. I’d bump this into the top ten, too. 2001 was a horrible year for commercial hiphop, but an amazing year for the streets.
*
Who decided Aerosmith are, apparently, over as a radio force? “Jaded” was their best single since, oh, “Janie’s Got A Gun,” and got so little love. I hate corporate radio.
*
The Ones’s “Flawless” will still be played at drag balls in 10 years. If that doesn’t signify some sort of classic, well…
*
“Kid A-Minus,” my ass. I actually find Amnesiac even more compulsively listenable than Kid A, and you’d be a fool to attempt to deny the majesty and magic of “Pyramid Song.” Toss in “Knives Out” and “I Might Be Wrong,” and this would be a great album by anyone’s standards. Toss in the rest of the album, and even by Radiohead’s standards, it’s fucking blinding. Without question, Thom Yorke’s band of merry men are the most vital, important band working in that idiom we loosely refer to as “rock” today.
*
Stumpy never ceases to enjoy ribbing me about ranking Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” higher than Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’.” I didn’t regret it then, and I regret it even less now. Sure, his white-trash hiphop/metal chic gets tiring in long doses – which is why he’s best as a singles artist, especially on this, his best single yet, on which he comes off like a mook cranking Metallica in the parking lot and rapping with his pals, going through a 30-pack of Stroh’s (and thinkin’ about a 30-pack of hos). I get the same rush from this song that I do from Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” – it might not be so good for me, and I could give a fuck. Raise your fist and yell.
*
It’s very rare for something to make my list two years running – generally it happens when I get hit hard by a song at the bare end of one year, and it’s later released as a single and completely saturates my conscienceness. That happened in ‘00/’01 with Jill Scott’s “A Long Walk.” Damn, she’s great. Yes, the whole releasing-a-live-record-as-my-second-album bit worries me a little, but at least in the case of Experience 826+, there was a second, studio album attached – and it showed even more growth. Her voice, plainly, is stunning, and Jazzy Jeff (yes, that Jazzy Jeff) knows how to produce her so she’s set in just the right, well, settings, musically. All of Who Is Jill Scott? isn’t a triumph – but in a fashion similar to Erykah Badu’s Baduism, the highs are so glorious as to be head-turning and gasp-inducing. Identikit artists aren’t the future of R&B; Jill and her sistahs might yet be.
*
Daft Punk is the sound of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Especially tomorrow. Please God, don’t let them retire any time soon. We need more of their kind of computer love, more than we know.
*
To use Shaggy’s immortal words, Maxwell is, in fact, Mr. Lover-Lover. That’d make a good movie tagline, you know: “Maxwell IS Mr. Lover-Lover!” It’s possible that he’s this generation’s Teddy Pendegrass (Jaheim’s got the pipes but most emphatically not the material); I know that no one’s making bedroom-rockin’, love-makin’ records today on his scale, drenched in sex and soul and sensuality. Statements, you ask? That is his statement.
*
His debut album proved Eric Heatherly as a versatile country artist, as comfortable with rockabilly rave-ups or Statler Brothers covers, of all things (“Flowers on the Wall”) as sumptuous balladry. The difference with Heatherly is that his balladry - most notably the sterling title track of Swimming In Champagne - wasn’t all drippy ( la most of the hat brigade), but sounded like Chris Isaak by way of Bakersfield, all high lonesome falsetto notes and production bathed in narcotics, like a slow, languorous day of sex. I am putty in his hands.
Of course, the idiots at his record label dropped him. Because they’re idiots.
*
”I’m overchargin’ niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush.”
- Jay-Z, “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” (The Blueprint, Roc-a-fella/Def Jam, 2001)
Indisputably, that’s the anthem. Get ya damn hands up!
*
I like the Doves’s album Lost Souls, but the longplayer is definitely carried on the back of its single, “Catch the Sun,” four minutes of classic, glorious Britrock – meaning it’s got a lot of soul to it, along with a stunning ascending series of guitar chords in its bridge. They’ve yet to match it, but I’ll take this one song, if nothing else.
