An early and supplementary Bookmarks this month, making a desperate attempt to mop up a bunch of music that came and went in 2020, and meant something to me that I was too glum to record.
Back when I reviewed The New Abnormal, I described The Strokes as the perfect group for adolescents trying to maintain some cool, some distance, in the face of new emotions they neither understood nor desired. For Bright Eyes, another turn of the century guitar group making a return this year, the appeal was the direct opposite. In Conor Oberst’s quivering toddler voice, his emotional directness, there was enough genuine insight and intelligence, pretension and self-involvement, to envelope any brainy, restless and self-involved young depressive. They’re back, the tunes are still good and committed and livelier than ever. Oberst’s love of soundscapes is undiminished and if his insights don’t seems as revelatory as they once did, maybe that’s because neither he nor his audience are as young nor restless as they once were.
Sex is, obviously, one of pop music’s great subjects, but it’s only when you hear a record like Kehlani’s sinewy, writhing R&B It was good until it wasn’t do you realise how limited the predominant depictions – sex as fantasy, sex as power, sex as point scoring – can really be. Kehlani deals with sex as reality, as it’s experienced by most of us – as pleasure, sadness, need and love and a mess. Or, as she puts it “Goddamn I wanna undress you, I wanna impress you … I want to undo the things I said before”.
Music is my everything sums up everything good and bad about Blu and Exiles’ Miles – it’s bright and melodic and intelligent and candid. But it’s also far too long, a bit too tasteful, and mistakes endless autobiography for genuine insight.
Maybe simple effortless execution from Beyonce simply doesn’t merit much attention at this point, but her verse on Megan Thee Stallion’s Savage Remix deserved more credit.
Talking about I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you in my last post reminded me of Think it Over, from Lou Reed’s Growing up in Public, another of my favourite songs about love, for similar reasons.
RTJ4‘s place as the album of the year is probably assured. One of those rare records that arrive with a sense of the times in its bones, so that when Killer Mike gasps “I can’t breathe”, a referrence to the murder of an unarmed black man at the hands of the police that happened in 2014 recorded in 2019, it had returned in taunting echoes by the time RTJ4 was released. The effect is aesthetic as much as lyrical – the album fans out from Yankee and the Brave’s machine gun snare intro, outward in all directions like a riot.
One of the most maddening things about this fucking nonsense earlier this year from the UK Guardian’s music editor is not just that his take – joking or not – on the most culturally and commercially important genre of the last 25 years would have been cliched, shallow, incurious in a white guy’s shitty 1993 stand up set. It’s that he’s in the UK, and appears not to have listened to – among all the other great hip hop the UK produces — Stormzy’s Heavy Is The Head from which I include the limpid, driving Handsome.
Dancing to Architecture 