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Matt Cole
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Floored.
It’s like they picked up where Fugazi left off with “The Argument,” or Sleater-Kinney with “The Woods.” I just assumed a rock record was never going to hit that nerve again…
Now you can thumb it up literally.
I can assure you that Mike Will Made It is not the next Timbaland. If he’s lucky he’ll be the next… I dunno, Polow da Don.
Return of JT: B+
Return of Timbaland: A++++
Timbo totally steals the show. The codas and breakdowns are killer. His best production since peak Missy. Justin has made real progress as a crooner, but he’s still no Maxwell. Plus, Missy always brought the funnies; the “silly” songs here (“Strawberry Bubblegum,” “Spaceship Coupe”) sound like rejected Digital Shorts (“there’s only room for two” *cheesy back-up vox: “me and you…”), and that has as much to do with the melodies as the lyrics.
As a gay rap fan, I would be more upset about AB’s slur if she had directed it toward anyone I hate even slightly less than Perez Hilton. As is, I don’t really have a problem.
No, it’s because most pop performers either don’t write their songs or co-write them with a collaborator… or a committee. For example, a lot of pop divas who “co-write” just contribute some vocal melodies and lyrics to songs that , in terms of their basic composition, were already finished when the demo went out. In this year’s SOTY, Miguel, Ed Sheeran, and fun. actually wrote the songs they are nominated for, but if Kelly Clarkson or Carly Rae Jepsen takes it, they would share the award with like 4 other people.
Nope – didn’t get covered at Pitchfork, so nobody here has heard it. It’s hilarious to see 80 comments of people railing against “irrelevant”/”closed-minded” MOJO because they think “albums that got the most hype on the internet” = “best albums.”
Not bad, I can definitely see the logic behind the list. I’ve been a fan of the Roots for a long time: as a guy who mostly liked rock music and has always had a serious, politically-minded bent, they were the perfect entry point into rap for me around the time I was starting college. I have to say that for me, their “middle period” (let’s say 2002-2008) is by far their best. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they did their best work during the Bush administration. I think the dark political times that our country was experiencing, and particularly the helplessness that black Americans felt during the Katrina ordeal, motivated the Roots to make their most urgent and intelligent music – really, some of the finest political rap ever recorded.
My list:
1. Phrenology
2. Game Theory
3. Things Fall Apart
4. Rising Down
5. How I Got Over
6. Illadelph Halflife
7. Undun
8. The Tipping Point
9. Do Yoy Want More?!
10. Organix
It was one of the year’s consensus picks, undoubtedly, but an album that a lot of people – and this includes people who immediately liked some of the record and eventually liked most/all of it – found pretty difficult going. Swing Lo Magellan is still a crazy motherfucking album, but I rarely feels like its songs are challenging by design.
You cease to be a legitimate voice for *anything* when you use the word “lamestream.”
I dunno. For YHF you’d have to take “War on War,” which I love and still sing along too in my car on sunny days, but I can’t call that a snub in the same way that I could if “Jesus Etc.” were a single and were therefore eligible for a snubbing.
It took me fully ten seconds to even remember what “Bang” sounds like.
I don’t know who is down-voting you but I mostly just feel bad for them because they can’t appreciate how good Aaliyah was.
I don’t think “Hey Ya” was even the best Outkast song on “The Love Below” … let alone of the album /their 00′s career / that decade. “B.O.B.”, “Ms. Jackson,” “Roses” are all better choices, even if we had to stick with singles.
As someone who has performed “Hey Ya” at more than one karaoke night I can’t deny that its a great tune, but as someone who has loved Outkast for a long time its sort of sad that its the song they’ll be remembered for, since its not at all indicative of how genius they were. What Dre, Tupac did for West Coast rap during the 90s, what Biggie and Wu-Tang did for the East … thats what Outkast did for the South.
