Favorite Music of 2020

These list preambles get harder to write each year, and as the world gets increasingly complicated, I find myself struggling more and more to say anything about it. What on earth am I even supposed to say about 2020 that hasn't been said ad nauseum? At any rate, a silver lining is that we had great music to listen to while the pandemic raged (continues to rage).

I still don't listen to enough metal or hip-hop, and instead, I listened to a larger proportion of jazz and electronic music than in probably any year prior. Plus, I still have probably a hundred albums I want to listen to more but haven't done so enough to justify putting them on this list. Let me know what your favorite music was this year, too, because that's always fun!

Anyway, here's the list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
This seems like a pretty consensus pick, to be honest, at least among music critics, so I'm not going to pretend like I have anything new to say about Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Such chaotic yet elegant music. It's the album I've returned to most this year, and it still gives me chills at times.

[Read original review]

2. NEPTUNIAN MAXIMALISM: Éons
Not much has changed since I wrote my review. Still definitely my thing: a 2-hour noise-jazz epic. Wonderful.

[Read original review]

3. Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song
Boss beats and terrific tunes. The best fusion of electronic music and pop music I've heard in a while.

[Read original review]

4. Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI
This is a late-year find for me: a single, 45-minute track that builds from a choral chant into an extended improvisation and then back into the chant. It's utterly transfixing and beautiful, indebted to minimalism and jazz but also unclassifiable in its own right. Building from Peggy Seeger's song "Reclaim the Night," the chant itself offers a meditation on gendered violence, and the music connects this idea to something much more cosmic as it dissociates from melody into soaring dissonance. I've not listened to much of the other entries in Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain project (as the title indicates, this is the sixth one), but they all apparently follow variations on this format. I guess I should listen to more, because this is great.

5. Taylor Swift: folklore
I still need to listen to evermore more, but I've listened to this one a lot. It's very good (of course)—Taylor's most songwriterly album since Red and proof, if we needed it, that she hasn't lost those chops since her pivot into full-on radio pop. A lot of albums this year have been billed as "quarantine records," but this is the only one I've heard that makes me feel happy.

[Read original review]

6. Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: Shaman!
Throwback spiritual jazz-fusion. Moving and personal and enormous-sounding. A lot of the albums on this list are improvisatory and elaborate, but I haven't heard one all year that does a better job of connecting those instrumental flourishes with small personal resonances.

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7. Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Bob Dylan's been playing the part of old man for longer than he's actually been an old man (he wasn't even 60 when he released the record that inaugurated his "I've seen things, and now I'm on death's door" phase, 1997's Time Out of Mind). But Rough and Rowdy Ways finds him as an actual old man (he's nearly 80), and he's eulogizing like never before: eulogizing himself, his career, and even the 20th century itself.

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8. Lyra Pramuk: Fountain
The liner notes call this "future folk music," which seems about right. For most folk music, the human voice is a foundational instrument, and Fountain is a record consisting entirely of samples of Pramuk's voice. A lot of people consider electronic music to be cold and robotic, but this very concept collapses the distinction between electronic and organic music, if there ever was one. It's hypnotic, warm, peaceful, and beautiful.

9. Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
This one's grown on me a lot since I first reviewed it, and it contains some of Grimes's best songs to date, especially "Delete Forever."

[Read original review]

10. Frédéric D. Oberland & Irena Z. Tomažin: ARBA, DÂK ARBA
This random Bandcamp find hasn't lost an ounce of its power for me. Modern classical drone, that's where it's at.

[Read original review]

Great 2020 Songs Not On These Albums:

Ariana Grande: "positions"—I didn't have a chance to listen to Ariana's new album much, but I do love this song, a slinky, slick piece of pop R&B, smoother than I'm used to hearing from Grande but all the better for it.

