Burn Your Hits

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]

(21) EMA - “California”

                          

Fuck California

You made me boring

I bled all my blood out

But these red pants, they don’t show that

My old friends don’t even know that

And when I sold them I sold that

I’m sorry Gracie girl you’re golden

I’m sorry Steven and Andrew

That I ever left you

You never seen the ocean

You never been on a plane

Schizophrenia rules the brain

Aliens coming to take you away

You’re still my favorite

Past Life Martyred Saints

Gimme the places I’ll give you the names

Wasted away alone on the plains

What’s it like to be small-town and gay?

Fuck it baby I know you’ll never change

***

What do we owe the past?  What do we owe the places we came from?  What do we owe the people who were once important to us?  What do we owe the people who no longer are?

After my nostalgia-drenched intro essay to the 100 Songs for 2011 collection, I’ve been trading emails with a couple of my college roommates, two guys who will be groomsmen in my wedding, two guys who know me better than pretty much anyone.  While I’m probably not done talking about the glorious musical year of 2005, I probably have just as much to say about the years directly preceding it, years when the three of us experienced virtually all music together.  Many of my all-time favorite albums and songs come from that time period, too.  The difference is that, for whatever reason, I still see pretty much everything I listened to in 2005 as unquestionably, unassailably brilliant. When talking about 2000-2004, though, I’m willing to admit that some of the music I loved at the time was, in fact, kinda terrible.  There are a lot of songs from that era that I don’t listen to anymore.

That kind of perspective scrambles your memories.  What do you do with good times spent listening to music that doesn’t mean anything to you anymore?  Do you need to pretend that those songs are still important to maintain a kind of internal consistency?  Is it enough to realize that they were important?  For me, thinking about how many of my formative experiences were soundtracked by the Dave Matthews Band makes me wonder if they happened to a different person, and that’s just alienating.

It gets much worse when you do this with people.

***

I don’t keep in touch with ex-girlfriends.  There are two main reasons for this.  The first, and most objective, is that none of them have ever tried to keep in touch with me.  For this, I am eternally grateful.  I don’t know anyone who has had positive experiences keeping in touch with an ex.  I wish them all the best of luck in our non-intersecting lives.

The second reason, though, is that I don’t really keep in touch with anybody.

I have one close friend from high school.  I have five or six close friends from college.  I assume I will remain close with these people forever, and it is very important to me that I do so.  I have a very small family, but I do my best to remain close with them as well.  Any breaks in communication are almost definitely my fault, and they bother me.  I consistently resolve to do better.  I understand that this paragraph makes me sound like a robot.

I keep in touch with many of my law school friends because most of them still live in San Francisco.  We go to concerts and happy hours.  We play fantasy baseball together.  If any of them moved away, I understand that our relationships would fade.  I hope that doesn’t happen.

Past that, though … there isn’t much.  There are times when Facebook seems like a collection of random strangers.  I’ve been accused of possessing a worldview in which other people don’t really exist unless they’re standing directly in front of me.  That’s a little harsh, but it’s not too far off.  I don’t wonder what my high school friends are doing with their lives.  I never think about them.  It doesn’t bother me that we don’t keep in touch.  It only bothers me in the sense that sometimes I think it should bother me more, and I worry about why it doesn’t.  Once you go down that rabbit hole, though, there’s no coming back.

Ilana keeps in touch with every person she has ever met.  We routinely hang out with her kindergarten classmates.  Sometimes I’m jealous of that.  Mostly it seems like a lot of work.

***

I could be wrong, but I don’t think I burned any bridges in my past.  I didn’t leave town owing anyone money, didn’t leave the band to go solo, didn’t break any hearts, didn’t crush any dreams.

I’m sure part of my willingness to cut ties with the past comes from a lack of self-esteem.  I can’t imaging anyone wistfully flipping through the pages of an old yearbook, sighing.  ”I wonder why Aaron doesn’t keep in touch.”  What good would I be to them, anyway?

They are the songs I don’t listen to anymore.  I still smile when I hear them even if, most of the time, I’m not really listening.  I hope they feel the same way about me.  We move on.  We drift apart.

***

EMA’s “California,” then, is the exact opposite worldview.  In fact, “opposite” may not be a strong enough word.  These two viewpoints annihilate each other.

***

Erika M. Anderson and I have some things in common.  She’s 28, I’m 30.  She came to California from South Dakota, I came from Minnesota. Okay, I guess that’s it.

***

Look at the first verse of “California.”  It’s about displacement, of course (Pitchfork called it “the shattered cry of someone living unmoored, trying to make sense of what’s going on in her head.”)  It’s about Erika, a little bit. But it’s also about Gracie. Steven. Andrew.

