Fast 'n' Bulbous' Anticipated Year-End Summary & Top 13 Lists!
www.fastnbulbous.com
Okay, maybe not so anticipated. But for what it's worth, I absorbed massive quantities of music this month like a madman (more so than usual) in order to feel confident that I could take a good stab at what were some of the better releases of 2004.
2004 Year-End Summary
Fun Incarcerated
If Clear Channel and the media conglomerates had their way, artists would stay imprisoned within specific genre cells until they die. The idea, that clearly defined genre labels will make it easier to market to specific audiences, is nothing new, of course. What they moguls should have come to understand within the past decade or four is that easy convenience always leads to stagnation. Without variation in the creative gene pool, music, art -- indeed all of humanity -- becomes weak and stunted. There’s a reason why incest is illegal. Keep it in the family and you’ve got deformed, dumb babies. Mix races and cultures and you create unique, beautiful offspring. Only the strong and wily can overcome the social barriers, break out of their cells and mix it up.
That’s what happened sixty years ago, when country, bluegrass and blues jumped the fence, met up for some moonshine and had a spectacular threesome, spawning rock ‘n’ roll. Despite its predicted death every ten years, rock was a sturdy kid, able to roll with the changes and absorb new cultural offshoots like metal and punk. Pop would be its sickly cousin, feeding off the scraps of other genres, perking up when infused with new blood from soul, funk and hip hop, but soon collapsing with exhaustion when trendhoppers bludgeon an idea to death with soulless repetition.
A decade ago it felt like something exciting was happening. Mavericks were mixing up German space rock, soul, dub, hip hop, punk, metal, and dozens of combinations of ethnic styles from Latin, Arabic, African and Asian cultures (for example, Laika, Roni Size, Massive Attack, Tricky, Transglobal Underground, Mano Negra, Nação Zumbi, Cornelius, Cornershop, Asian Dub Foundation and Café Tacuba). It seemed inevitable that they would influence the direction of pop music. Didn’t happen. Sure there were token nods to innovation, like Timbaland toying with bhangra beats, but under the sheer weight of the usual drivel, the small explosions in creativity affected little in the anemic pop world. Instead of being inspired by Tricky’s innovations, artists aped surface sounds to create trite and dreary “trip hop.” Drum ‘n’ bass painted itself into a corner and imploded. Artists united against their will (and with mewling protests) under the “post-rock” tag (more as a state of mind than a sound) chose to stay sternly obscure rather than court popularity, except for Radiohead, who have valiently served as a mainstream ambassador.
Whether it’s my age or the oppressive political climate I’m not sure, but 2004 didn’t party like 1994 or 1984. With the lack of both satisfyingly enraged outbursts and sheer manic fun, music didn’t seem to feel as important as usual. Subdued moods and expectations made normally trivial moments like the crossover successes of Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand and Interpol seem far more exciting and encouraging than they were. In this context, TV On The Radio’s Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes makes perfect sense as the album of the year. Ambitiously mixing droney post-punk with hip hop and doo-wop, they’re also somewhat reserved, keeping the rage at a slow simmer as they cast an evil eye upon the hypocritical pop stars who make bank from pop based in hip hop and soul while they flaunt diamonds mined by African slave labor and traded with terrorists: “oh loiterers united / indivisible by shame / hungry for those diamonds / served on little severed bloody brown hands / oh the bling drips / oh the bling drips down / fallin’ down just like rain.” Justice was at least served in a small way when Desperate Youth... claimed the Shortlist Music Prize in November. Rest assured, no bling will be flaunted from any resulting success, but TV On the Radio do seem to be loosening up with the danceable single, “New Health Rock.”
Rightly considered the queen of infusing pop with avant-garde ideas, Björk continues her introspection with Medulla. Scrapping a project initially bloated with orchestras and bombast, she focused on the human voice, creating a powerful work that is at times cuddly, but often terrifying and alien. With Björk having frightened off mainstream pop audiences and stalkers alike, it would be great to see her come to terms with instruments again, particularly guitars. She started out in Kukl, a badass post-punk band, after all. Perhaps her partner Matthew Barney’s death metal mixes will inspire her. A post-punk/metal/pop hybrid from Björk would be something to behold.
One of 2004’s most encouraging developments are two gifted young songwriters who chose to work directly in pop music. Annie (Norway’s Anne Lilia Berge-Strand) and Utada (21 year-old Utada Hikaru) are subverting the tradition of making innovative, unpopular music, only to see others rip off the obvious parts and cash in with inferior versions that hit big on the pop charts. While penning intense, literate lyrics to their own music isn’t unusual in folk, rock and country, it’s unheard of in pop music. Ever since the days of Tin Pan Alley it seemed there was a rule book that writers write catchy, vapid pop songs, and singers sing them. Aside from some of the near poetry of Motown hits, this was rarely an inspiring formula. Not only are Annie and Utada’s joys and sorrows more believable, they’re complimented by expertly crafted music, subtly laced with experimentation. Gwen Stefani aims for that kind of success with her solo debut and comes only up a little short due to her inconsistent collaborations. On the flip side, Girls Aloud shows that manufactured pop can have some heart if the production team is talented enough. Spawned from the U.K. reality show Popstars: The Rivals, they’re the living, silver-clad fem-bot embodiment of Bruce Sterling’s fictional girl-band G-7 from Zeitgeist and William Gibson’s Idoru.
By necessity, good art is often disobedient and unruly, which explains the popularity of an album that was never commercially available – Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. DJ Danger Mouse mixed The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s The Black Album, distributed 3,000 free copies, and was served with a cease-and-desist order from EMI. Despite further litigious threats, millions of fans gleefully downloaded it. It’s a great conversation starter on the struggle between copyright law, fair use and free speech. But while The Grey Album has some brilliant moments, it gets old pretty quickly as a one-trick gimmick. Much better is M.I.A. & Diplo’s mash-up mixtape, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. M.I.A. sings, raps and chants over Diplo’s splices of hip hop, dub, baile funk and The Bangles. M.I.A. signifies a new breed of pop star who’s first big break happens on the Internet without the aid of labels and genres. This is promising.
Legally released albums have also tapped into this energy. Much like the Avalanches, The Go! Team makes heavily sampled party music that is dense, brash and exhuberant, yet manages to keep their eyes on the prize in not letting the mish-mash overwhelm the winning pop songs. Jason Forrest’s The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash sacrifices clarity for still more manic energy, integrating the AOR rock of ELO, The Cars, The Who and Elton John into something utterly unrecognizable.
Corporate radio may never loosen its deathgrip on restrictive programming. But anyone with a laptop, a wireless connection and some know-how could become a pirate DJ. Unfettered by commerce and copyright law, let’s hope the new pop artists, emancipated from genre holding cells, will rise to the surface and make new music fun for everyone again. Or at least music worth going to jail for.
Click here for comebacks, debuts, overrated, disappiontments and of course the Lucky 13 list of albums.
