I never did a top 10 of 2011, was in absentia during the list’s prime time. This isn’t particularly groundbreaking but felt necessary before moving on to 2k12 (two months in already, I KNOW). Part of the reason is my number 10 spot was a revolving door of honorable mentions. Re-listening to Beyonce’s 4 I’ve decided that, at the time of this post’s writing, I was a fucking idiot for not cementing its standing sooner.
ALBUMS
Hercules and Love Affair Blue Songs - That Cut Copy’s Aryanized, rockist version of house music nabbed a Grammy nod makes sense. Well it doesn’t, because the Grammy’s don’t make sense, but for thinkpiece purposes….actually the Grammy’s isn’t really alone here as there was a general cold response to Blue Songs as a half-baked followup to the lush Russell-isms of their first album. The whole thing is beyond insulting to the ambitiously queer reconfiguration of western mythology that relates directly to House’s other meaning of alternative familial structures for kicked-out/runaway queer and trans youth (see: Paris is Burning). Lyrics to something like “Blue Song” which constructs a temple alternative to the church, and hymns alternative to psalms bring the vague youngs in the track into the lens of the cast-off orphans that plenty of shit homes are deemed more suitable for than any welcoming gays. The new, Antony-less lineup is itself an alternative family (a kind of long lost vogueing gang) whose internationalism also trumps the faux-utopian Zonoscope’s pretenses at relevance, especially the unintentionally insulting “Pharaohs & Pyramids” and “Blink and You’ll Miss a Revolution” which dropped Mario-level orientalisms right around the start of the Egyptian revolts. The production, too, is much DEEP-er than the first album’s lush, late disco Sylvester flourishes, and varied in fairly rewarding ways.
G-Side Island - Wrote about it here.
Jay-Z & Kanye West Watch the Throne - Wrote about it here and here.
PJ Harvey Let England Shake - Had a post planned on how Refused’s cash-in reunion gig at Coachella is only one example of how outdated their agitprop politics are, the other being the mature empathy of PJ Harvey’s fragmentary WWI collage. While, say, there’s a bit of the Ochs-ish protest in reworking Summertime Blues’ “gonna take my problem to the United Nations” line, her reconfiguration of it as a rhetorical question acknowledges the reality’s harsh response. The rest of the album works from the non-vantage point of nationalists, soldiers and victims in their epiphanic coming-to’s that what they signed up/got conscripted for is a lot more horrific than nationalism’s push had signaled. Instead of the (admittedly still kind of great) “I’ve got a bone to pick with capitalism and a few to break” from a gang of Swedes, there’s the disoriented “i’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat” which knocks down the twin birds of capitalism and the slaughterhouse with one poetic stone. While, on the surface, Refused’s return seems appropriate for the OWS revival of leftist protest, advancing discourse on the subject will have to take in cultural reflections on its core problems from POV’s outside their punk comfort zone, i.e. this, iSlaND and Watch the Throne.
Danny Brown XXX - “Income tax swag”, clinical debauchery and crushing poverty make this a searing statement on reckless abandonment from a personal and a structural level.
EMA Past Lives Martyred Saints - Along with XXX, one of the rawest fucking records of 2011, its lacerating (self and other) scope virtually unmatched. Mixing nursery rhymes, folk hymns and noise squall, Anderson’s meditation on damaged tension is empoweringly hard and confrontationally vulnerable. Though Kim Gordon is generally used as a reference point, “you were a goth in high school” and “i wish that every time he kissed it left a mark” also have relevance in the halls of Xiu Xiu U.
Clams Casino Rainforest EP Choosing this mainly because of its awesomely corny concept. While S/T is equally important (actually moreso), its coherence was a happy accident (which perhaps makes it even a stronger contender?). Clams committing to a Museum of Natural History framework and killing it is, along with his FACT mix, fairly indicative of his wide range of talents. Here’s a .gif I made for “Waterfalls”.
Cities Aviv Digital Lows - When fresh rappers come adorned in a mish-mash of genre signifiers it’s usually the opposite of transcendent i.e. the empty-calorie creampuff masquerade of ASAP Rocky. Here the guttural slop of Memphis forebears, balls-out self-mythologizing of hard-knock east coasters and the resurgence of vulgar shock is married with the glitched-out electronics of internet buzz for a singularly 2k11 blueprint for internet rap. Nice guy, too!
Holy Ghost! Holy Ghost! - The other end of my anti-Zonoscope agenda is this album’s robust sense of history that was sorely lacking when I saw Cut Copy live last semester, where they treated Chapel Hill to a set length meditation on the illusion of a musical vacuum. HG! are genre nerds and wear their influences on their sleeves, from instagram photos of New Order posters to twitter riffs on which Larry Levan remixes Louis CK and Larry David’s shows correspond to. Though indebted to James Murphy’s DFA label, I think that “I love this city but I hate my job” is a proper recession-conscious flip to LCD’s obnoxiously entitled “New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.”