What did Erika owe them?  What, exactly, is she apologizing for?

More than anything, she’s apologizing for leaving.  She moved to California with her boyfriend and their band (the marginally successful Gowns).  It made sense for her.  She wasn’t going to stay in South Dakota forever.  She wasn’t going to solve rampant rural homophobia. She wasn’t going to cure crippling schizophrenia.  What could she have done?  What did anyone expect?  What would she have expected from them?

It would never have crossed my mind that she should have anything at all to be sorry for.  It was not her duty to stay.  She did not owe them that.

At this point, the cynic would bring up the actual events of Erika’s time in California.  Her band broke up.  So did her relationship.  She actually returned home to South Dakota to write the songs on Past Life Martyred Saints.  The cynic would call this a clever bit of misdirection.  As she couldn’t admit, “I never should have gone to California because I failed and my life fell apart,” she is left with “I never should have gone to California because I had to leave my friends.”

I don’t think that’s the case.  I think even at triple-platinum, even at “critically-acclaimed voice of the people,” Erika M. Anderson would still be apologizing to Gracie, Steven, and Andrew.  I think those connections would still matter to her, connections without a real purpose, connections whose only benefit sometimes was just the chance to feel miserable with someone.  I don’t know if she thinks it was her duty to stay there forever.  I suspect she does.

And I don’t know how comparable her situation is to mine.  I’m not suggesting any of my childhood friends are dealing with mental illness or feelings of isolation.  I still submit that everyone in La Crescent, Minnesota is doing just fine without me.  

Maybe Erika knows that she was the only friend some of these people ever had, or ever will have.  Maybe they pleaded with her not to go, and she ignored them.

The point is that I’m not sure I fully understand the logistics of human relationships.  I’m pretty sure Erika M. Anderson cares too much.  But it’s also entirely possible that I don’t care enough.

This is my favorite song of the year that I assume everyone else will hate.

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]

(89) AraabMuzik - “Streetz Tonight”

I’ve always listened to hip hop for the beats.  This is kind of a false dichotomy, of course.  Every song is a synthesis of music and lyrics.  A great beat can never be totally divorced from the words laid over it.  However, I’m always more than willing to put up with subpar verses if they come with incredible production.  (This is why I frequently listen to Cam’ron.)  I’m very rarely willing to put up with terrible beats in the interest of great lyrics.  (This is why I never listen to Nas.)

This could be a product of timing.  My formative hip-hop years (early-2000s) were a golden age of superstar producers:  Neptunes, Kanye West, Timbaland.  As such, I have no problem referring to producers as “artists” (or even more directly, “musicians”).  I’m hesitant to say the same thing about rappers.  I don’t own any of Tupac’s poetry books.

Maybe I’m in the minority here, I don’t know.  But if the producers are the true engines of creativity in hip hop, it seems bizarre that so much of their artistic legacy is at the mercy of rappers.  If Just Blaze creates the greatest beat in the history of the world, it won’t even see the light of day unless Jay-Z deems it worthy of inclusion on The Blueprint, Volume 6.  The biggest names can turn the tables (i.e. Timbaland can put out his own album, choosing which rappers appear on which tracks) but I’m still surprised that more hip hop producers don’t venture out into more esoteric musical territory in the name of artistic freedom.  As an artist, it has to drive you crazy that the only thing standing between you and superstardom is your ability to convince a record label that your work would be the perfect canvas for Rick Ross to say the word “boss” two hundred times.

Certainly superstar producers have been able to transcend.  The Neptunes went rock with N.E.R.D.  Kanye West went R&B with 808s and Heartbreak.  However, before 2011, it was nearly impossible for lesser-known producers to cross over.  In this respect, the year was a breakthrough.  As this trend was largely fueled by Pitchfork, Spin, and a host of music blogs, it would be easy to dismiss it as white kids latching on to a less intimidating subset of hip hop culture, but that’s unfair to the music.  At the forefront of this movement were Clams Casino and AraabMuzik.

AraabMuzik comes from the Diplomats’ stable of beatmakers, probably best known for hard, angry tracks like The Diplomats’ “Salute” and Cam’ron’s “Get It In Ohio.”  So it’s confusing that he apparently wants to make cheesy Euro-dance music, but whatever.  As Pitchfork explains:

It’s tough to imagine the tracks on Electronic Dream getting any play in any dance club in the world, and it’s virtually impossible to picture anyone rapping over them. Instead, this album is a genre unto itself— ominous future shit that creates an atmosphere but never bleeds into the background. Araab’s snare-hits resonate like eye-punches, and his drum-programming is pure, unrelenting rap shit. But he’s applying that sensibility to songs where the melodies shine even when Araab’s using a screaming sound effect as part of the rhythm track. The end result is a truly weird little album— something at once anxious and euphoric.

