My wedding, music in Barcelona

A rare post where my personal life overlaps with my music, where my music helps me get through obstacles in my personal life ...

To follow up on the previous post (now updated with a tracklist), it was not a mix of music intended to be played at a wedding.  I was itching to make a new mix, specifically a more free flowing and laid back kind of mix like the one from Podcast Episode 6 (which I've been listing to a lot recently), but couldn't find the time.  It was only in the few days before the wedding, when we'd finally run out of important things to do, that I found the time one Friday morning to record the mix.  And in the days following the wedding, I spent a few free hours listing to the mix and doing some minor editing.  It was a simple task and therefore a helpful distraction to keep me busy and relatively free of nerves.

I had asked the DJ at the wedding to record his set.  Wait, let's back up ... I met with the DJ a week earlier and handed him a lengthy list of songs not to play. Almost immediately, I regretted doing it.  Even though I had already told him I'd be bringing him a "do not play" list (something he'd happily agreed to), he seemed put off and even a bit insulted when I showed it to him. First, it was a long and detailed list, filled with minute details like "no slow songs by Stevie Wonder", "nothing by Phil Collins except for possibly 'Against All Odds'", and a list of specific disco songs not to play.  Was he supposed to print it out and/or memorize it and/or remove certain files from his hard drive for the evening (actually, I thought the last of these was possible and not altogether unreasonable)?  Second, an experienced professional DJ might resent the impression that he was being handed a list of detailed instructions about how to do his job.

In the end, the list simply confused matters.  We'd told him he'd be playing in front of a very mixed crowd so he should mix it up between pop, rock, Middle Eastern, and some of our personal requests.  In that sense, his set was perfect in terms of style and flow.  He seamlessly combined genres and covered all the musical ground we asked him to.  But the "do not play" list was a failure.  All it seemed to do was stick the names of certain songs in his head, without the negative associations.  So now I have to live with the fact that dreck like Joan Osborne's "One Of Us" got played at my wedding.  The saving grace is that almost all of these slip-ups were for "slow" portions, when people were eating and the music was in the background.  In fact, the DJ's only real comment on my list was that it wasn't a problem because most of them were slow songs, IOW, when people were actually dancing he could just go by feel and wouldn't need my list.

Of course the truly most important thing is that I was generally too happy to really care about the DJ's mistakes.  The guests enjoyed themselves and certainly didn't care about stuff like that either, which is the second most important thing.  I have a recording of the set and can relive things "as they really were" whenever I want, warts and all, and that was important to be.

The DJ came through for us in two other, very underappreciated ways:

1) He chose the "glass breaking" song, i.e. the song immediately played after the ceremony.  His first suggestion was the Beatles' "She Loves You" -- happy, upbeat, not too serious but also a bit too old fashioned.  His second suggestion was the Cure's "Friday I'm In Love" which I didn't think would work because not everyone would know the song.  He insisted it didn't matter, it was all about setting the mood and that everyone would be able to understand that from the first note. It was perfect because a lot of people complimented us on a great choice of song even though we didn't pick it (of course we gave him his due credit!).  The DJ correctly guessed I was a Cure fan based on the music I like.

2) I gave him a list of suggestions for the welcoming reception.  I didn't want to tell him what to play but told him I'd appreciate it if he could slip in a few of these songs, just so my fingerprints could be on a small portion of the music for the night.  I was busy and/or not present for significant parts of the reception, but I vaguely remember hearing Spiritualized's "Cool Waves" and Beach House's "Walk in the Park".  But my clearest memory of the reception was in the few moments before the ceremony started, when we were already running late and really had to get out there, and you're trying to have a few more moments to relax and breath but you know there really isn't any time for that ... and that's when I heard the muffled sounds of  Beach House's "The Hours" drifting into our dressing room.  I hadn't requested that song, but he knew I really liked Beach House (why?  I'd sent him a copy of my top 10 albums of 2011 and 2012) and played it as a bonus.  And that's when time proverbially stood still for a couple of moments and I knew everything was under control.

The following week, we were in Barcelona, and unfortunately it was a trip filled with missed opportunities on the music side of things (but a great trip otherwise).  There wasn't much to piqued my interest on the club side of things (although Italo Disco night featuring a live performance by Alexander Robotnick could have been interesting), which might have something to do with Easter week being a slow time for clubs.  I didn't get a chance to do any serious music shopping, and besides, a lot of places seem to be closing based on the information on this page (and the number of dead links it contains).  We also missed out on seeing the Magic Fountain because we mixed up the summer and winter performance hours.  Seeing the final couple of minutes from afar (too far away to hear the music) while walking from the train station somehow made our mistake even sadder and more pitiful.