Bruce Springsteen: "If I Was the Priest"—Bruce Springsteen got the E Street Band back together and recorded some songs the old-fashioned way, live in the studio, for his new album, Letter to You. To inaugurate the event, the band recorded some songs that Springsteen wrote in the '70s but never put to tape, and those songs are definitely the highlight of the album. "If I Was the Priest" is the best of that bunch, hailing from the Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. days; like most of that album, it's a fire-hose of words and metaphors and melodies, intoxicated on the possibilities of rock music and trying to cram all of those possibilities into one song. I've liked a good deal of Springsteen's output in the 21st century, but boy is it nice to hear him in his classic mode like this.

Cardi B: "WAP" (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)—I mean, what else is there to say? Slaps. Most clever rauch-rap lyrics since CupcakKe retired (ed. to say: she's apparently un-retired now?). Share your favorite lines in the comments. Mine is the one about the "dangly thing in the back of my throat."

Cracka Khan: "Cardi B - WAP (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) But It's Dire, Dire Docks"—Exactly what it says. Best "WAP" remix in a year full of them.

Fleet Foxes: "Sunblind"—Fleet Foxes at their most lovely and effervescent.

Frances Quinlan: "Your Reply"—Really catchy mid-2000s-throwback indie rock song by Hop Along's Frances Quinlan. I've kind of fell out of love with a lot of mid-2000s indie rock, but this makes me feel like I haven't.

HAIM: "The Steps"—Major Shania Twain vibes on this song. Between this and their work on Taylor Swift's evermore, I think I'm ready for HAIM to go '90s pop country.

Illuminati Hotties: "Lucky"—A cover of (easily!) Britney Spears's best song by the plucky, self-proclaimed "tenderpunk pioneer" Illuminati Hotties. I like Illuminati Hotties just okay, but I wish I loved them, because this is great.

Jeff Rosenstock: "Scram!"—"I've been told for most my life / 'Try to see the other side' / By people who have never tried to / See the other side," this song goes, a perfect lyric for the year of the disingenuous centrism of Joe Biden's Democratic party. Rosenstock's shout-along punk has never been more cathartic.

Lianne La Havas: "Weird Fishes"—2020 was apparently the year for Radiohead covers (I can't count how many of those "artist in the bedroom" livestreams included Radiohead songs), and between this and the song on Kelly Lee Owens's Inner Song, 2020 was apparently the year for covering this specific Radiohead song. La Havas's version is a slow-burn soul take on the record, which is the perfect mode for In Rainbows covers, I think.

Megan Thee Stallion: "Shots Fired"—I don't know what actually went down between Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez, but I know whose music makes a better case for their version of the story. Lanez never had a chance. The best diss track all year, which is saying something in a year that also included Noname's J.-Cole-withering "Song 33."

Neil Cicierega: "Fredhammer"/"Limp Wicket"—Mouth Dreams was a little disappointing for me, but this mini-suite in the middle of the album was among my favorite minutes on any album this year. Cicierega mixes Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" with Limp Bizkit's "Nookie" and (eventually) a Star Wars Ewok rap, and it improves on all of them.

Sufjan Stevens: "The Ascension"—Hands-down the best song on the new Sufjan album, as pained and beautiful an exploration of faith as he's ever written. Sufjan is another of my favorite artists who underwhelmed at the album length in 2020, but this song can stand up to anything he's ever done.

U.S. Girls: "4 American Dollars"—Extremely catchy economic-downturn disco.

Yves Tumor: "Kerosene!"—Yves Tumor has grander ambitions than to just be a rock star, but this song is truly a rock star turn: a wailing, bleak anthem of twisted love, anchored by a wicked guitar solo. 2020's "Gimme Shelter."

Mini Reviews for June 22-28, 2020

Blah blah.