I can tell you what Cam’ron’s flow is going to sound like in five years.  I’ve got a pretty good guess regarding the subject matter on Ludacris’ next record.  I would bet that Jay-Z still has more to say about really nice watches. But I don’t know where AraabMuzik is going.  And I’m excited about that.

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]

(71) The Bear Coat - “Steady Til Stuck”

Here are some facts you will need to know for the rest of this essay to make sense:

(1)  The Bear Coat is kind of a vanity studio project, the brainchild of two guys from Brooklyn.  They do not tour.  They do not appear on Hype Machine.  However, their two albums, 2009’s self-titled debut and 2011’s Adding Mass, are available on both Amazon and iTunes.  The most popular song on their MySpace page has been accessed 543 times.  That should give you some rough idea of the commercial success of The Bear Coat.

(2)  One half of The Bear Coat is a man named Jason Parks.  Mr. Parks is a Texan.  He is a freelance baseball scout, a blogger at both Lone Star Ball and Texas Farm Review, and a contributor for Baseball Prospectus.  Mr. Parks is also co-host of BP’s Up and In Podcast, of which I am a subscriber and a religious listener.  I learned about The Beat Coat through this podcast.  For reasons that I cannot fathom, Mr. Parks does not have a Wikipedia page.

(3)  ”Steady Til Stuck” is a pretty excellent song.  As with the rest of The Bear Coat’s output, I highly recommend it, especially for fans of Rogue Wave or Elliott Smith.  If forced to choose, I would probably recommend the first album, especially the “Operation Stiletto,” “Butter,” “Career Fabulist” section.  The fact that I’m probably not going to mention any actual music again in the course of this essay should not in any way be taken as a slight against the band.  Please go buy both Bear Coat albums.

***

When I was a kid, art was made by celebrities.  This was almost a tautology.  If I was aware of a piece of art, it was by definition made by a celebrity.  I was living in a town of 5,000 people, before the internet.  For a decent amount of that time, my family didn’t have cable TV.  If I heard a song, it was a song by an artist on a major label, with a national distribution deal.  If I read a column in a magazine, the author likely had a subscriber base in the hundreds of thousands.  If I read a book, it was by an author whose publishing house was large enough to stock books at Barnes & Noble.  If I was aware of a piece of art, it was almost implied that the creator of that piece of art was a successful artist.  Famous, independently wealthy, able to draw on the resources of a powerful corporation whose business was art creation.  This is where art came from.  Art was made by capital-A Artists, international celebrities.

When I was a kid, it was easy to understand why not everyone was an Artist.

And I don’t mean to use “resources of a powerful corporation” as a thinly-veiled reference to selling out, like you had to be a shill for The Man to get your voice heard.  What I mean is this:  When I listened to The Beatles, I knew the stories of those songs.  I knew about Abbey Road studios and Apple Records and the genius of George Martin and Brian Epstein and everyone who made The Beatles possible.  I knew if they needed a full symphony orchestra for a song, they would get it, possibly that day.  If they needed Eric Clapton for a song, he would stop by.

These incredible production excesses seemed to filter down to even the most middling of the ’90s one-hit wonder bands.  Everyone had a million dollar recording budget.  Everyone built their own studio in a barn near Woodstock.  Everyone brought out premium sound equipment to record ambient noise at Joshua Tree.  Everyone shipped double-platinum.

My high school garage band wasn’t really a garage band because we rehearsed in a kind of converted living room at my friend Vince’s parents’ house.  We recorded by hanging a cheap microphone from the ceiling.  And we loved every minute of it.  We absolutely did.  But we understood that this was pretty much as far as we would go.  If we had a major label record deal, and top-notch production, and world-class studio musicians, well then we could dream about something bigger.  I thought we wrote some really good songs.  But I don’t know if we ever thought we were Artists.  That implied something beyond us.

It was like that with all artistic formats.  When I read novels, I imagined the stories of their creation.  When I read The Corrections, I saw Franzen holed up in some secluded but well-stocked cabin, safe from the pressures and responsibilities of the world, living comfortably off a hefty advance, writing letters to David Foster Wallace about the meaning of literature and devoting every waking thought to his craft.  (Unlike the last paragraph about The Beatles, I don’t know if any of these details are true.  I could be making up every word in this paragraph.  The point is that this is how I thought great novels were created.)  Journalism was no different.  Hunter S. Thompson’s expense reports must have been massive.  Cigarette boats to Cuba, Vincent Black Shadows down Highway 1, and enough rum to drown everything.  Then retreat to Woody Creek to shoot guns and sort it all out.