On the bright side, the buskers in Park Guell were wonderful.  There was a classical guitar/violin duo who were so great we bought their CD, a didgeridoo player in one of the many mini-caves in the park, and a acoustic rock band who I jokingly thought looked just like Coldplay right before they broke into a rather pleasant version of Radiohead's "No Surprises".  Best of all was the music and parades on Palm Sunday, where costumed monsters and stampeding horses roamed the streets with a succession of brass and drum ensembles.  

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast 14

"The Wedding Mix" - 123 minutes

Not a mix of love songs, or a selection of songs that are necessarily recommended for play at weddings, but something that brought me much peace of mind.  A snapshot of a moment in time.

(tracklist will be posted at a later date)

The Wedding Mix by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud

Dave Ogilvie did what? and the return of Hollowphonic

As if the "Call Me a Hole" mashup wasn't unbelievable enough, it turns out that the man who mixed "Call Me Maybe" was none other than Dave "Rave" Ogilvie, who made a name for himself by working with industrial bands such as Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails.  What's more, he mixed "Call Me Maybe" with NIN in mind.  I couldn't make this up if I tried.  It's also no less than the most bizarre and spectacular bit of music trivia to come along in ages.  I was reading about how he feared that the beats were a bit rough for a pop record, only to be told by the producers that it was exactly what they were shooting for, and it made such perfect sense and seemed so bleedingly obvious.  And yet at the same time who could have ever made the connection on their own, without it being spoon fed to you?  It's like the "Smells Like Teen Spirit"/"More Than A Feeling" connection, only ten times more awesome and unexpected.

What's more, I'm hearing odd connections everywhere now, like on this brand new song by Hollowphonic. Can you convince me that Brad Ketchen didn't ask for a "Call Me Maybe"-style kick drum to be glued onto his song during the mixing process?  Up until a week ago I probably would have said this was Hollowphonic's homage to MBV's "Soon", but now I hear a catchy danceable intro and a big pop chorus.

History in photos, Black Swans in music

Catching up on some older links I've been meaning to say something about:

I can't recall seeing a better collection of photos that take you right inside New York club culture in the 70's and 80's. You really feel as though you're sitting in the room with them in these pictures.  The comments and reminiscences are revealing too, in particular, Nicky Siano's memories of Bianca Jagger's birthday party at Studio 54 (with photographers magically appearing out of the woodwork and bums lining the streets in the back) really sums up NYC's legendary highs (clubs, artists, glamour) and lows (crime, everyday dangers) that made the city so notorious in the 70's.

Why did I only find out about Slices DVD Features a couple of months ago?  In the latest installment, Alva Noto talks about how he was influenced by physics and oscilloscopes (which could be inferred from listening to his music for ten seconds, but it's still nice to hear him talk about it) and the whole interview and all the music in it could have been recorded at almost any time between 2000-2013.  Don't ever change Carsten!  He's been dong exactly the same thing since forever but he knows exactly who he is.

Finally, I woke up to a lot of "best mashup ever!"/"this wins the internet"-style posts today (which of course happens a few times most weeks) but this time it really might be true.  I always say that one of the main reasons I write about music is to be able to look back on what I write in a few years time and laugh about how wrong I was about something (and also to gloat about being right).  But just about everyone (which obviously includes me) writes intrinsically conservative predictions, neglecting to speculate on the Black Swan events that are usually more eye-catching.  Not that there aren't good reasons for this -- Black Swan events are by definition completely impossible to predict, so it's a bit silly to waste time on fantasy booking when you could be writing about the art that's sitting in front of your face.  Nevertheless it would be interesting if we could place Superbowl-type prop bets on music and musicians.  For instance, in 1991, what odds would you give on Trent Reznor winning an Oscar?  1000 to 1?  Maybe the odds come down a bit when he improbably won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 1992, but still.  You can assign almost any number you want to these odds -- these events were so improbable that nobody would have known how to place a value on them.