/superfan
I love both of those songs, but I honestly think “Reckoner” is an overlooked contender for best Radiohead song. I know that a lot of Radiohead fans think “In Rainbows” was a step down from the genius of their more experimental work, but for me, its just mid-blowing what Radiohead can do when they play with pop idioms, and that’s why I am deranged enough to say “In Rainbows” is better than “Kid A.”
Also: Thom Yorke has been in denial about his own marketability since the mid-90s, but his voice is PRETTY whether he likes it or not, and “Reckoner” is surely the closest he’ll ever come to singing R&B.
Some girls in the audience are singing WAY off key at the beginning of the clip.
Not a bad round-up at all. I have to say for myself that (of the ones I’ve heard, obviously) 2012 has had a nearly endless supply of records I like and yet very few that I’m convinced I’ll come back to once the year’s out. Beach House, Chromatics, Chairlift, and Grimes are the exceptions. I am looking forward to Walkmen and Japandroids but based on the early singles I’m not expecting to be floored by either one.
It sounds like you’re just against people making bad decisions. There are lots of generally good things that a person can do – like donating an organ or adopting a child – that can have negative consequences if done in a “dumb” and “rash” matter. Saying gender reassignment surgery as a whole is questionable because some people choose it unwisely is like saying that pizza is questionable because some people cook it poorly.
PS: “’It’s incredibly invasive, and I can’t imagine it’s good for you health-wise.”?
1) Surgery is invasive. Are you also against boob jobs, organ transplants, and brain surgery?
2) You shouldn’t have to *imagine* if gender reassignment is healthy. You should either know, because this is something you know about, or you should keep your mouth shut.
Yeah, what pair of ears was Tom listening with when he decided “Somebody That I Used t Know” sounds like trip-hop? Er, ” something you might dig up on an early-’00s retro cocktail-lounge trip-hop compilation.” If you want to bag on Gotye for not having the most original sound in pop, why not point out, like every other music writer on the planet, that its all from the Peter Gabriel / Sting / 80s art-rock playbook?
Also, didn’t Tom just give a fairly generous review of Santigold’s album, which mines exactly those influences but with a heavier dose of shit Rihanna and Beyonce have been doing for years? For the record, I like Gotye and Santigold, but its kind of stupid to ::eyeroll:: at one and gush about the other.
“I withheld my attention from a popular thing for a long time because I sensed that I would not be able to enjoy it no matter how many of my far-less-intelligent friends told me I might. Then, when I did give it a try, I did not find it especially pleasurable.” WHAT A SURPRISE. I love having my tastes ‘deconstructed’ by a writer who evinces zero ability to engage critically with her own.
For example: saying that Kristen Wiig in particular and physical comedy in general are “super not-that-smart” shows how little comedic sensibility you have. What, you like audited a film course once and now you think that all comedy has to be Woody Allen?
In conclusion, I would love if just once one of these columns could be about the same thing for more than a single paragraph at a time. This isn’t your tumblr.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every one of these columns has worked by construing the consensus opinion on an artist/event as uncharitably as possible so that the author can “tsk, tsk” the entire internet and set herself up for a couple of hasty paragraphs where she drops some insights that are not totally off-base but have also definitely been said elsewhere and not infrequently. I guess every author has to think they’re adding something new to the conversation, but I have to think she could do that better by engaging the perspectives of other good writers rather than exaggerating the influence of the bad ones so she can save the day.
I guess that only makes sense if you know that the venue was a theater and people were generally seated during the songs.
I took my boyfriend, who likes very little rock music and whose two favorite singers of all time are Aaliyah and Mariah, to see the Dp when they played an on-campus show two years ago. We had just started dating and for most of the show he was pretty “WTF is this” but he was the first one on his feet after Amber finished singing “Stillness.”
“Stillness is the Move” kind of ruined this band for me in that I used to like all of their music and now I’m just looking at the tracklist and trying to guess which songs will be Amber’s diva numbers.
Yah, but if you keep clicking through on the widget you can eventually get out of the embedded player and just stream from the band’s website: http://silenceyourself.savagesband.com/ – seems to not have the problem with the even tracks.