In college, and briefly in grad school, I wrote short stories while working part time at a bookstore, then a chain Italian restaurant.  I took a bunch of other classes, of which I remember shockingly little.  (Seriously, I was a philosophy minor.  I took an entire class on Wittgenstein.  I have no idea what that guy was about.)  I struggled to pay rent.  I sat in traffic.  I bought groceries.  I watched too much TV.  I battled hangovers.  I did many, many things that were not writing, often because I had to, but sometimes because I was lazy.  My short stories were not very good.  I told myself that, if I ever got a chance to focus all my energies on writing, if all this real-world nonsense ever just melted away, my short stories would get better.  I knew this would never happen.

***

When I was very young, I wanted to be a garbage man.  This is absolutely true.  I think a lot of this is based on the children’s book Junk Day on Juniper Street, but looking back it seems like my Mom had a whole library of books about happy garbage men who found awesome stuff in the trash, fixed it up, and possibly solved crimes or something.  The point is that, from a very young age, I believe that garbage man was absolutely the coolest profession in the world.  They were the stars of the show, heroes in their community, possessed of a kind of self-satisfaction I could tell was rare in the adult world.  This is the only time in my life that I ever really had an answer for the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

When people ask me now what I wanted to be when I grew up, I jokingly tell them that I wanted to play third base for the Minnesota Twins.  This is only half-true … I would gladly have played either corner infield position, but I was better with the glove than the bat, and so I profiled better at third.  The more serious truth behind that joke is that I never really had any career ambitions.  I became an English major because I liked to read, and I liked to write, and I liked to talk about books, and I was pretty good at all of them.  I assumed the job stuff would sort itself out eventually.

***

To be honest, I never really thought I would go to law school.  As a college senior, stocking shelves at a Barnes & Noble in Central Minnesota, I remember flipping through a book of practice LSAT exams before filing it with the others.  The questions didn’t look all that difficult.  I was already wrestling with my future.  I had been accepted to the MFA Creative Writing program at San Jose State University.  I knew I wanted to move to California, but I wondered about the utility of a second liberal arts degree.  I had been working at the bookstore for two years.  Plenty of people were asking about The South Beach Diet and The Purpose-Driven Life.  Only a handful asked about heroes of mine like Jonathan Lethem or Michael Chabon, and those weren’t obscure cult favorites, they were some of the biggest names in fiction.  I knew the book-buying public wasn’t exactly clamoring for another pop-culture-saturated novel from some middle-class white kid.

So I got mad at the system.  Why did we value the wrong things?  Why were the artists starving while hotshot bankers and lawyers raked in money for nothing?  What right did they have to exploit the system?

That last question stuck with me.  Bankers, I assumed, knew things about business, and finance, things I did not know.  Lawyers, though … they were good with words.  I was good with words.  What right did they have to exploit the system?  Well, they had the same right that I did.  They did it because they could.  I had a suspicion that I could, too.

This would have been late 2003, early 2004.  I didn’t find myself enrolled in law school until fall 2006.  The rationalization took time, but the logic involved was incredibly easy.  I could process information, and I could write.  There are a number of professions where that skill set would prove useful.  In terms of total financial compensation, though … it was obvious that society valued the law over all others.  I didn’t choose to become an attorney.  America chose it for me.

I remember the first time I told anyone I was considering going to law school.  I told Brian, my boss at Barnes & Noble.  Brian was an incredibly down-to-earth guy.  He loved books, but he was no elitist academic snob.  He was also one of the friendliest people I have ever known.  So, when I say “Brian called me a sellout to my face” … I don’t really mean that.  He gave me some kind of spin on the “Come on, you’re better than that” speech.  He knew I had aspirations to literature, and it bummed him out to hear that I was considering abandoning them.  It was the first time I understood that there would be an element of giving up in pursuing a Real Job.

My day job at the time consisted largely of handing out copies of The Da Vinci Code.  And yet still it was possible to sell out.

I went to law school.  Looking back, I don’t think I regret it.  Choosing one path closes off all others.  I get that.  The doubts and second-thoughts I have about my current profession seem entirely manageable compared with the worst-case (or even some of the pretty-good-case) scenarios implicit in becoming a writer.  I make good money.  I have a chance to do cool things.  I don’t worry about the future.  And besides, I was never going to be an Artist anyway.  Those people were different.