Movies

(T)ERROR (2015)
As definitive a document of the simultaneously Kafkaesque and Orwellian horror of the post-9/11 surveillance state as CITIZENFOUR (though to be fair, there's not a lot in this documentary that couldn't also be found in the COINTELPRO days). I'm a little surprised that this didn't have the huge media splash of CITIZENFOUR, given the scale of the horror and the depth of the access the filmmakers get, except that I guess the international heist-ish scope of Snowden's story is just a lot more mass-audience ready than a sad, scary gaze into the mundane and even pathetic interplay between FBI informant and FBI target. Still, the access here is stunning: we see an active FBI case unfold from both the side of the informant (an ex-Black Panther) and the side of the target (basically a random Muslim dude in Pittsburgh with some academic interest in militias). This is probably the most intimate look I've ever seen at the U.S. intelligence state's ground-level methods, and it is, frankly, terrifying. There is a very real sense that American counterterrorism is based on nothing more than a never-ending cycle of manipulating vulnerable people into entrapping other vulnerable people, who then have few choices besides joining this cycle—the informant, for example, was initially approached to become an informant to avoid jail time for his involvement with a radical group, and despite the fact that being an informant has in a very real way destroyed his life, he continues to do so because the FBI pays him, and he needs the money. Pair all this with news like this from just down the road from where I live, and it's really hard not to get paranoid. Grade: A-

Redline (レドライン) (2009)
It's basically an R-rated, animated Speed Racer (2008), and like that movie, the style of this thing is completely wild. These stretchy hand-drawn characters (the whole movie is apparently hand-drawn, though I'd bet money that computers did the inking) whip through their sci-fi world with an abandon so reckless that it nearly breaks the cinematic form. The two racing sequences that bookend this movie are jaw-dropping sensory onslaughts, and I was having a great time as long as we were on the racetrack. Unfortunately, any time there isn't a race going on, this movie is kind of awful. The fifty-ish minutes between the two races are completely dull, fleshing out a narrative that is basically nonexistent during the races into some uninteresting archetypal beats and populating the movie with a convoluted but somehow still flat array of characters and noir-ish plots. This movie's relationship with its female characters is pretty bad, too, and there's like an entire scene where the love interest appears topless for no reason. So there's that, too. But those race sequences... golly, those races. Grade: B

The Ring (2002)
Solidly entertaining, though a little goofier at times than it probably needed to be. I prefer the Japanese one for reasons I can't exactly articulate at the moment except that it strikes me as a cleaner execution than this one. That said, I love how, for all its reputation as a horror movie, the story both versions tell is much more just a Gothic mystery, and kudos to Gore Verbinski's direction for being extremely keyed into that wavelength. Grade: B

Taken for a Ride (1996)
I'm of two minds with this one. On the one hand, the ascendancy of the automobile and highway systems is one of the most vile, destructive things to happen to the American city organism over the past century, and the second half of this movie gives an effective overview of those effects, from the cutting of public transit budgets to the destruction of neighborhoods for highway development. On the other hand, this movie is somewhat misleading in presenting the dismantling of the Los Angeles streetcar system as representative of how the country's mass transit got so terrible, and its nostalgia for the old streetcar systems completely ignores how those were usually private enterprises prone to their own abuses and often run by the very same people who built city suburbs—a ton of trolley lines were simply amenities built by developers, and since these developers were interested in real estate, not transit, they had a real incentive to encourage people to take automobiles instead of the streetcars once it became clear that that was the direction the larger corporate lobbies were leaning. On yet another hand, despite some really solid archival footage, this movie is an extremely 101 take on the history of public transit/car transit in America, and I was really hoping for something a little more detailed—maybe if the movie had just focused on either the Los Angeles streetcar system or the effects of highways on cities, instead of smashing those two topics together into two ungainly halves of a pretty short movie. So for anyone who's counting, that's two minds and three hands I have about this movie, which I think means that I think about urbanism too much and about metaphors too little. But anyway, I hate cars and motor companies, and this movie is great agitprop against those entities, so I'm trending more positively on this one than I should. Grade: B-

