By: Ben Johnson
Among the
people in my life who I regularly talk to about music, Pitchfork’s suckiness is
something like a running joke on its last legs, no longer enthusiastically engaged
in so much as referenced out of a sense of obligation, akin to a 20th hour
“third base” refrain in some postmodern 24 hour performance art version of the
“Who’s On First” routine. Pitchfork is a wind-up toy on its side. Its owners
have already gotten rich from writing about music, which is an astonishing and
historic thing to have happened, and the website is sitting there, still,
sucking in roughly the same way, its payola-reeking banner ads gone in favor of
even more sinister unseen revenue sources. All that.
You might have heard the gripes. You
run an independent label (that’s like an “indie” label but actually
independent) these days, your releases are gonna top out at a 7.2, and that’s
just a cold-ass fact of life, man. Nothing you can do about it. Sux cuz they
got the mindless sheep herd of weekend warrior music fans by the short and
hairies. That place (which is not an actual place in the actual world) is a
behemoth uncaring internet moneyprinting machine, and it does NOT care about
music.
This is
at least as tiresome as Pitchfork itself. Pitchfork was created by humans,
and what one man can do, another
can do. Anybody can build something. All it takes
is timing and financing and toiling in obscurity for years and years to figure
out how to do what you’re doing, and working and working and working and
working for seemingly no reason at all with no idea that you’re getting any
better or any clue that you’ll ever arrive anywhere. Anybody who does those
simple things can author another Pitchfork. So the rest of us really have
nothing to complain about. Of course if you want to build a Pitchfork, one
potential road block is the prior existence of a Pitchfork (in this case
Pitchfork), so that idea is kind of taken. But doing things yourself because
they’re not impossible is the general idea of the bear-killing speech scene
from The Edge that I just linked to.
Trying to
do your own thing is probably a better way to bash your head up against the wall
than trying to crack the code on P’fork’s latent fishiness. You’ll never catch
them in the act. They can spin their bullshit any way they want. They can use
the word “indie” to describe bands like The National, which bums me out more as
a fan of words (words work best if they mean something) than as a fan of music.
It’s their world that they built and live in. Pitchfork for all its many faults
at least has a fairly consistent critical line of reasoning about who’s got the
talent and the chops and the charisma and who doesn’t. It’s all very
scholarly and sourced and vetted and well-informed, and you can almost hear it
if you squint while listening to this stuff, so long as you ignore the pounding
in your gut demanding that you turn off Passion Pit. These albums are “better”
than other albums in certain ways which you could care about if you wanted to,
which renders the Pitchfork line of thought perfectly defendable.
The “real
problem” (this is my Slate pitch moment) with Pitchfork is musicians have long
been treating them like the primary audience, and, worse, it’s likely that aspiring
critics are doing so as well. They’re so successful they set both the market
and the tone of discourse within it. That means the rest of us are getting
nonstop synth-heavy new wave singles bands who trace their musical heritage to
the great hallowed fountainhead of Human League (not a bad band per se, just not fountainhead-worthy), and we’re
getting nonstop thinkpieces by writers who treat each track these bands fart
out like it’s a new definitive translation of Proust.
But hey,
you can’t get too mad about it. If this horseshit of theirs is believable
enough for people to fall for and the resultant checks do not bounce, well, I
have to say, good for Pitchfork. If you worked your ass off to build something
as successful as the ‘fork, you’d cash those checks too, and you probably
wouldn’t give a shit that the central argument against the work you’ve done
boils down to “it’s your fault that millions of people are gullible enough to
believe you when you tell them Fleet Foxes is a good idea.”
All that
being said, this list sucks. It’s a sucky list of sucky music for sucky people
posted on a sucky website. Nyeh nyeh. Now let’s have some fun.
50. Pusha
T, My Name Is My Name
Oh man.
There’s fucking 50 of these. That’s an album a week for a year with two weeks
paid vacation. That bears no resemblance to human scale music enjoyment. If
you can name 50 albums you genuinely like in any given year, no offense, but
you are operating on the autism spectrum somewhere.
Let’s
see, Pusha T. You may be familiar with the lead single “Numbers on the Boards,”
a subtle masterpiece of sneering sonic understatement that sounds like a
postmillennial reimagining of “Come
Clean.” What Pusta T brings in terms of flow to
this collection of sparing beats can most aptly be compared to La Comédie Humane era Honoré de Balzac in that… oh shit, my fucking back. I
heard a pop. Oh God. Oh no. Not right away like this. How do these assholes do
it?