***

This section of the essay made a lot more sense before Bill Simmons started Grantland, but let’s try it anyway. My job requires me to sit in front of a computer for hundreds of hours every month.  So did law school.  So does my obsession with music.  And sports.  Really, pretty much everything leads to sitting in front of the computer.  And I love essays.  And I love distractions.  So I’ve found an impossible number of writers to follow.  Some of them (Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, Matt Taibbi, John Jeremiah Sullivan) have book deals and prominent columns in successful magazines.  Others, though … just write.  They do it even though they have other jobs.  (Rany Jazayerli writes about everything from the Royals to Syria, and the guy’s a dermatologist).  They do it even when they lose their jobs.  (My spiritual adviser, Fred Clark at Slacktivist, was recently laid off from his newspaper gig.)  Most just write to write (like the incomparable Molly Lambert, ripping off impossibly profound riffs on pop culture from a website she started with a friend).

And now Simmons has hired Rany, and Molly, and Katie Baker, and Tess Lynch, and countless other incredible writers previously toiling in semi-obscurity, and I would hope that Grantland’s ESPN backing means that all of them are working on some kind of professional and financial security.  When I found them, though, they certainly weren’t the celebrity Artists of my childhood.

***

There are a million reasons why I didn’t write “Let It Be,” and lack of talent is only one of them.  I had none of the resources that Sir Paul had.  If we switched places, who knows what would have happened?

These are the lies you can tell yourself when your heroes are international icons.

When your heroes self-publish a web magazine … well, what’s stopping you?

***

Which brings us back to Jason Parks.  Through the podcast, I’ve learned a few things about the day to day life of Mr. Parks.  I don’t claim to know him, by any stretch, but I think it’s fair to say I know more about him than any of the other people I’ve mentioned in this essay.  And it turns out his life isn’t perfect.  It turns out the man deals with some issues, which seems completely unfair to me.  One of the little joys of my week is having a fresh Up and In podcast loaded on my iPhone.  By the logic of how I was taught to understand art and celebrity, this means Parks (and equally excellent co-host Kevin Goldstein, who, if he started a band, could probably get a several-thousand-word essay written about himself as well) should be rich and famous by now, entertaining adoring women on his yacht.  Somehow, though, he’s just a guy who lives in Brooklyn.

Here’s the part that troubles me.  If you sketched out the essentials of my job (third-year associate at major law firm X, salary is Y, potential for advancement is Z) and the essentials of Parks’ job (freelance scout, freelance blogger, website contributor, unsigned musician), and you asked a number of people who was more successful … I think a decent chunk of them would choose me.  Which is insane.  If I’m more successful, how come I haven’t brought hours of happiness to Jason Parks’ life?  If I’m more successful, how much of that is due to my own selfishness?  Because only one of us has contributed anything to society.

I would absolutely trade jobs with Jason Parks, just like I would have traded jobs with Paul McCartney, or Hunter S. Thompson.  That’s obvious.  It’s equally obvious that McCartney and Thompson never would have taken me up on that offer.  Parks, though …

He’s a smart guy.  He knows where the money is.  He could have made the same decision I did, traded in his liberal arts degree for a high-paying desk job.  Maybe, when times are tough, he thinks about a parallel life with a 401(k) and comprehensive health insurance.  Maybe he doesn’t.  I hope he doesn’t.  It fits this narrative better if he doesn’t.  Maybe Baseball Prospectus has an awesome insurance plan.  I don’t know.  But what does it mean when it is conceivable that one of your heroes might wish he could trade places with you?  What does it mean when society, as a whole, might agree with his decision?

***

In the end, what is the difference between me and Jason Parks?  Why didn’t I write “Steady Til Stuck”?  Why don’t I write bizarro short fiction about Tom Verducci?  One answer, of course, might be “TALENT.”  That’s a totally fair point.  Of all the things Parks does, I doubt I do any of them as well.  That’s not really what I’m getting at here.  I’m talking about his actual creative output:  podcast with a friend, website he runs himself, freelance contributions to other websites, self-produced recordings of his own band.  This isn’t The Beatles.  This isn’t Franzen.  Or Thompson.  What advantages could I claim that Parks has over me?  The only difference between Parks and me is that he chose to do this, he chose to stick with it in the face of obstacles, chose to stick with it even though he probably knows that, even if everything breaks perfectly for him, he will never be rich and famous.  He chose to do this … and I chose not to.

That’s a tough thing to think about.