This is still true today.  In 2007, what were the odds of a reject from a Canadian reality show scoring the runaway biggest pop hit of the year in five years time?  I'd have gone a lot higher than 1000 to 1 on that.  There are precedents for renegade rock artists switching to soundtrack work and winning awards in their 40's and 50's.  There was no precedent for Carly Rae Jepsen.

If I traveled back in time to 1991 and told you that Nine Inch Nails would "collaborate" with a bubblegum pop artist on a "rerecorded" version of "Head Like a Hole" (nobody knew what a mashup was so it would have been described in those terms) and that fans of both bands and music in general would say it was cool and awesome, would you have believed it?

Grammys 2013

I didn't watch the show this year, save for The Black Keys' amazing performance of "Lonely Boy" via Popmatters (all the links to the other performances were quickly taken down).  My predictions were spectacularly wrong this year, save for the one I was most sure about (i.e. the snubbing of Frank Ocean).  Black Keys upset Springsteen in the categories that he's owned for more than a decade, and although I have hated generally every two person drums/guitar garage-y rock band that's come along since 2001 (with No Age still being a somewhat inexplicable exception), Black Keys are the real deal, "Lonely Boy" is a killer song, and I feel safe in agreeing with Popmatters that their was the best performance of the night even without seeing another minute of the show.  

Instead of sitting through the entire three hour ceremony, it's probably better to read what really smart people had to say about the Grammys anyway.   Philip Sherburne found some silver linings in Skrillex's dominance of the dance music categories on his SPIN blog.  First, he argues, it's good that Grammy gave the awards to the act that's currently at the top of their game, as opposed to what they usually do (in rock, R&B ... apparently no genre is safe from this!) -- giving the nods to established acts that gets their nominations and awards mostly due to name recognition.  Skrillex's music might be indistinguishable from 90% of Chemical Brothers' back catalogue, but it sure is nice to see those kids and their hip new sounds taking the big win away from those old farts!  Second, the Grammys have given up on trying to integrate electronic music into the rest of the show.  They're content to let the categories stand in their own little quaint corner of the awards universe, much like the classical and jazz categories that most Grammy viewers couldn't give a crap about, rather than forcing the likes of Dave Grohl to play nice with David Guetta to the benefit of nobody.  I completely agree with Sherburne here.  Why force these cross-cultural mashups -- is it an attempt to "contextualize" the music for viewers who like rock but don't know anything about DJ culture?  Was Dave Grohl really going to act as a gateway for new fans possibly getting into Deadmau5?

Jon Caramanica touched on some of the same points in his Grammy piece for the NYT.  Every year we see younger performers on stage with veteran ones, and it's starting to feel like, in Caramanica's words, that the younger generation are being "effectively supervised by an older peer".  It's cool to see "dream pairings" of performers that span generations of music fans, but there are diminishing returns associated with them.  They catch your eye the first through tenth times you see them, but afterward they become just another gimmick that the Grammys use to get people to tune into the broadcast, and they cease to be special.

On the other hand, the Grammys happen only once a year (it's not as if Paul McCartney and Jay-Z are forced to tour together or anything) and the Grammys have always been at least one generation behind popular trends.  Just look at the awards handed out in the 1960's -- almost none of it has any critical cache today.  Caramanica looks at Grammy success of Black Keys and Mumford and Sons with the glass empty.  He sees their wins as enforcement of a Grammy narrative that nothing innovative has been done in music since the 1960's.  But that sort of music was going to win anyway, because the Grammys need thirty years to adapt to new trends.  That being the unavoidable state of things, I say it's better to give the awards to the young guys rather than the older ones.  It's incremental progress, but at least it's something.  

Hyden's winners

Grantland's Steven Hyden has been posting a series of articles that he calls "The Winners' History of Rock and Roll", where simply put, he examines why huge bands became huge and remained huge.  The project was born of the idea that music critics have given too much attention to the plight of the underdogs, that there have been far too many essays written on the likes of the Velvet Underground, the rise of punk rock, and the bands whose music went relatively unnoticed in their time and is due for a reappraisal.  Therefore, if we want to learn something new about the last 30-40 years of music history, it's time to stop combing through the underground obscurities and start focusing on what the mega-successful acts can tell us about changing trends and tastes in music.