49. Julia
Holter, Loud City Song
Here I am
all full of piss and vinegar, ready to rip into some jugulars, and sections of this
Julia Holter album, an urban nymph song-cycle chanteuse thing very far removed
from my wheelhouse, are actually doing it for me. I must be depressed. I just
Googled to make sure she’s not one of the singers from Dirty Projectors. She is
not. That would have made sense because this also sounds like somebody’s
college a capella group run amok.
48.
Speedy Ortiz, Major Arcana
Has
anybody tried to explain the 2013 reemergence of 90’s Up Records also-ran
northwestern emotional sludge-twee girl band music by making an Ariel Castro
joke about Calvin Johnson? If not I call dibs.
47. The
Range, Nonfiction
Chicago
has these street fests everywhere during the summer. I usually stop by the one that’s
nearest my house every year, and that one has a “dance” stage where DJ’s play
whatever brand of ridiculously hyper-specific EDM subsubsubgenre they
specialize in (“romantic deepdub”), and usually that’s a good place to
people-watch because open-ass city streets as a dance venue tend to have a
pretty strict “weirdos only” admissions policy. I always used to wonder if the
crazily joyful undulating berserkers at the street fest dance area are actual
fans of the specific music and/or the DJ spinning those sounds, or if they’re
totally oblivious to those concerns and are only there because they’re
naturally drawn to any situation where they’re most likely to become some young
person’s biggest lifetime sexual regret. I decided there’s no effective difference,
and that this music is the soundtrack of good ideas metamorphosing into bad
ideas through repetitive overindulgence.
46.
M.I.A., Matangi
I still
can’t shake the feeling that M.I.A. is Peaches but multicultural and political
and with probably twice the talent and four times the tastefulness. Otherwise,
though, Peaches. That’s not a knock on M.I.A. so much as just a comment on how
I sometimes miss Peaches.
45. Fuck Buttons, Slow Focus
Maybe I
just haven’t experienced the right context to be impressed by this. It’s
probably great to listen to when you’re driving your Scion home from a barn
rave while trying to come down smoothly from bath salts.
44. Justin Timberlake, The 20/20 Experience
I think we can all
agree that was a really really good Bud Light commercial. It was like “oh this
is exciting, this is a good night out on the town, these people are attractive
and probably very well off” and then “Bud Light,” which was like “Bud Light?
Okay, I guess, Bud Light.”
43. The National, Trouble
Will Find Me
This is music for
people who think they’re so interesting they need to listen to boring music in
order to be able to relate to other people.
42. Rhye, Woman
Acts like this should
just have a Kate Bush number.
41. Mutual Benefit, Love’s
Crushing Diamond
Here’s a fun game:
mix up any combination of the five words “Mutual Benefit Love’s Crushing
Diamond” into an artist and an album title and still get this exact album. I
like this, but Crushing Love’s Mutual
Diamond Benefit is just as good.
Side note: my mom
just heard me listening to this and she said, “Nobody’s going to be singing
this in ten years.” Mom is the goods.
40. Parquet Courts, Light
Up Gold
I wonder what already
good current limited release microlabel album is going to end up on next year’s
best of the year list because some guy with a publicity budget reissued it? My
money’s on Exhaustion Future Eaters,
but you never know.
39. A$AP Rocky, LongLiveA$AP
We’re at a point in
hip hop where the emcee’s entire job is to project their personality. We’re
going to have a silent rapper by 2020, and he is going to be the BEST.
38. Boards of Canada, Tomorrow’s
Harvest
It’s weird that
there’s so many new LP’s at Half Price Books now and all of them are $24.99 and
all of them are this.
37. Jon Hopkins, Immunity
This Hopkins guy has
worked with Eno, and that’s like the big thing with him, and working with Eno
these days means you’re not making music so much as designing theoretical
noninvasive cochlear surgery procedures.
36. Chvrches, The
Bones of What You Believe
The first time I
listened to this was when I made fun of the Rolling
Stone list three weeks ago and it has not aged well. It's got music Progeria.
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| No need to get involved in this. |
35. Phosphorescent, Muchacho
This guy’s already
doing fine. He’s trying on hats with skinny naked women. He doesn’t need our
help.
34. Forest Swords, Engravings
If you hear this kind
of “ambient chillwave” in a public place, run. You are about to spend a lot of
money for something that has herpes all over it.