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]                                                  

2011 was the Year of the Saxophone.  Of the many strange but true things you could say about 2011, that one bizarre sentence should be near the top of the list.  It’s not a question of timing.  I don’t think anyone thought there would ever be a Year of the Saxophone.  Before 2011, the instrument’s claim to fame was probably The Onion AV Club’s seminal 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined By Saxophone list.  Before 2011, the best the saxophone could say was that it didn’t completely ruin songs.

On Tuesday, M83’s sax-drenched “Midnight City” took the top spot on Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks of 2011.

                               

You may remember “Midnight City” from its earlier stint soundtracking a Victoria’s Secret commercial.

                     

Destroyer’s equally sax-indebted “Kaputt” came in at number six on that same Pitchfork list. Without going back though the archives, I’m betting the saxophone hasn’t graced two top ten songs in the entire storied history of Pitchfork.

                           

We mourned the passing of the Big Man, Clarence Clemons, but before he died, Clemons lent his talents to a stadium-rock anthem from … Lady Gaga?

                            

Even Kenny G found his way back into the spotlight … TWICE. Seriously. There was this:

                            

And there was also this:

                             

A video for something called “Mr. Saxobeat” has been viewed more than one hundred million times. And, of course, there was the Sexy Sax Man:

                             

It was the Perfect Storm of Saxophones.  Will we ever see anything like it again? Would we survive?

***

2011 was the Year of the Saxophone, and no one did it better than Patrick Wolf.  It’s just mind-blowing that that’s a real compliment.

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]

(87) The Roots - “Make My” (f/ Big K.R.I.T.)

There’s a kind of catch-22 inherent in every new Roots song.

On the one hand, The Roots have worked for decades to cultivate a signature sound, and it’s paid off.  Questlove’s snare drum hits are one of the most instantly recognizable sounds in all of popular music.  After years of touring together, the band falls in behind Quest perfectly.  Black Thought has more experience handling the mic in front of a live band than any other emcee in the rap game.  The Roots function as a cohesive whole.  You couldn’t just throw a guest verse from Snoop Dogg or Ludacris on a Roots album like you could with just about anybody else.  It wouldn’t fit.  The Roots have to respect their own style.

On the other hand, that carefully cultivated sonic identity means there are familiar qualities the listener can expect in every new Roots song, which is a nice way of saying that sometimes all Roots songs sound the same.  They have to.  Making major changes in songwriting or instrumentation would undercut everything the band has stood for over the years.  You couldn’t just throw a guest verse from Snoop Dogg or Ludacris on a Roots album like you could with just about anybody else.  It wouldn’t fit.  The Roots have to respect their own style.

The sameness is the reason they should probably try something new.  The sameness is the reason they can’t try something new.

“Make My” is a good song, but just about all Roots songs are “good” songs, as in not-great songs, consistently damned with faint praise.  What sets “Make My” apart, what inches it toward greatness, is the way Big K.R.I.T.’s guest verse splits the difference between the new and the familiar.

K.R.I.T. is reined in here, dread and remorse in his voice, far from the pointed boasts of “Country Shit” that made him blog-famous.  He’s talking about Benzes and blunts, but he’s talking about the karmic consequences of that lifestyle.  It’s obvious he has a lot to say, but he’s not trying to match the style and vocabulary of Black Thought (who will rhyme “pedantic” and “semantic” in the next verse).

Thought’s style can become exhausting for the listener.  I’m sure he’d say that if you’re not willing to put in the work necessary to keep up, then it’s your loss, but music doesn’t quite work like that.  As listeners, we need a break sometimes.  I don’t mean some kind of catchphrase chorus or a verse that just rhymes letters and numbers with each other.  I mean something a little less cerebral once in a while.  Something like K.R.I.T.’s verse here.  By the time Black Thought jumps on the mic for the second verse, his style is already fresh again.  I’m looking forward to hearing him.  That’s not always true with the Roots.

Big K.R.I.T. made the list last year, with the remix to “Hometown Hero,” and I said:

Here’s a question that’s either really deep or really stupid, I honestly can’t tell: The best things about this song are (1) the sample (Adele’s “Hometown Glory”); (2) the Friday Night Lights-quoting intro; and (3) Yelawolf’s incredible second verse. I’m assuming Big K.R.I.T. didn’t make the beat. I’m assuming he didn’t write Yelawolf’s verse. However, I’m also assuming he chose the beat, and that he chose to work with Yelawolf. So, even though Big K.R.I.T.’s two verses are absolutely the two weak links in this song, the fact remains that this is a Big K.R.I.T. song on my Top 100 list. Given those facts: Do I think Big K.R.I.T. is a good artist or not?

When it comes to backhanded compliments, it’s hard to top telling an artist that his contributions are the worst parts of his own song.  This year, K.R.I.T. gets to be the best part of someone else’s song.  The guy’s got range.