Beyonce 4 - A meditation on R&B history that’s not icky in the vein of Weeknd’s triptych and thus a welcome alternative (in my head something like Iron Man vs. The Dark Knight). While the latter’s sonic disorientation is powerfully visceral embellishment on its queasy date-rapish lyrics, its clever deconstruction of “Blame it on the Alcohol’s” thematic implication leaves a sour, unclean feeling, like a tunnel-visioned Gaspar Noe detour or those Dragon Tattoo movies. Maybe that’s a necessary corollary to the historically astute optimism of 4, what with the crisp crackle of its retro sheen and expansively diverse meditations on the love and heartbreak of slow jam balladry, but 4 felt important as a reminder that Whitney Houston wasn’t always fodder for proto-meme ridicule.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Das Racist Relax - Anyone who thinks the very solid Nehru Jackets is the Vicki Leekx to M.I.A.’s @#$%^& misses that this is where DR establish the aesthetic that best reflects on their multi-racial identities and politics. It may not be as giddy or grab-bag as their mixtapes but it’s as coherent statement on who DR are that even reaches back to Victor’s days in of montreal-lite outfit Boy Crisis. Also bonus points for baiting their mostly white auds by bringing the less approachable (to put it mildly) Danny Brown on tour.
Justice Audio, Video, Disco - As blasphemous towards prog rock as their first album was towards french house, it’s basically an album length series of arena-stomping hooks with none of prog’s heady, circumlocutive buildup.
Nacho Picasso For the Glory - SMOKIN’ READIN’ COMIC BOOKS. Like Danny Brown’s haircut and skinny jeans, there’s a flirtation with some vaguely indie-friendly signifiers while remaining firmly entrenched in aggressively knucklehead traditions. The wordplay here is simultaneously comatose and dizzyingly complex like Cam at his most fun (also most evil and “BEEN A BAD GUY, EVER SINCE MY DAD DIED” is pretty good origin story shorthand for rise to villainy). That sample of Laurie Anderon’s O Superman, while not as heartbreaking as that vocoder-heavy classic, is also only a few notches below XXX’s This Heat/Hawkwind mash-up.
Oneohtrix Point Never Replica - Didn’t spend a lot of time with this, but my alternate title when I did was Adventures of Young Fox Mulder OST.
The Field Looping State of Mind - except for that one bit of Animal Collective jamming, this is a pretty flawless transition into a full-fledged band.
OVERLOOKED
Rustie Glass Swords - What I imagine the right soundtrack to a proper (as in without the racist whitewashing) live-action remake of Akira would be like (Them’s The Vagaries to post a version of one soon!). I also think that, in a way, it’s more successful in that regard than Johnny Jewel’s backwards-looking Symmetry album (as the Attack the Block OST may be, too, but I haven’t heard that outside the film yet).
Rihanna Talk That Talk - Didn’t really give this a fair chance when it came out but Rhi-Rhi’s Barbadan roots stick out even stronger than on Rated R. While less coherent than that album, and a few tracks too long, it’s still a pretty bold refutation of public perception that girl is fragile. A kind of album-length exegesis of her “Thug Life” tattoo.
Miguel All I Want is You - this is from 2010, but I only got to it a month ago. Including it here as a reminder that people should stop waiting for Timberlake to come back, there’s plenty of other boundary-shifting R&B out there.
TRACKS
Rihanna “We Found Love” Partly emboldened by the instantly canonical video, which sits alongside Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” in its compact efficacy of minor British drama. The song, too, in it’s jarring, head-spinning rave-up bits, also mirrors the song’s theme of dangerously whirlwind romantic entanglement. Again, whether aided and abetted in construction or not, Rihanna remains the best commentator on her own life.
Hercules and Love Affair “It’s Alright” - Kim Ann Foxman’s tender vocals on this monster ballad version of Sterling Void’s global protest classic flesh out the optimistic naivety of its “dance music as political remedy” scope, giving the original a lullaby companion piece.
Kim Ann Foxman “Creature” - putting Vogueing back in its right place i.e. the multi-racial, queer underground. Also shout-out to the Kenneth Anger-ish inclusion of a pentagram in the video.
EMA “California” - Melding the fatalistic swagger of Bo Diddley, the bruised howl of a certain Smalltown Boy and that jagged, dead-eyed, post-hippie realism of an acid-damaged 70’s survivor, fuck-yous to Californian optimism have rarely been this heady or bracing.
Holy Ghost! “Jam for Jerry” already summed up proper by Brandon in his P4k BNT review, but most definitely the least histrionic and most affecting way to honor the sudden death of a close one.
The Throne ft. Frank Ocean “No Church in the Wild” - Theoretically, this could have put the illuminati nonsense to rest in that it does the same man behind the curtain schtick that Leonard Cohen’s new album does. It’s really the opening slab of demystification for one long scab pulled off the wound of history.
Britney Spears ft. Nicki Minaj & Ke$ha “Till The World Ends (remix)” - the bat mitzvah anthem of the apocalypse.
Skrillex “Alejandro (remix)” - While most dubstep producers are content to open the gates for the womp with the same breakdown, Skrillex splatters it on his jenga-topple of a hyperspeed Gaga remix. This thing goes plaid.
Danny Brown “Scrap or Die” - Will leave it to the last few paragraphs of Willy Staley’s mammoth Detroit poverty article, but here’s a fucked up and fucked over working class, back alley tale that’ll convert any Mountain Goats fan.
Juicy J “Who Da Neighbors (Skinny Friedman trap rave mix)” - “MY MANSION SIT ON 40 ACRES, WHO DA NEIGHBORS? KOBE BRYANT FROM THE LAKERS, NOW THAT’S PAPER (repeat with increasing delirium)”