33. Burial, Truant/Rough
Sleeper
Oh man, 34 stole 33’s
joke :(
32. DJ Koze, Amygdala
I love how every year
there’s the one person who gets all of the exact picks correct in the NCAA
basketball tournament pool. Can you imagine the one person alive whose brain is
actually wired to listen to all of these albums and like them in exactly this order,
and not just because Pitchfork said so? Whenever such a person talked it would
be like hypnosis but for rage blackouts.
31. Autre Ne Veut, Anxiety
It’s a run of
electronic shit. Somebody needs to start Pitchfork Beatz so these people can
leave the rest of us alone. Oh no, wait. Pitchfork is Pitchfork Beatz. Somebody needs to start Pitchfork Not Beatz.
30. Deerhunter, Monomania
After the rest of the
30’s I’m so excited to hear guitars it’s like reverse Stockholm Syndrome. You
know, where somebody keeps you captive and you just fucking hate it the whole
time.
29. The Haxan Cloak, Excavation
This is the kind of
music people listen to while talking themselves into an intentionally botched
suicide attempt with the rationale that they need to be the most dramatic
person in their circle of friends or else they’ll be completely ignored by Kim,
who loves gossip. Kim is a man named Kim.
28. Run The Jewels, Run
The Jewels
Killer Mike and El-P
are not necessarily Aristotle, but they’re a little too self-aware for my
taste. They grade out to like a C- on the Tutti Frutti curve.
27. Neko Case, The
Worse Things Get, The More I Listen To This Neko Case Album
Jeez louise, Neko
Case. Lighten up a little.
26. James Blake, Overgrown
It was funny how
either this guy got introduced as James Blunt or James Blunt got introduced as
this guy. Whoever made that announcement cared as much as I do.
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| Drake's old boss. |
25. Drake, Nothing
Was The Same
Every time I see
Drake, still, it’s like “How did the guy from the T-Mobile store get courtside
seats? That guy just sold me a phone last week.” His only defining skill is
being super phone-store-salesman-guy-confident-for-no-reason confident. One of
those guys whose smile seems like it’s going to somehow spray designer cologne
on you.
24. Oneohtrix Point Never, R Plus Seven
Do other people have
that thing where you have to do something you don’t like and you go “no no no
no no fuck this fuck this” and you have to take a mini break or else you’ll go
insane because now since you’ve allowed yourself to feel like “fuck this” about
it, continuing to do this stupid thing feels like torture? That’s how I feel
about listening to this right now. It’s great. It’s a modern… great…
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
23. DJ Rashad, Double
Cup
Footworkin’ needs a Saturday Night Fever. A group of best
friends trying to negotiate a Chicago summer together, and they do a flash mob
robbery, and one of them is really good at Footworkin’, and he falls in love
with a girl and gets her pregnant, and one of the friends is the tough one who
stops the Footworkin’ kid from getting murdered by a rival gang but then gets
murdered and with his last breath he tells Footworkin’ kid to Footwork extra
hard for him, and then the guy gets some big triumphant dance scholarship that
solves all his problems by removing him from his community. If handled
correctly, such a film would double or triple its modest budget for some
collection of already rich white guys. Of course you’d have to shoot most of it
in Vancouver. Chicago taxes are prohibitive.
22. Waxahatchee, Cerulean
Salt
Cerulean Salt reminds me of being ass-tired and obnoxious
at a Nowheresville Denny’s with a bunch of the Pennsylvania kids I used to
visit sometimes as a teenager. I would have loved this back then, probably
going so far as to sing it earnestly over the phone long distance to a
justifiably underwhelmed girl who is absolutely going to draw the line at
second base when I drive up there in a month. Being in high school is like
having a major industrial accident at an emotion factory. Thinking about it
makes me wince.
21. Blood Orange, Cupid
Deluxe
This guy is our
current Quinciest Jones. This album has David Longstreth on one track trying to
sound like Robin Thicke. I listened to it. It’s odd. His voice does the audio
equivalent of a gawky child at a bar mitzvah trying to be nonchalant about
dancing while wearing a suit.
20. Jai Paul, Jai
Paul
Oh, so this is an
album that “leaked” and isn’t actually an album that somebody released for real
on purpose, and the idea of putting it on here is some kind of a wisenheimer
critique of the music industry slash running commentary on audio delivery
methods in the digital age. Get this, everybody, the 20th best album
of the year was not even an album, if you can believe it. Anyway, me and some
other people are gonna go break in to this underground swimming pool in the
financial district if you want to come along.
19. Earl Sweatshirt, Doris
The narrative
Pitchfork is pushing about this kid is he’s talented but reluctant. I don’t
care if this dude ever raps again or not, but I always like it when people are
talented but reluctant. It bothers the fuck out of people who are talentless
but motivated, a.k.a. ruiners of everything ever.