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]

(64) Foster the People - “Helena Beat”

On January 20, 2011, Ilana, Jamie and I saw Foster the People in concert.  The flyer looked like this:

Depending on who you ask, capacity at the Rickshaw Stop is either “about 400” or exactly 127.  Foster the People opened for a band called Royal Bangs, who I had not heard of at the time and have not heard from since.  As far as I could tell, the members of Foster the People were hovering dangerously close to the line at which it becomes dishonest to call yourselves “professional musicians.”

The three of us were familiar with “Pumped Up Kicks,” the band’s first single, which hit the blogosphere in spring 2010, first sniffing the spotlight on the still-essential “Blogwave Summer” mixtape over at Daily Beatz.  It was catchy and dark at the same time, a pop-rock oddity with just a hint of a dance element.  We assumed Foster the People were disposable LA scene kids, but there was something about that song.

As with virtually every song we’ve ever heard, Ilana and I had made up nonsense lyrics about our dog.

“Pumped Up Kicks” checked in at #69 on my “100 Songs for 2010” list.  At the time, I said:

I’ve done a pretty exhaustive search, and I’m pretty sure this is the only Foster the People song that exists in recorded form. It may be the only song they have. And yet, they play shows. Those shows may be very short. If this one is their only song, though, they’re definitely batting 1.000 so far. It’s almost impossibly light and summery, even though the lyrics appear to be about shooting kids for their shoes. So it goes, I guess.

***

That “pretty exhaustive search” link goes to Hype Machine.  At the time, Hype Machine had one lonely link to “Pumped Up Kicks.”  A few dozen people “liked” it.  Maybe they were into triple digit “likes” by the time 2011 rolled around.  Click on that link now.  There are pages and pages of Foster the People songs, remixes, covers, and mash-ups.  Many have been “liked” tens of thousands of times.  Somewhere along the way, Foster the People became the biggest indie band on the internet.  They’ve dominated the charts at Spotify since the day that service became available in America.  They appeared on Saturday Night Live.  They sold out back to back shows at the Fillmore in minutes.  The next time they come to San Francisco, they’ll be too big for just about any venue in the city.  Ilana heard “Pumped Up Kicks” at a gay club in the Castro.  This blows her mind.  Those are Kylie Minogue Only establishments.

The backlash was just as instantaneous.  The cool kids on the internet now refer to Foster the People as “Maroon 6.”  Friends update their status on Facebook, threatening to kill everyone if they hear one more effing Foster the People song.  If you’re not sick of Foster the People yet, you will be.  Corporate America will make sure of that.

And the point of all this is not that I’m so cool and I knew about this band before anyone else.  That’s not really true, anyway.  The point is that 2011 was the year of Foster the People … and I have no idea why.

I still like “Pumped Up Kicks.”  I still like pretty much every song on Torches.  But if someone came up to me and said, “Your life depends on selling one song to the youth of America” … I sure wouldn’t have chosen “Pumped Up Kicks.”*  I still wouldn’t, even after seeing its success.  It’s too slow.  It’s too weird.  There isn’t much of a sing-along element.

I’m glad they blew up.  I really am.  But I have no idea how it happened.

***

* Obviously, I would choose “Empty Streets” by Ghost Beach.

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]

(78) Azealia Banks - “212”

2011 was a big year for “outsider” hip hop.  The national face of this movement was Tyler, the Creator and his crew, Odd Future.  Locally, it was Kreayshawn.  And everything in the rap game was fresh and exciting, independent and youthful, and the music press fell all over themselves declaring that we were finally living in The Future, that this was how it was going to be from now on.  Super-talented kids would make mind-blowing music on their laptops, release it for free on their Tumblr pages, interact with fans directly through social media, and destroy the bloated record labels once and for all.

It sounded awesome.

It sounded … way better than actually listening to any of the music I just mentioned.

Again, all the usual disclaimers are in place here … I’m white, old, from a small town, etc.  It’s possible I just don’t get hip hop at all.  Maybe there’s real genius in Tyler, the Creator’s music.  Many, many smart people seem to see it.  But every time I read a breathless essay about how we were living in a Golden Age, a Revolution in hip hop, I just felt left out.

Until Azealia Banks.

Barring a late-December miracle single, “212” is going to be the highest-scoring song of the year at The Singles Jukebox, and a lot of the comments over there echo my thoughts the first, fifth, tenth time I heard this song:

This is awesome. I don’t hate music anymore.

New favorite song to blast out of my car. New favorite song that I had no idea I was waiting for. Just wow.