Hyden seems to be working from a premise that's clouded by the democratization of music criticism that's taken place relatively recently due to the rise of blogs, social media, and specialty publications/websites.  The median age of music critics has (I think) gotten younger than it was in the magazine and newspaper dominated eras of a couple of decades ago.  More importantly, the nexus has shifted -- and shifted rather quickly -- from writers weaned on music from the 60's and 70's to those weaned on music from the 80's and 90's.  The "missing" generation in the middle, I believe, is mine and Steven Hyden's, i.e. the people in their 30's who didn't have an outlet to write about the music we cared about because the media for doing so (blogs,  tumblrs, etc.) didn't exist. When I was growing up, music criticism was ALL about the winners, and the only way to avoid the steady stream of hero worship and TV specials about the Beatles or Led Zeppelin was to listen to the one alternative radio station in your city or town (assuming there was one), hang around indie music shops, read fanzines, and find like-minded message boards on the then-fledgling internet.  Music criticism circa 1990 was about nothing other than the "winners" that have been unfairly overlooked according to Hyden, and I'm not sure how he could have forgotten that.   

The music fans and critics born between 1970 and 1980 (which includes me) grew up in an age where they were pulled in opposite directions by two very different philosophies.  On one hand was the music of the Beatles and Stones generation, the stuff we wouldn't dream of rebelling against (even though it was our parents' favourite music) because it still sounded so ridiculously good.  On the other hand, there was the "punk saved rock and roll from itself" narrative that was equally well entrenched and well argued by our favourite DJ's and record store clerks.  You kind of had to pick one side.  It wasn't that both sides couldn't agree that the Beatles were a great band, but one side looked backward, confident in the knowledge that music would never be that good ever again, and the other side refused to accept that.  Those viewpoints were, and are, for the most part incompatible.

That said, just about every 70's baby who came down on the side of the punks had a eureka moment where they realized that their side wasn't as infallible as they once thought it was.  Mine happened sometime in 1996, when I heard Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" in full for the first time since ... well, the first time ever*.  Of course I was already familiar with many of the songs, as they were inescapable on FM radio even in the early 1980's, years after "Rumours" was released.  For the punks, Fleetwood Mac were the ENEMY, a key symbol of why punk had to come along to rid the world of multi-million selling soft rock pussies and their sunny LA cocaine addicted friends. One problem though -- when I heard those songs again, for the first time in over a decade (or at least since Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign), my reaction couldn't have been more surprising.

"This is soooo much better than any punk album."

*I wrote about rediscovering "Rumours" back in 2001 ... and when searching for that post, I discovered a "hidden" post, i.e. two separate pieces in the same post that I must have missed when carrying my old blog over to blogspot.

That's when it all came crashing down.  I didn't even like punk (or post-punk) all that much, but it was the philosophy of punk (and the alternative music I loved so much) that got overhauled.  I never looked at idealized, messianic histories of alternative music (which included early 90's grunge by that point) the same way ever again.  On the other hand, as much as I love "Rumours" and other "winners" albums, I don't write very much about them, and in that sense Hyden stance is absolutely right.  I wrote about another long time favourite of mine, Sinead O'Connor's "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got", for the first time just a few weeks ago.  All in all, I've been enjoying Hyden's work a lot, both in this series and in general on Grantland.

However, he picked a strange example with which to explain himself as he introduced the series though -- Arcade Fire's surprising "Album of the Year" win at the Grammys.  If there's any institution that can be counted on to honour the winners at all times, always going with the safest and most uncontroversial choices and never falling prey to critical buzz bands or emerging trends, it's the Grammys.  Arcade Fire's win was an outlier, which is why it was such a surprise.  It's really odd to see Hyden singling out the Grammys as an institution that would confuse acts that the critics consider great with those that consistently move units.

To take it even further, if popularity is dictated by whatever "Middle America" wants to hear, as Hyden states many times in his Led Zeppelin and Kiss pieces, then why aren't Arcade Fire a lot more popular?  Kiss and Led Zeppelin were selling a lifestyle but they were also selling their audience a means of escape.  Isn't that exactly what Arcade Fire are about?  Hyden writes "Middle America" many times when he really means "the suburbs".  Plenty of bands were writing about happenings in New York, but the teenager population in the suburbs across the country was many times higher, ergo, Kiss and Led Zeppelin wrote for them and became as huge as bands could possibly be.  Today, Arcade Fire's third album is called "The Suburbs" and is all about life in the suburbs. Where's the logic gap?

