The underlying theme of 2008 was we must do it ourselves - in politics, in art, in literature the people that mattered in 2008 all exhibited greatness in the most personal ways, which is a relief as we see the dying embers of the Bush administration fizzle out. It was like the Reagan Eighties without the prosperity, our stabs at integrity for so long have been made with knives dulled and tarnished by The Team, or as Lou Reed so sadly and pathetically put it in "Coney Island Baby" - we just wanted to play football for the coach. And there were plenty of team players still in the music of 2008: MGMT captured the imaginations of those who have no imagination left, and publicists pitched every bad haircut and a key-taur with unprecedented ardor. I saw a voicemail from one pop up on my phone on Christmas morning.
The plan started to crumble in 2008, so much so in music that when we talk about albums and records and critics and bands, we have to carefully define our terms, like we are writing a Philosophy 101 paper. This is a beautiful thing, perhaps not so much for the folks that extract their financial well-being from them, but maybe this mess we are in came from too many people extracting their financial wells-being, and each pulling meat and crumbs from the sandwich until there is nothing left but an empty plate. It is good to live in philosophical times, it blows clear the smoke and shatters the mirrors, and calls us to create the future out of our dreams than from our patterns. It gave us a president that at least doesn't seem to be a categorical embarrassment from the outset. It gave us a realization that our economic game was much faultier than we thought. It gave us a kick in the ass that we really do need to do something about this climate business. It supplanted hoping that everything doesn't fall apart with straight-up hope. And the music of 2008 reflected the times. In no precise order...
Lil Wayne
Tha Carter III
After the Sousa march of the above paragraph, I realize the
absurdity of starting out this list with a record this admittedly laughable. But
I contend that Lil Wayne is not unlike the pirates praised in master architect
Buckminster Fuller's utopia practicum Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in that Lil
Wayne can apparently do everything. He is the self-claiming "world's greatest
rapper" and at a quick glance at the numbers, our most effective pop star. He
out clowns Flavor Flav, has 100 ways for describing blowjobs, and yet, up there
behind the bong hits and ill-advised tattoos, he raged and cried and growled a
formless genius that no one could predict. He also made the one album I came
across this year that I couldn't stop listening to - I'd put something else on
as if to just have an intelligent adult conversation after dealing with this
child-man, but I'd quickly come right back to it.
Bon Iver
For Emma, Forever Ago
Unlike Weezy, Bon Iver's origin could not be more predictable
- a breakup album recorded on a laptop in a shack by a guy with a pronounced
beard, yet the results are undeniably powerful.
It says something that despite knowing the back-story and having
listened to this album countless times, so many that we can pinpoint the blips
in his sub-sub-R&B mélange and will brace myself when his cracked voice
emerged from the choir, and yet, I haven't the foggiest clue of his actual
name. The Bon Iver guy embodied this most personal album so perfectly that the
details are unimportant. Part of me hopes that the breakup shtick is all a
giant Duchampian lie, and that Bon Iver scored the greatest marketing coup of
the year. The beauty of this record cuts through the dull arguments about the
veracity of memoirs, reminding us that in the telling of the story is where the
real truth lies.
Shearwater
Rook
No band told their peculiar story with greater acuity than
did Shearwater. The combination of that
condor voice, delicate percussion, tough meaty guitar hanging close on the bone
of this skeleton bellowing the last cry of love in the wasteland; Rook is a
killer record. If I could sound like
Jonathon Meiburg when I sing in the shower, I would stay in there until I
eroded away and disappeared down the drain. I don't know why I feel silly saying I love this record because it is so beautiful, but it is, and I do.
Drive-By Truckers
Brighter than Creation's Dark
DBT is my favorite band, period. I say that partially
because they continue to make great music, greater music even, as they progress
and evolve, but also because they lay just under the radar of greater
consciousness. I feel evangelical about the Truckers; when I encounter someone
who weirdly betrays ambivalence about them, I want to pull them aside and share
the good news with them. It feels good
to have a favorite band at this age, and that feeling is helped by the fact
that they continue to write smart songs. Mike Cooley moved to the forefront on
Brighter, twisting and compressing the English language into redneck koans of
hilarious love and loss. Patterson Hood did his part forming the panting soul of
the band, and bassist Shonna Tucker managed to shake out two of the finest country
songs of the year.
The Hold Steady
Stay Positive
There was talk that the convulsive Hold Steady had blown its
wad with Boys and Girls in America, and well, with all that shaking, some
release is going to happen. But like the South and the boners of teenage boys,
the Hold Steady rises again on Stay Positive: denser, more mature, a little preachy, yet
still fleet footed in their Converse All-Stars. The Hold Steady confront
religion, sex, youth, triumph and failure just as the giants Springsteen and
Dylan do, but unlike their rawk moralist forefathers, you actually want to
listen to it when The Hold Steady sings it. If there is a song of the year, it
is "Lord, I'm Discouraged" - a stadium-cum-cathedral ballad that bears witness
to the transmigration of frustration into hope.