But mostly I agree with Michelle Myers:

Luckily, she spits with the kind of mirthful insolence that I imagine music-crit bros hear in Tyler, the Creator. Except she’s way better at rapping.

To me, the most exciting thing about Azealia Banks is that … this is what I thought I was getting with everyone else.  This is the incredible song I expected to hear the first time I clicked on Tyler, or Kreayshawn, or Nicki Minaj, or any of the other hip hop Paradigm Shifts of the last few years.  Most of the blogosphere is giddy with excitement over this song … and I understand why.  It’s impossibly original, and it’s just so much fun.

The song is a wonder in its own right, but the video sends it over the top.  For as sneering and vulgar as the song is in places, the video is equal parts adorably playful.  Somehow those two seemingly contradictory poses work perfectly together.

I already feel bad about ranking this song way too low.

[And I do agree with Jonathan Bogart when he says:

She deserves better than to be championed by critics as a moral rebuke to Odd Future or Kreayshawn, especially when those rebukes carry overtones of East Coast snobbery and white people deciding who’s properly black. She also deserves better than to be championed by critics as an aesthetic rebuke to Nicki Minaj or M.I.A., especially when those rebukes carry overtones of anti-chart rockism and dudes deciding who’s properly feminist.

Even though I just spent 500 words explaining why I like her better than all of those artists.  I really don’t want it to go any deeper than music.  I don’t want this song to Represent anything, or Signify anything, or Champion anything.  I just like this song better than all of the songs by all of the artists he listed.]

[In the past, I’ve written short blurbs for each of the year’s 100 Songs.  Some of these “short blurbs” were actually thousands of words long, but you get the idea.  This year, sadly, I didn’t have time to do that.  But I still have a lot to say about almost all of these songs.  So I’m just going to start writing.  This is one of a still-undetermined number of essays.  Maybe I’ll find something to say about all 100 Songs.  Maybe there will just be a handful of these.  I’ll try to write one every day, but I make no promises.  Also, they will be in no real order.  In case it gets buried, the original 100 Songs for 2011 post, with links, can be found here.]

(94) Fleet Foxes - “Helplessness Blues”

It was quite a year for Fleet Foxes.  ”Helplessness Blues” was Paste Magazine’s Song of the Year.  Helplessness Blues, the album, wound up at #4 on Rolling Stone’s list.  I would bet the band garnered more accolades in 2011 than we have room to list here.

More than that, though, 2011 was the year in which Fleet Foxes transcended being a mere band and became almost entirely an abstract concept.

If you want to make a larger point about society, positive or negative, Fleet Foxes are the rhetorical device for you.

***

In February, Tom Ewing wrote another brilliant Poptimist essay for Pitchfork entitled “I’m So Fucking Special.”  Ewing dissects “the particular vibe of current self-empowerment pop,” perhaps best exemplified by Katy Perry’s “Firework.”  The counterpoint, for Ewing, is Fleet Foxes:

On the new Fleet Foxes single, “Helplessness Blues”, Robin Pecknold applies his typically gentle harmonies to creating the anti-“Firework”. He sings about how he was raised to think he was a unique snowflake, and it’s not satisfying— he’d rather be a cog in a productive machine, which turns out to involve working in an orchard. This is a common criticism of self-actualization— if you tell everyone they are special, they end up disappointed and dissatisfied when they find out they’re not.

Where can we turn in our fight against narcissism?  We can turn to Fleet Foxes.

***

In March, Rob Sheffield wrote an essay for Rolling Stone entitled “Why Rebecca Black is a Demon-Wizard Child Piper,” in which Sheffield attempts to decode “Friday” as, among other things, “a message from the future.”  The first paragraph of that essay:

1. It’s only been a week since Rebecca Black became a YouTube sensation with “Friday,” but the song remains full of mysteries. Who is Rebecca Black? How did this song happen? Is it a joke? Why does she find it so hard to decide whether to kick in the front seat or sit in the back seat? Why is she afraid we’ll get the days of the week in the wrong order? Could music possibly get any dippier? None of these questions have answers yet. (Except the last one: Fleet Foxes.) But maybe we’re not asking the right questions yet. Clearly, this song demands a deeper investigation.

Do you think pre-fab teen pop is weird and robotic?  Too bad!  You either embrace it or you’re left with nothing but hippies singing about orchards.

***

Somewhere along the line, Fleet Foxes became the pastoral counterpoint to everything.  It’s a strange turn of events for a band who’s actual music is so un-revolutionary.  For the parts of our culture you love, for the parts of our culture you hate, one thing is certain … it’s either this or Fleet Foxes.