18. Janelle Monáe, The
Electric Lady
This album is 67
minutes, which is really not that insanely long. It’s longer than I personally
want to spend listening to a Janelle Monáe album. It’s long enough that I just
started Googling classic albums with long run times. It’s long enough that I
had an out of body experience while doing this. I was sitting over there,
reading a magazine, watching myself Google classic albums with long run times.
Then I re-entered my body and told it to stop Googling album run times while
listening to Janelle Monáe. It listened. True story.
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| Try not to ever look like this. |
17. Haim, Days Are
Gone
I guess it’s
pronounced “hime.” Weird. It’s like poor Corey Haim is failing to book gigs
from beyond the grave.
16. Bill Callahan, Dream
River
Bill Callahan can’t
wait for Leonard Cohen to die so he can finally be the best living Leonard
Cohen.
15. Sky Ferreira, Night
Time, My Time
Maybe the lasting
legacy of the The Strokes is they inserted simple, hooky riffs and Lou
Reed/Iggy Pop disaffected vocal melodies into a self-replicating pop music
environment that has no rootedness in any music that isn’t commercially
successful. It’s weird. You get stuff like this that sounds kind of almost like
a thing you love, but doesn’t sound like it’s trying to be that way on purpose.
This whole area of pop music is like some mega-producer asked the singer what their favorite rock band is
and they said Jet.
14. The Knife, Shaking
the Habitual
I can see where
Pitchfork is going with this one. It’s mesmerizingly pointless.
13. Kurt Vile, Wakin
on a Pretty Daze
Compared to all these
other acts, Kurt Vile is basically Neil Young in terms of how little you’re mad
at him for doing what he does. He should fuck with that more. Test the waters.
Do his version of “Like An
Inca.” Am I mad at Neil Young for writing and recording “Like An Inca?” No
I am not. I’m maybe a little peeved at his coke dealer for being Johnny On The
Spot that year.
12. Chance the Rapper, Acid Rap
Chance The Rapper
gets the 2013 Frank Ocean Award for most difficult album to make multiple jokes
about. This is a good time to check in: when was the last time anybody listened
to that one Frank Ocean album? Be honest. Never, right?
11. Darkside, Psychic
If your favorite
genre of music is “forgot I was listening to it,” this is definitely the album
of the year.
10. Arcade Fire, Reflektor
These guys are
alright with me. I got a polite notice in the mail reminding me to please wear
a suit when I call them frauds.
9. Savages, Silence
Yourself
This is the album
this year that I spent money to own which most completely erases itself from my
brain every time I listen to it. I must have listened a dozen times. I haven’t
heard it once. I’m listening to it right now. I couldn’t tell you what is happening.
8. Majical Cloudz, Impersonator
Oh give me a break.
The first song is “Childhood’s End” and the first lyric is “someone died.” Who
are the gleefully happy all the time people out there who can handle something
like this? Like “Oh man, I have a surge of excess energy and am feeling too
profoundly grateful to be alive, what should I do? I know, I’ll put that new
Majical Cloudz album on. That’ll fix my wagon.” Somebody needs to tell the
Majical Cloudz how hard I had to convince myself to get out of bed this morning
before they make any more music like this. This is no way to reward people for
their effort.
7. Daft Punk, Random
Access Memories
Giorgio Moroder did
an NPR interview where he said these guys told him they wanted to collaborate
with him, and he was probably pretty psyched because they’re huge, and thought
he would be playing some music or something, and instead they asked him to tell
his life story. Like, “No, you’re done. You’re nostalgia now. You’ve already
done enough. Just talk about the things you’ve already done.” I love that Daft
Punk did this to Giorgio Moroder. Somebody should do it to Morrissey.
6. Deafheaven, Sunbather
Sometimes the “related
videos” side panel in YouTube can be instructive. Like I’m listening to the
Sunbather “full album” YouTube and here are the other “full album” YouTubes it
recommends to me: Eminem, The Marshall
Mathers LP 2, Swans, The Seer, Year
of No Light, Ausserwelt, A Perfect
Circle, Mer De Noms, Agalloch, The Mantle, Godspeed You Black Emperor!,
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To
Heaven, Palms, Palms, My Bloody
Valentine, Loveless, Neil Young, Harvest, Russian Circles, Geneva and Station, Tool, Lateralus,
Deftones, Diamond Eyes, The Ocean, Pelagial, Wolves in the Throne Room, Black Cascade, The Antlers, Hospice, and Opeth, Still Life. If this was all the information I had to triangulate Sunbather, I’d say it’s very likely a progressive-type
heavy metalish album with some pretty dark themes which is both pretentious and
cynical at the same time. It’s located about halfway between high art and low
cunning. And there’s evidently a fuck ton of other things like it. Sounds accurate
to me. Man. Better living through algorithms. This is way easier than listening
to music.
