This is my 500th post, and it was about to feel monumental to me, so I am going to use it to write more about 2009's music, since on such a momentous occasion, Alex will go easy on me, if at all. I know! I thought about doing a thingo where I say, "oh, leave a comment and I will randomize you to win a package of photo postcards," etc, but if you read this old thing & you want me to know that you read it, you probably already know where to email me & ask for a package and I probably already have yr mailing address, so good work! Congratulations!
Anyhow, music of 2009: I just feel like I have more to say about it, which is not like me to leave a bunch of stuff unwritten.
First of all, there were several songs that I overlooked, that came up on other people’s year-end lists, and I thought, “Oh, god! I forgot about that song! I really liked that!” The thing about 2009 -- I think I wrote about this the other day -- was that it seemed like everything was good, almost nothing was exciting, and pretty much all of it was way above average.
So, there was just this onslaught of really good music, all of it likeable and it was a tough year to say, “I liked that better than the rest! Wow.” Everyone exceeded expectations at the very same level, I thought, even the new bands, who were likable and -- this was another problem -- all sounded like each other. BellX1 sounds like Fanfarlo, sounds like Metric, sounds like Animal Collective, sounds like Miike Snow, sounds like The Killers, sounds like Tegan and Sara, sounds like the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, sounds like Bat for Lashes, sounds like Dirty Projectors, etc.
Maybe this is the definition of the generation gap, where the kids all sound the same. But I did not have this problem in 2008 when Kings of Leon did not sound anything like Fleet Foxes, who sounded nothing like MGMT, who were totally different from Brazilian Girls. I can tell Death Cab from Weezer from the Decemberists! Hell, even all of Jack White’s side projects sound totally different from each other!
There is a fashion right now for heavy chorals and orchestral anthems and … I think it is fine, these musicians are all very talented and earnest, but, for example, I believe I would have been much more taken by Fanfarlo if Fleet Foxes had not beaten them to the studio. It is unlikely, but also we will never know. The good news is that everyone in this style has outshined Coldplay, so phew!
The number one song (of 100) on our semi-local public radio station’s listener-elected, year-end countdown was the Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes song, “Home.” While it is a fine song, it is astonishingly over-the-top in a Rodgers & Hammerstein direction. I like it, it has whistling, Mari and I sing it in its parts to each other when it is on the radio or when we are bored, it is sweet and has a rowdy Pogues-ish messiness, but that it would be number one is just illustrative of how gosh-darn all righty likeable the year in music was.
Also, I was thinking of music in general because at the same time I was quantifying my end-of-year list, I had slung together that 80s mix, which was very, yk, In the Beginning because of my age, and music is just so different now. I was struck by how -- and I had not listened to an awful lot of the music I put on that CD in 15 years -- energetically solution-oriented the music seemed. It was very overt and serious without being grim and also, with a lot of team spirit, the Team of Humanity. It was very human without being too egalitarian, or maybe I have that inverted. Possibly I have it all wrong, but the music was different, like the difference between a Maserati and a MiniCooper.
One of the songs I forgot from my first list was Lily Allen's "The Fear," which when I first heard it months & months ago, reminded me so much of an updated version of Madonna's "Material Girl." It felt very much to me like the same impulses, the same social-developmental quandaries, the same youthful oversight, just imported into this new century and thus entirely different.
I wrote a while back -- this year, in fact, while more toward the bottom of this drift of really shiny, likable music -- that the problem w 21stc rock & roll is no one's high as kites or losing pals to junk or has endured a childhood under the Luftwaffe. Apartheid and the Cold War are over, too. And we need to think about this, going forward, because maybe the world is no longer bleak and we can not define music by the same benchmarks we have previously. Maybe rock & roll as we have always known it -- born of segregation and Liverpudlian exotique and dancing -- is just dead, undone by the loss of regionalism and the concurrent secularization + franchising of the globe.
Also, sound! The way the music sounds! We watched I Love You, Man, a few weeks ago, and the saddest, most right-on part of the movie is when Paul Rudd’s character is trying to explain Rush to his girlfriend (played by Quincy Jones’s daughter, ironically), and he fires it up & tries to get her to grok it from his tinny laptop audio. Rush on a MacBook, seriously? Who ever would have imagined? I swear. So, maybe now that everyone has teeny little earbuds and laptop speakers, maybe this other audiophiliac stuff – which used to be super-important 35 years ago -- no longer matters. I can not say. Not tonight anyhow.
The nine 2009 songs I overlooked while quantifying and sorting and choosing I just threw up onto the 8tracks right here. They are:
"Backwards Down the Number Line," Phish"Periodically Double or Triple," Yo La Tengo
"Pale Horses," Moby
"500 Miles," Rosanne Cash
"Black-Hearted Love," PJ Harvey with John Parish
"Just Breathe," Pearl Jam
"Hearing Damage," Thom Yorke
"The Fear," Lily Allen
"Nothing to Worry About," Peter Bjorn & John
How nice that 2010 is starting with this long weekend! Enjoy!


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