The Mountain Goats
Heretic Pride
If there is a major theme to the epic narrative of the Mountain
Goats, it is bearing witness to the struggle of being alive. The lovers and mad poets and wretched
teenagers that populate Heretic Pride
all spin and convulse like the autoclave in the central track, making the
unclean glisten with a deeper purity than can be attained with any amount of
scrubbing. Like the Hold Steady, the
Mountain Goats hold onto the essence of youth but they rein it in just enough,
focusing it into something more universal.
Stalwarts might claim John Darnielle lost the thread when he utilized
more than a jambox and a battered acoustic for his art, I say those types fail
to understand the nature of heresy - you must continually work toward what you
must become regardless of what you or anyone else left in the past want you to
be.
Nas
Untitled
From a Nietzschean perspective, hip-hop has largely reached
the end of its ubermench run, becoming a tireless parade of dull thugs playing
the part of dull thugs over dull thug music. Nas revels in hip-hop's history to
craft this brilliant record. It was originally
supposed to be called Nigger, but the labels balked. On the resulting untitled
record, Nas carries no illusions that the original title is that bestowed upon
him by society at large no matter what he does, and the revelry that ensues is
not endless yap about the game and how it's played, but about the struggle, how
the chain works. In the chorus of "Make
the World Go Round" we hear now let's toast to the hustlers/ tell the
hustlers toast to the gangsters/ tell the gangstas toast to the ballers/tell
the ballers pour a glass for all of us. It's easy to read this as the usual Mafioso rapper
pecking order breakdown, but it's also just as easy to read this as an
indictment of CEOs bleeding consumers dry and then begging for a handout, for
investment schemes built on trust and faith suddenly being revealed as
extortion of the most heinous kind. It is a plea that the chain be used to pull
us all along before we are all eventually bound by it.
Nico Muhly
Mothertongue
If there is a thread binding most of the above records, it is
a density of language, but even the thorniest couplets Mike Cooley and Nas have
to offer can compete with the density of Nico Muhly's Mothertongue. Muhly finds those things one loves about Radiohead,
Sigur Ros, hell even Coldplay, and distills them into a clear liquid in which
he suspends the chatter of the Internet, the buzz of a million ringtones, the
babel of opinion so that it forms a darting plankton cloud of information,
indecipherable yet holistic in meaning.
The strings and horns and twinkling pianos and synth blaaaats form the
ever-rising foundation for this hornet's nest rising high above a plain where
nothing much is being said. Muhly
operates in a Rauschenbergian gap between the institutional world of modern composition and
the glossier cloudland of pop. he instead is a jooyous magpie who has worked with Bjork, Will Oldham and Philip
Glass among others. Mothertongue, in its four movements, is alien and homey,
chilled and undeniably warm, sounding like everything at once and through that,
something greater.
The Raconteurs
Consolers of the Lonely
Much of my listening this year was consumed with thick heady
stuff like Muhly and his thornier predecessors, and I could at a moment of
self-composition fill this list with icy artifacts of Appolonia but after that
is done, I want what everyone wants: a beer and a convivial relationship to the
gods of Saturday night, and the Raconteurs deliver that very thing on their
second disc. Consolers of the Lonely pushed the Raconteurs into something more
than that other Jack White band. I heard
both the new Guns 'N' Roses and the new AC/DC, records I'd hoped would be
bottled messages from mighty ships long sunk by their own icebergs, but neither
group have the rock star chops now that the Raconteurs possess. It is friends
drunk in the backseat of your brother's Camaro. It is the spark from a bar
stool scooted back on the tiles right before a fight. It is the regional high
school football champs partying in a graveyard with the eyeliner misfits under
a pregnant moon. It is a great rock 'n' roll record.
Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
The album opens with "Amerykahn Promise" sample of more
action, more excitement, more everything from some 70's movie trailer before
launching into a glorious Funkadelic vamp about a train. It's easy to see the
freedom train pulling into the station with the election of Barack Obama, the
white house being painted black as jokingly urged by George Clinton in 19993.
But Erykah Badu has always been a difficult artist, lifting up blues, R&B, and
hip-hop, even the neo-soul she supposedly invented in her arms and uses it as a
weapon. On New Amerykah, Badu openly feels love for herself and the world
(even herself in the world) but is quick to hold the world responsible for the
promises it has made. The album cycles
through the silkiest and most inventive soul music to crop up this year,
twisted sonic essays on race, and comes full circle with "Honey" a reiteration of
the album as a whole. It is a rare
political soul record that keeps both flames lit throughout.
is an odyssey from the backwoods bars and small-town dives to the swampside dance halls and converted clapboard barns of a Louisiana Saturday Night. Don't leave Heathrow without it. His first book 