The problem is that writing about the suburbs not the same as writing for the suburbs.  In the same way, writing about the need to escape isn't the same as writing music that makes you feel as if you've already escaped.  Led Zeppelin sold the dream, but they didn't engage in self-reflection, they were famous but they didn't write an album about the "pressures of fame" (e.g. Sly Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On", Pulp's "This is Hardcore").   The kids in the suburbs don't want to hear about things as they really are, about the ups and downs of living the glamorous life.  If you're writing about the gritty reality of life then you've ruined the fantasy no matter how rich and famous you are, you're practically halfway to writing about life on the streets of New York to a limited audience. The airbrushed version of being famous is what sells.

Kiss might have understood that better than anybody.  The third band in Hyden's series, Bon Jovi, were simple kids from New Jersey who mastered the "I dream of escape" vibe that Springsteen had perfected.  What was "Livin' on a Prayer" if not Springsteen with bigger hairdos?  Bon Jovi made it work mainly for two reasons.  First, they presented a simple message in its most basic, most unconflicted form.  No family pressures, no trouble with the law, no teenage angst, just "we're young so let's get out of here".  Second, they looked the part of pretty boy rock stars at exactly the right time in music history when you needed to look like a pretty boy rock star to break through (i.e. the height of the video age).  Hyden has a lot more to say on that in his Bon Jovi article.

I found his Aerosmith and Metallica profiles less thought provoking than the first three, but I'm looking forward to his upcoming piece on Linkin Park because for me their success story has completely defied explanation and I really would like to know more.   

Woke up, got out of bed

Dragged a comb across my head, etc.  Packed a lunch, noticed I was late, grabbed a bus and a train, headed to the office, stopped at the bank, did a bit of work, took a short break, finally logged on to Facebook and was floored by the NEW MBV ALBUM INTERNET MULTIVERSE POSTING EXPLOSION.

So you wait 22 years for an album to come out, the lead guitarist of the band (the biggest perfectionist/procrastinator in music) responds to hecklers at a one-off London gig by saying that the new album would be out in three days, and it TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE?  There were follow-up articles written after that London gig that compiled the last fifteen years of new release announcements, and I couldn't believe that anyone took this last one the least bit seriously.  If I had been betting, I would have placed the odds somewhere between the proverbial "when monkeys fly out of my anus" and "when monkeys fly out of the anuses of the monkeys flying out of my anus" because after fifteen years of Kevin Shields saying "there'll definitely be something out by the end of the year", I thought we knew better than to be fooled yet again.

I don't have anything interesting or constructive to say, I'm just posting for the sake of posting.  I haven't even heard the album yet, but so far the responses have been overwhelmingly positive (yes!!) and I'm kind of glad I slept through those manic few hours when MBV's website repeatedly crashed due to all the traffic.

Just ... wow.  First GYBE, then Bowie, now MBV.  New music that appears without warning, after years of waiting, nearly at the point when fans had reached their peace with the idea of never hearing music from them ever again.

Pazz and Jop 2012

There seems to be a lot less discussion about the results compared to past years, probably due to a number of slowly snowballing factors.  Single-publication and critics' best-of lists start appearing online in late November, making P&J results not much of a surprise in mid-January.  The declining interest in print media in general.  Shifts in music criticism away from generalist and towards specialist publications.  And so on.  List submissions (less than 500, way down from the 600-700 in recent years) and comment submissions are way down too.  They published two of my comments again this year, so you know they must be hard up for submissions.  But seriously, thanks to Brian McManus and the Village Voice, I'll always get a kick out of seeing my name next to Alfred Soto, Phil Dellio, and other P&J commenting regulars. 

I sent three short comment bits this year, and here's the one they didn't publish, a shortened version of my Beach House comment on my Top 10 Albums of 2012 post:

I'm exhausted from reading about other people's best albums of the year, not least because I feel overwhelmed and don't have time to listen to all this great music.  Beach House's "Bloom" was my favourite album of 2012, but if you haven't already heard it then you probably won't get around to it, because just like everybody else (including me), you've got a huge backlog of other albums in the queue that you hope to catch up with one of these years.

So that's why I've picked out the best bits of "Bloom" -- the very best part each of its ten songs -- edited them together, and posted them on Mixcloud (http://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/best-of-bloom/) for your listening convenience.  Now there are no excuses for not hearing "Bloom" because all you need to do is invest a measly one minute and forty five seconds to absorb the very best moments from the year's best album, such as 1:12 - 1:20 of "Myth", which is possibly the best eight second homage to "Heaven or Las Vegas"-era Cocteau Twins ever made, or the spine-tingling bridge from 1:59-2:13 of "Lazuli", or the mid-song break from 1:54-2:05 of "New Year" where guitars wail like crying seals straight out of My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless".  And who knows, maybe you'll like the highlight reel so much that you'll want to hear the entire album.