*
U2’s “Walk On” does not belong in my top 10 of ’01. We all make mistakes.
*
soulDecision, how do I love thee? I love you for being cute (especially Trevor, but I like Ken too). I love you for being Canadian and not either a) Celine Dion or b) yet another sucky rock band (Blue Rodeo, please come to the white courtesy phone). I love you because you have some of the best multi-layered harmonies in pop. I love you because you’ve obviously listened to a lot of George Michael and Wham!. I love you for showing us Trevor in his boxers in the “Ooh It’s Kinda Crazy” video. I love you for making me feel 12 again – only this time, I wasn’t scared. I love you for helping my baby sister (almost 10 years my junior) and I bond over a short-lived TRL obsession due to your ascendancy to #1 on said program (and yes, I voted for you!). I love you this much.
*
“One In A Million” is achingly sexy, yes, of course. But so is “Rock the Boat,” where to my ears, Aaliyah at last sets sail and sounds like more than a woman. Which she was.
*
I think I first heard Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar” about 3 weeks before the end of the year; it wasn’t even out yet (by all rights, this should’ve shown up on my ’02 list). But it stamped itself so defiantly on my cerebral cortex as to say “I fucking dare you to avoid me, to ignore me.” This is their finest moment, a breathing, living beast of a record, pushing/pulling, in and out, up and down, fucking me every time and leaving me panting and exhausted yet begging for just one more time.
*
Who ever would have guessed that a film by the Coen Brothers starring George Clooney – a 1930s take on The Odyssey, no less! – would revitalize the bluegrass genre?! Seeing “I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow” win the Country Music Association award for Single of the Year in ’02 thrilled me so, I actually got up off the couch and was cheering and clapping. To me, it said there’s life in this genre yet – even if it took a traditional song to do it. The Soggy Bottom Boys, a genius one-off assembled by producer T-Bone Burnett and led by the marvelous Dan Tyminski (a member of Alison Krauss’s band Union Station) – cliché alert – breathe new life into an old song by making it sound, well, old. Perfection.
*
None of us were ready for Beyoncé’s jelly, were we? I’m not sure we’re ready even now. Only a genius would underpin a bootycentric get-those-asses-on-the-dancefloor track by Destiny’s Child with the opening guitar riff from “Edge of Seventeen,” endlessly looped. Give the producer(s) a Nobel prize, for fuck’s sake!
Bonus points for putting Stevie Nicks in the video, in a feather boa.
Also, this song definitively proves why Michelle Williams made a gospel album, and not a mainstream R&B album: ‘cause in gospel, selling 50,000 is a success. In R&B, it better be ten times that, minimum. And Michelle’s voice isn’t anywhere near selling 500,000 records, believe that. [As it would happen, it appears Kelly’s not, either.] Can we just crown Beyoncé reigning queen of pop and get it over with?
*
“Get Ur Freak On”: it’s tabla-tastic! How the fuck is it that with each successive album they make in tandem, Missy Elliott and Timbaland bang yet another future-shit record outta the park? And they keep doing it?! Obviously, they have talents we don’t. And/or are from outer space.
*
Daft Punk are fucking godhead, and “One More Time” proves it. In spades. There’s nothing like looped disco-house to get the party started. Well, and vocoders.
*
Wait, I’m not done with Starsailor yet. Why weren’t they as big as – at least the Verve? Their respective singers have that similar plaintive, crying quality to their voices, and their musics have a shared urgency. Maybe they can be, yet; the Verve didn’t really break through until, what, their fourth album? Hopefully Starsailor didn’t shoot their entire load on the first album.