5. Danny Brown, Old
This is as good a
time as any to mention that Yo Gotti “King Shit” was my favorite
single track of the year. I like to listen to it on repeat while doing chores. I
have a weakness for monolithic bangers. “King Shit” joins the "secretly I love
them more than any other kind of song" elite bangers club with “A Milli” by Lil’ Wayne, “What You Know” by T.I.,
and “Love Fuzz” by Ty
Segall. I don’t see why I can’t throw Ty Segall in there with those other
dudes. That track is tight as a drum. Somebody could rap on it. That would be
SPECTACULAR. Anyway, this Danny Brown album is okay, I guess. Not a single
track on it gets me off my lazy ass or helps me do the dishes.
4. My Bloody Valentine, mbv
It’s weird to listen
to 45 albums that came out this year which are not this one and then go, “Oh
yeah, My Bloody Valentine put out an album this year.” I like it. My Bloody
Valentine might not be the best band ever, but they’re goddamn heroic if you consider
them as an afterthought. They’re like history’s greatest afterthought. Like “Sidebar:
My Bloody Valentine album” in between Danny Brown and whatever’s next on this
list. They’re like a channel your dad flips past and you go “wait wait wait, go
back” and he doesn’t want to so you don’t get to watch it and you don’t put up
a stink because it’s his tv in his house and you know whatever thing that was is
probably not all that great, but you still make a mental note not to let Dad
have the remote next time. That mental note is more important than the thing
itself.
3. Disclosure, Settle
I did own a pair of
Jncos. I went with the khakis. They weren’t the insanest possible version of
Jncos. They let me act like a rave poser and a hardcore poser with equal
alacrity. I had an outfit that was Adidas sweatshirt, Jnco khakis, and Adidas
shelltops. It was comfortable and it let me snoop around just about any
subculture I felt like investigating in 1996. Once it became obvious that I wasn’t
gonna get laid in any of them without putting in more work than I wanted to, I settled
on more of a regular human being look. This album reminds me of late night viewings
of Mtv Amp which I partook in to be more conversant in rave culture on the off
chance it would help me with my virginity problem. These guys are like Orbital
meets The Orb, which is a reference about two feet beyond my Peter Principle
limits which I just pulled a neck muscle trying to make. The good news is I don’t
give a shit. My dalliances in raves always made me sad, like I was in the
middle of a bunch of people all trying too hard to dance away their broken
homes. Don’t get me wrong, there’s beauty in that, but it’s a sad beauty.
2. Kanye
West, Yeezus
One of the more unfair aspect of year-end
lists is they serve as an official last time we’re going to talk about any of
the music that happened this year. There are so many albums nobody’s talking
about in these lists, some of which are likely to scratch and claw through word
of mouth into a much more accurate future revisionist history versions of “Best
of 2013” lists. These future growers are unfortunately in for some rough
sledding now that we’re ending the annual hype cycle and turning the page. But
there are some pretty big silver linings here. At least now we can all finally start
the process of being dead wrong about 2013 in retrospect. And the very very
good news about this is we're now witnessing the official last time we all have to talk
about Yeezus like it’s a more important
thing than an album of music that exists. When’s the last time you had a big
long conversation about My Beautiful Dark
Twisted Fantasy? Two or three years ago, right? See? There’s light at the
end of the tunnel.
1. Vampire
Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City
When I say I’m looking forward to everybody
being dead wrong about 2013, this is what I’m talking about. There’s just no
way this album is the best album of the year we were just in. It’s like how
some years the Pulitzer goes to some shitty pandering book with a good
publicity campaign and/or references to a politically expedient cause célèbre. Because everybody
who has to do the voting throws the pandering book a token “yeah, it’s alright”
second or third place vote and the actually really good books that year caused
arguments and divisions, the final tally says “Martin Dressler: The Tale Of
An American Dreamer” is the best book that year even though it’s rubbish. Then the voting body goes back and recounts the vote and says “this can’t be right,” and they start arguing all over again until finally
they’re so exhausted from yelling about it they go “fuck it.” This Vampire
Weekend album is the Karl Malone MVP of albums of the year.