Glenn McDonald's P&J statistical index is now clearly the highlight of the poll.  Every year I get happily lost among the fascinating statistical tidbits that come out of Glenn's calculations, and this year was no exception.  This year he added new tools for comparing polls and critics' voting habits across different years, including the Breadth Index, which quantifies whether a critic tends to vote for his or her favourite artists year after year.  After years of existing in the background as something of a plaything for hardcore list fans only, Glenn's work is taking center stage at long last.  The final line of his essay sums up the importance of his work perfectly - "arguably, this explorable critical hyperindex is what the poll really exists to build."  The results of P&J might be a foregone conclusion these days, but it's still the largest music poll of its kind and is a golden opportunity for collecting data that will enable us to look at critical and popular music trends in a way that nobody ever had before. 

After several years of collective whining and crying about indie rock and the Pitchfork narrative taking over P&J (lest we forget 2009), Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar took the #1 and #2 album spots, while Miguel and Killer Mike placed in the top ten as well.  Fewer complaints have been heard, even though Pitchfork ranked those same artists high on their list this year.  So in case you were wondering, the indie rock half of the equation was the real problem.  Animal Collective's "Centipede Hz" finished tied for 157th, which is believed to be the largest drop-off in the poll for the follow-up to a P&J #1 album.  Everybody got burned out on AC at around the same time -- probably in the spring of '09 -- and "MPP"'s easy victory in the poll later than year was as fine an example of voter cruise control and hivemind groupthink as you'll find.  In other words, the thinking was "we decided one year ago that MPP is the album of the year, so I guess it still is."  Four years later, and the critical dismantling of AC and the indie rock backlash is all but complete.  I still haven't heard all of "Centipede Hz", but submitted my most indie rock centred list ever, so it was only a partial victory around my house. 

I've heard the usual complaints about not enough musical diversity and participation by voters in specialty genres, and every year I respond by noting how almost none of the diversity complainers stick up for electronic music.  This year, the closest thing to a consensus choice was Andy Stott's "Luxury Problems", at #29 with just 21 mentions (I'm not counting Grimes as "electronic").  That's fairly typical for each year's token electronic album, for instance, last year James Blake finished at #34, the previous year it was Caribou at #25 or MIA at #31 or Four Tet at #35 (depending on your definition of electronic/club music), indie rock blazed a path of destruction over all genres in '09 but in '08 Hercules and Love Affair were at #19, largely on the strength of the crossover appeal of "Blind".  In 2005 it seems like everyone with a passing interest in minimal rallied around Isolee's "We Are Monster" and it finished "only" at #41, but it was nevertheless something of a shock to see that sort of album ranking so high.  Anyway, you get the idea.  Electronic music was mostly ignored again, nobody really cares, let's move on.

Don't blame me if you think there isn't enough variety in P&J.  My centricity score was .201, at #283 out of 485 contributors, putting me in the lower 42nd percentile.  I was in the 46th percentile in 2011 and the 40th in 2010, so this was more or less in line with my average (which has also been calculated!  I'm #633 out of 1067 over the past five years, or the lower 41st percentile of centricity).  Also my Breadth Index is .900, or #89 out of 1083, which means I'm near the top when it comes to voting for different artists each year with very little repetition.

It seems to be the case every year, but once again I voted for two albums that did very well in the poll, and another eight that for the most part did not.  That distribution was less bimodal than in past years, mainly thanks to a fair bit of support for both Spiritualized and GY!BE.  Oddly enough, the biggest extreme occurred in 2009, when my centricity score was skewed by votes for two top five finishers in the poll.  The rest of my choices that year drew a combined total of 23 votes, or about one-sixth of what Animal Collective earned with their #1 album.  My total of seven unique votes is misleading because of the strangeness of my singles ballot, but I did vote for one album with no other mentions and two others with just one other mention.  One of those two was Sigur Ros' "Valtari", which was a huge surprise because they've usually done quite well in P&J going back over a decade. With their four previous albums, they finished at #54 in 2008, #50 in 2005, #25 in 2002, and #33 in 2000 (and #16 in 2001 for "Agaetis Byrjun" yet again).  Spiritualized have been heading in the opposite direction -- #184 in 2003, #80 in 2008, and #34 this year, tied with "Let It Come Down"'s rank from 2001.