*
“Fuck. The. Frail. Shit,” Jadakiss opines in his opening. Later, he pronounces “salmon” as “sal-man.” He and his compadre Styles spit an absurd amount of grime all over “We Gonna Make It, talkin’ ‘bout the game, the streets, and hope. That’s the key to this record – the title just seethes hope, but angrily, with a chip on its shoulder big as Montana (“you know dead rappers get better promotion”/”Jadakiss, muthafucka, I’m’a see you in hell”). Most of ‘01’s best lyrics are all here, in this one single. And the production, all Bootsy-ish slap-bass funk underpinning swirling swings, is masterful. I’d bump this into the top ten, too. 2001 was a horrible year for commercial hiphop, but an amazing year for the streets.
*
Who decided Aerosmith are, apparently, over as a radio force? “Jaded” was their best single since, oh, “Janie’s Got A Gun,” and got so little love. I hate corporate radio.
*
The Ones’s “Flawless” will still be played at drag balls in 10 years. If that doesn’t signify some sort of classic, well…
*
“Kid A-Minus,” my ass. I actually find Amnesiac even more compulsively listenable than Kid A, and you’d be a fool to attempt to deny the majesty and magic of “Pyramid Song.” Toss in “Knives Out” and “I Might Be Wrong,” and this would be a great album by anyone’s standards. Toss in the rest of the album, and even by Radiohead’s standards, it’s fucking blinding. Without question, Thom Yorke’s band of merry men are the most vital, important band working in that idiom we loosely refer to as “rock” today.
*
Stumpy never ceases to enjoy ribbing me about ranking Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” higher than Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’.” I didn’t regret it then, and I regret it even less now. Sure, his white-trash hiphop/metal chic gets tiring in long doses – which is why he’s best as a singles artist, especially on this, his best single yet, on which he comes off like a mook cranking Metallica in the parking lot and rapping with his pals, going through a 30-pack of Stroh’s (and thinkin’ about a 30-pack of hos). I get the same rush from this song that I do from Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” – it might not be so good for me, and I could give a fuck. Raise your fist and yell.
*
It’s very rare for something to make my list two years running – generally it happens when I get hit hard by a song at the bare end of one year, and it’s later released as a single and completely saturates my conscienceness. That happened in ‘00/’01 with Jill Scott’s “A Long Walk.” Damn, she’s great. Yes, the whole releasing-a-live-record-as-my-second-album bit worries me a little, but at least in the case of Experience 826+, there was a second, studio album attached – and it showed even more growth. Her voice, plainly, is stunning, and Jazzy Jeff (yes, that Jazzy Jeff) knows how to produce her so she’s set in just the right, well, settings, musically. All of Who Is Jill Scott? isn’t a triumph – but in a fashion similar to Erykah Badu’s Baduism, the highs are so glorious as to be head-turning and gasp-inducing. Identikit artists aren’t the future of R&B; Jill and her sistahs might yet be.
*
Daft Punk is the sound of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Especially tomorrow. Please God, don’t let them retire any time soon. We need more of their kind of computer love, more than we know.
*
To use Shaggy’s immortal words, Maxwell is, in fact, Mr. Lover-Lover. That’d make a good movie tagline, you know: “Maxwell IS Mr. Lover-Lover!” It’s possible that he’s this generation’s Teddy Pendegrass (Jaheim’s got the pipes but most emphatically not the material); I know that no one’s making bedroom-rockin’, love-makin’ records today on his scale, drenched in sex and soul and sensuality. Statements, you ask? That is his statement.
*
His debut album proved Eric Heatherly as a versatile country artist, as comfortable with rockabilly rave-ups or Statler Brothers covers, of all things (“Flowers on the Wall”) as sumptuous balladry. The difference with Heatherly is that his balladry - most notably the sterling title track of Swimming In Champagne - wasn’t all drippy ( la most of the hat brigade), but sounded like Chris Isaak by way of Bakersfield, all high lonesome falsetto notes and production bathed in narcotics, like a slow, languorous day of sex. I am putty in his hands.