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
I don't think I've ever seen a cops-and-outlaws movie be so sad about the cops winning. Sad not just that Pat Garrett gets Billy the Kid, but that the cops win on a societal level: that the cops side with land-owners who abuse immigrants and native people; that the "taming" of the American West means the concentration of power that forms a true underclass as sure as it forms a ruling class. This all requires some dubious American mythology to work as existing within a real historical moment, but taken as a kind of parable, it's a pretty effective little tale about a man whose choice to become law enforcement has caused his soul to rot. A really elegiac bummer with (duh) some contemporary resonance both in '73 (I imagine this is how it felt for Peckinpah to watch the cops win the 1960s) as well as in good ol' 2020 A.D. That said, you've got the typical marginalized/objectified roles for women in a Peckinpah flick, which I'm never a fan of—there's only so many times you can show abused women as shorthand for "gee, masculine scripts sure are violent" before it comes off as a cheap crutch. And even though he's the whole reason that I watched this movie to begin with, I gotta admit that Bob Dylan is pretty distracting here. There isn't a single moment when he's onscreen when I wasn't thinking, "Wow, it's really Bob Dylan," and the fact that his character is super cagey about his real name ("Alias") doesn't help. Someone really needs to isolate the audio of him reading the general store inventory and set it to a sick beat, though. Grade: B+

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie) (1972)
A relentless, dryly hilarious satire in which Buñuel justly heaps burning scorn on the titular social class for an hour and forty minutes. SPOILERS—There isn't much charm to the bourgeoisie at all. The central conceit that these clueless rich folks are forever in search of a dinner party but never actually eating is great, but my favorite part is how these people somehow still keep getting invited to dinner parties at all—and who invites them is telling (and damning). Major props to the part where the army sergeant declares war on radicals and then, with his next breath, cordially invites the bourgeoisie to dinner the following week, which feels like Buñuel inventing and then completely torching that Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad—this one moment is probably the most withering takedown of the whole "we could solve systemic social problems if we could just sit down and get to know each other" ethos that I've ever seen. Grade: A-

Hellzapoppin' (1941)
I honestly did not know they made movies like this in the 1940s. The closest contemporaries operating anywhere near this wheelhouse are the Marx Brothers with their vaudevillian anarchy and animators like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, whose irreverent chaos and rubbery physics somewhat approximate what happens here. But more than anything, this movie feels like a forerunner to the absurd, sarcastic meta-humor of much later film comedy like Mel Brooks, Zucker-Abrams-Zucker and early Robert Zemeckis, though even at their giddiest (Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand/1941), those movies are still too beholden to plot to really be quite in the same wheelhouse as Hellzapoppin', whose already tenuous rom-com/musical revue structure is gleefully torn to pieces by its actors, who seem to actively resent the plot they are in. Gremlins 2 is probably the closest I've seen a mainstream studio feature come to this level of delighted self-destruction. It has to be seen to be believed, and maybe even then, you won't believe it. Grade: A

Books

Maus by Art Spiegelman (1980-1991)
The visceral impact of this graphic novel's innovations is mostly lost on me, reading it now almost twenty years after its final volume's publication and having already read a lot of comics that take its approach (most notably Persepolis). That said, this is extremely well-done, and I don't have any substantial critiques other than the anachronistic one that it feels overly familiar because of its influence. The one part that legitimately surprised me, though, was the frame narrative, where Spiegelman captures with admirable frankness the frustrating, often sad process of trying to interview his father to get the Holocaust survival narrative that makes of the bulk of this novel; his father (who died while Spiegelman was finishing the series—another surprising wrinkle) is obstinate and antagonistic and even bigoted himself, all of these characteristics having complicated roots in his survival and the ripple effects it had on his psyche and his family. I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for Spiegelman to wrestle with this, especially in the context of a Holocaust story, and the book, messy and complex, never really tries to reconcile all the threads of his father into a neat thesis; it's all the better for it. Grade: B+

Music

Frédéric D. Oberland & Irena Z. Tomažin - ARBA, DÂK ARBA (2020)
I bought this album entirely on the virtue of its cover art, and I wasn't disappointed. An intoxicating slurry of ambient drone and modern classical—when the vocal chants start up in the back half of the record, I get chills. This probably won't be for everybody, but if you're at all into the genres I named earlier, this is definitely worth a listen. Grade: A-