Consensus around the top albums seems to be holding steady over the past few years.  62% of all ballots listed at least one of the #2-#10 albums.  That's only two percent lower than 2009, AKA the year of GAPDY.  But my favourite P&J statistic this year is this one, courtesy of Glenn Mcdonald -- of the 7 people who voted for Mastodon's "Curl of the Burl" in 2011, 5 of them voted for "Call Me Maybe" in 2012.   Numbers like that simply defy simple generalizations, you just have to sit back and admire them.  

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 13

"The mix uses a counterintuitive sequence of light pulses" Running time: 47:00 I submitted this mix for Little White Earbuds' podcast competition. Being pressed for time, it didn't turn out as well as it could have but it was fun to make, I enjoyed the experience of recording and submitting my work, and learned more about recording and mastering a mix properly (which I will put to good use in the future. Of course I didn't win anything -- no complaints there, considering the amazing quality of the winning mix   -- but like I said, it was a fun thing to do. It's not so much of a dance-y mix (especially compared to last year's outstanding winning mix by 2toomanygays, but the second place mix in '11 was also full of creative hops between genres and had a downtempo, somewhat tacked on ending, and this year's winning mix by Stewart Brown also shared some of those qualities.

LWE Podcast competition mix 2012 by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud

Sinead O'Connor, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got"

I have no idea how many times I played this album in 1990, but either this or the Stone Roses' debut were the albums I listened to the most that year.  It's even possible that I haven't listened to any album more times in any year than I did with these two albums in 1990, which is a likely signature of an earlier era when acquiring music was a lot harder (meaning you had fewer albums to listen to in a given year) and the cassette was still a popular format (meaning that you tended to listen to albums straight through more often because fast forwarding to your favourite tracks was such a hassle).

Like with many overplayed albums, I burned out on "I Do Not Want ..." and left it untouched for quite a while.  By chance, I happened to be watching Saturday Night Live on the night that this happened, and the fallout from that incident essentially ended her career as a commercial force.  One might reasonably argue that her breakthrough into the mainstream was a fluke anyway, and that grunge along with MOR rock and country would have bumped her from the charts regardless.

It wasn't until 1995, when I undertook a fun and crazy project to listen to all my CDs and cassettes in alphabetical order, that I rediscovered this album and remembered how great it is.  I only had about 150 albums back then, so this was a realistic undertaking, but I only made it about 2/3rds of the way through before abandoning it for reasons I can't recall.  But it was thanks to that alphabetical listening project (which forced me to revisit music that I hadn't heard in years) that I rediscovered "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got".  And yet, even though I've remained a fan of it ever since, still play it on occasion, and will tell you how underrated it is if you prompt me, I've never written anything about it and didn't rank it among my favourite albums of the 1990's as recently as 2004.  [it may not have been nominated and therefore not eligible in that particular poll, but I wrote up a complete, non-poll related Top 100 around that I can't find right now ... I'm fairly sure Sinead wasn't ranked very high on it]

In short, I've written about that SNL episode before, albeit not very well (re-read at your own risk), and I've underrated "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" even while telling people that it's underrated.

With over twenty years perspective, it stands out as the first true "90's" album. This has been noted by many others I'm sure.  It signifies the turn from the "me" 80's to the confessional, angst-filled 90's, predating grunge and other alternative artists by at least a year.  You could dismiss the epic album opener "So Different" as O'Connor's stab at making a "Troy Part II", but a sample-heavy pop track like "I Am Stretched On Your Grave" could have only been recorded in the early 90's.  O'Connor clearly knew that change was afoot and "Nothing Compares 2 U" made that even more abundantly clear.  The keyboards/strings and muffled drumming could never have been produced in the 80's, and the simplicity and directness of the video was certainly not something that could have been made in the 80's.  I've also always loved how the lack of a bass line (a la "When Doves Cry") and the decisions to leave "mama" and "baby" in the lyrics came across as very subtle tributes to Prince, even though the recording sounds absolutely nothing like him otherwise.  

It's also got Nellee Hooper producing, and Jah Wobble, and ex-Smiths members playing on it ... what could be more 90's than that?