Throughout this year, lyrics from timeworn classics floated through my head--"mucha policía, poca diversión," "this fucking city is run by pigs," "smash to fuck their fucking systems"--and I would just pause and reflect on how decades of books and newspaper articles and an entire formal education had tried to teach me nuance when in fact, punk had taught me all I needed to know. "Have you ever thought about how 'some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses' is basically the most articulate political statement of our era?" I texted one of my group chats; everyone said yes. Maybe this is why "I Want a Refund" by Xylitol felt like the song of the year, like however many years since a monkey discovered fire and we have expensive juice and cops with burner activist accounts on instagram and a government vacillating between inept and homicidal instead of anything actually desirable, or actually resembling justice, or actually being able to have basic shit like enough food to eat and not dying from a virus.
I planned to spend the year blogging on here about various matters instead of tweeting but hopefully you spent your time reading actually wise people with good thoughts instead of a worm woman whose brain pingponged between rage and sadness and the mundane indignity of "having to do a job every day," Baby Yoda and Tyler Glasnow and organized abandonment and meaningful distinctions between mutual aid and charity and how to measure a seam allowance along a curve and are cheez its lunch. For a lot of people I think, this year consumption of media/art felt alternately like a necessary comfort and/or like an intimate if fundamentally futile politics (cf all those reading lists during the summer protests). Some months I barely read or listened or watched, just lay on the couch alternating between brainless games and well-meaning infographics and covid graphs on my phone. Sometimes I listened only to NTS and flooded my brain more new sounds than I could parse. The other day, I listened to the same Ted Leo song from the early 00s 4 times in a row and secretly wanted to listen to it more. In May, I bought a mellow Thai country rock 12" for too much money after being captivated by some song snippets on instagram and it turned out to have the same 3 songs on both sides.
Anyway here's some stuff I liked w a few notes on the ones that I feel I have something to say about. The previously blogged-about Cold Beat and Beatrice Dillon albums were favs too.
JAZZ - WHAT IS JAZZ CATEGORY
Slauson Malone - Vergangenheitsbewaltigung
Irreversible Entanglements - Who Sent You?
Still House Plants - Fast Edit
Dyani - Under
Pharoah Sanders - Pharaoh
I don't know anything about jazz despite many emails and google chats with friends in which I ask them to help me get into jazz, years of dating an academically trained jazz musician who awoke every morning to the yelps of Phil Schaap on WKCR's "Bird Flight," my own ass having taken jazz guitar lessons during high school, etc. HOWEVER, these records which bore certain Jazz Stamps really appealed to me this year. Irreversible Entanglements is Actual Jazz with Moor Mother's writing feeling like outright prophecy of what came and what lies ahead, "who sent you?"--whether the cops the colonizer the gentrifier and/or any white listener--maybe in and of itself being one of the year's most provocative indictments. Malone's record is beautiful; Dyani's fragments jazz into intimate, oceanic techno; Still House Plants continue the age old work of mushing jazz and emo together with Life Without Buildings-esque incanted lyrics. & finally, I finally have a boot of the world's best song "Harvest Time."
CLASSICAL MUSIC ? ?
Charles Curtis - Performances & Recordings 1998-2018
a bunch of flute sonatas not recorded this year, esp Prokofiev and Debussy and Hindemith
Steve Reich various
Sarah Davachi - Cantus, Descent
AMBIENT MUSIC THAT IS BEAUTIFUL BUT TINGED WITH EMOTION--SADNESS AND IN SOME CASES ANGER TOO
Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders
Ana Roxanne - Because of a Flower
John Atkinson & Ned Milligan - Call Me When You Can
Nailah Hunter - Spells
REISSUES
Flaming Tunes s/t
Karen Dalton - It's So Hard To Know Who's Going To Love You the Best
Frumpies - Frumpie One Piece
Reigning Sound - Home For Orphans
I feel generally skeptical about the reissue industrial complex but here we had four absolutely unimpeachable classics all hitting the reissue shelves at the same time
NOT A REISSUE BUT KIND OF
Arthur Russell - Sketches For 'World Of Echo'
Start to finish jaw droppingly good
MUSIC BY GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS
All, especially "All the Good Times" and "Time: The Revelator." I haven't dug into the Boots as much as I plan to, but even before the wealth of new material from the best singer-songwriter in the American tradition currently living came out, I was wearing out my mp3s of "Time: The Revelator," (please release this on LP) a literally perfect record, ideal for a summer spent glued to my couch with sweat during the death throes of the American Empire. For Welch, time doesn't heal all wounds--it lays bare scars and gaping holes, the festering repetitions of history. You be Emmylou and I'll be Gram.
For PUNK I liked Xylitol, Special Interest, P22, and Gunn. I listened to very little new punk, which I think I blogged about before? About how hard it has become to find those sounds inspiring? wrt punk, for some reason the metaphor that comes to mind is a response to a question legendary punk and fellow blog/newsletter author Colin/Life Harvester
posed about transitioning: perhaps the boner for punk has moved to my heart.
I first heard the Magik Markers LP yesterday but I have already listened to it a bunch and it's excellent.
without THE MUSIC OF THE VELVET UNDERGROUND I would be a salted slug. This year my favorite VU song was "The Ocean" as heard on Live/the Matrix Tapes but shoutout also to the "Live at the Second Fret" LP that was booted this year.
Another thing that I became randomly obsessed with was Sinead O'Connor's first record "The Lion and the Cobra" and in a similar vein finally Got Kate Bush during the couple weeks when my bf and I would get drunk and started playing scrabble at midnight while blasting "Hounds of Love"
Probably I forgot some things. I spent a LOT of time watching movies and reading and that will be another posty I think--or maybe another issue of the print newsletter. Issue #2 of paper The Talya Times came out as part of Shivaun's zine swap this fall but I don't know how to post the PDF online.
RIP to John Prine and Vern Rumsey and Sam Jayne and Marc Orleans and to so so so many others. If you're reading this, I will do what I can to keep you safe and I hope you'll do the same for me.