Of course, the idiots at his record label dropped him. Because they’re idiots.
*
”I’m overchargin’ niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush.”
- Jay-Z, “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” (The Blueprint, Roc-a-fella/Def Jam, 2001)
Indisputably, that’s the anthem. Get ya damn hands up!
*
I like the Doves’s album Lost Souls, but the longplayer is definitely carried on the back of its single, “Catch the Sun,” four minutes of classic, glorious Britrock – meaning it’s got a lot of soul to it, along with a stunning ascending series of guitar chords in its bridge. They’ve yet to match it, but I’ll take this one song, if nothing else.
*
U2’s “Walk On” does not belong in my top 10 of ’01. We all make mistakes.
*
soulDecision, how do I love thee? I love you for being cute (especially Trevor, but I like Ken too). I love you for being Canadian and not either a) Celine Dion or b) yet another sucky rock band (Blue Rodeo, please come to the white courtesy phone). I love you because you have some of the best multi-layered harmonies in pop. I love you because you’ve obviously listened to a lot of George Michael and Wham!. I love you for showing us Trevor in his boxers in the “Ooh It’s Kinda Crazy” video. I love you for making me feel 12 again – only this time, I wasn’t scared. I love you for helping my baby sister (almost 10 years my junior) and I bond over a short-lived TRL obsession due to your ascendancy to #1 on said program (and yes, I voted for you!). I love you this much.
*
“One In A Million” is achingly sexy, yes, of course. But so is “Rock the Boat,” where to my ears, Aaliyah at last sets sail and sounds like more than a woman. Which she was.
*
I think I first heard Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar” about 3 weeks before the end of the year; it wasn’t even out yet (by all rights, this should’ve shown up on my ’02 list). But it stamped itself so defiantly on my cerebral cortex as to say “I fucking dare you to avoid me, to ignore me.” This is their finest moment, a breathing, living beast of a record, pushing/pulling, in and out, up and down, fucking me every time and leaving me panting and exhausted yet begging for just one more time.
*
Who ever would have guessed that a film by the Coen Brothers starring George Clooney – a 1930s take on The Odyssey, no less! – would revitalize the bluegrass genre?! Seeing “I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow” win the Country Music Association award for Single of the Year in ’02 thrilled me so, I actually got up off the couch and was cheering and clapping. To me, it said there’s life in this genre yet – even if it took a traditional song to do it. The Soggy Bottom Boys, a genius one-off assembled by producer T-Bone Burnett and led by the marvelous Dan Tyminski (a member of Alison Krauss’s band Union Station) – cliché alert – breathe new life into an old song by making it sound, well, old. Perfection.
*
None of us were ready for Beyoncé’s jelly, were we? I’m not sure we’re ready even now. Only a genius would underpin a bootycentric get-those-asses-on-the-dancefloor track by Destiny’s Child with the opening guitar riff from “Edge of Seventeen,” endlessly looped. Give the producer(s) a Nobel prize, for fuck’s sake!
Bonus points for putting Stevie Nicks in the video, in a feather boa.
Also, this song definitively proves why Michelle Williams made a gospel album, and not a mainstream R&B album: ‘cause in gospel, selling 50,000 is a success. In R&B, it better be ten times that, minimum. And Michelle’s voice isn’t anywhere near selling 500,000 records, believe that. [As it would happen, it appears Kelly’s not, either.] Can we just crown Beyoncé reigning queen of pop and get it over with?
*
“Get Ur Freak On”: it’s tabla-tastic! How the fuck is it that with each successive album they make in tandem, Missy Elliott and Timbaland bang yet another future-shit record outta the park? And they keep doing it?! Obviously, they have talents we don’t. And/or are from outer space.
*
Daft Punk are fucking godhead, and “One More Time” proves it. In spades. There’s nothing like looped disco-house to get the party started. Well, and vocoders.
# posted by Thomas : 2:06 PM
