narrowcast

2012-01-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

This week in the Baltimore City Paper I have a feature about the awesome band The Pilgrim, who are currently raising funds on Kickstarter to release their totally ass-kicking debut album on vinyl.

(photo by Jefferson Jackson Steele)

The 2011 Remix Report Card: The Year-End Wrap Up

2012-01-25T22:40:00.000-05:00

I've been doing these Remix Report cards for five years now, and for a long time it felt like a lot to keep up with. But it seems like in 2011 the all-star remix trend in hip hop and R&B finally slowed down, or at least stabilized, that there was a lot less to cover last year: I didn't have to do an edition every single month to keep up, and after being able to do a 20 best and 20 worst list in every previous year, this year there weren't even 40 total, so I'm downsizing to top 10s.

The Top 10:
1. "I'm A Boss (Remix)" by Meek Mill featuring T.I., Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, Birdman, Swizz Beatz and DJ Khaled
2. "Till The World Ends (Remix)" by Britney Spears featuring Nicki Minaj & Ke$ha
3. "Oh My (Remix)" by DJ Drama featuring Trey Songz, 2 Chainz and Big Sean
4. "Niggas In Paris (Remix)" by Jay-Z and Kanye West featuring T.I.
5. "Motivation (Remix)" by Kelly Rowland featuring Busta Rhymes, Trey Songz and Fabolous
6. "Black & Yellow (G-Mix)" by Wiz Khalifa featuring Snoop Dogg, Juicy J and T-Pain
7. "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) (Remix)" by Katy Perry featuring Missy Elliott
8. "Stay (Remix)" by Tyrese featuring Rick Ross and Faith Evans
9. "Shot Caller (Remix)" by French Montana featuring Diddy and Rick Ross
10. "All Of The Lights (Remix)" by Kanye West featuring Lil Wayne, Big Sean & Drake

The Bottom 10:
1. "Moves Like Jagger (Remix)" by featuring Mac Miller
2. "S&M (Remix)" by Rihanna featuring Britney Spears
3. "Racks (Remix)" by YC featuring Bun B, CyHi Da Prynce, Young Jeezy, B.o.B, Big Sean, Cory Gunz, Cory Mo, Nelly, Trae Tha Truth, Wacka Flocka Flame, Wale, Wiz Khalifa and Yo Gotti
4. "The One That Got Away (Remix)" by Katy Perry featuring B.o.B
5. "Tony Montana (Remix)" by Future featuring Drake
6. "Welcome To My Hood (Remix)" by DJ Khaled featuring Ludacris, T-Pain, Busta Rhymes, Mavado, Twista, Birdman, Ace Hood, Fat Joe, Jadakiss, Bun B, Game & Waka Flocka Flame
7. "Wet (G-Mix)" by Snoop Dogg featuring Jim Jones and Shawty Lo
8. "Party (Remix)" by Beyonce featuring J. Cole
9. "Blow (Remix)" by Ke$ha featuring B.o.B
10. "Body 2 Body (Remix)" by Ace Hood featuring Rick Ross, Wale, Chris Brown and DJ Khaled

A quick note: I'm still sticking to my tradition of only including remixes that were released after a song's chart success, not remixes that were also the song's best known single release, otherwise the Nicki Minaj version of Big Sean's "Dance" would be on the best list and Katy Perry's version of "E.T." with Kanye would be on the worst list ("Tony Montana" is I suppose kind of borderline).

On Beauty Pill's Immersive Ideal

2012-01-24T13:15:00.001-05:00

About six months ago, I interviewed the Washington, D.C. band Beauty Pill in a theater in the Arlington, Virginia museum/gallery Artisphere where they were recording their next album, as part of an exhibit called Immersive Ideal. On Sunday, I went back to Artisphere for the second phase of the installation, in which you listen to the album in the room in which it was recorded, in gorgeous surround sound, while manipulating three projection screens of photos from the recording sessions (one of which is framed by the same 'control room window' rectangle seen in the above picture of bandleader Chad Clark that I snapped during the July interview).

There is probably no other album I've anticipated more the past few years than the new Beauty Pill, although of course the long wait (almost 8 years since the band's last album, over 5 since the last new song surfaced online) factors into that, as it inevitably does in matters of anticipation. But a lot of that is because I'd long thought Chad Clark was really on the cusp of some really great and fascinating things, both musically and lyrically, that I wanted so much to see realized. And what I heard on Sunday was very close to what I'd hoped for, as well as many other things I didn't expect at all.

The exhibit was open for less than 2 hours on the final day of the installation, and I stayed there as long as I could, listening to the whole cycle on display (7 songs totaling under 40 minutes) three times. Clark has said the band plan on releasing two full albums this year, and that about 20 songs were worked on in the Artisphere sessions. It'd been mentioned on Twitter that "Ann The Word," the song that had been released on the band's MySpace in demo form in 2006 and effectively marks the beginning of the current era of Beauty Pill, was in the Immersive Ideal rotation, but I didn't hear it on Sunday. I don't know if what I did hear is the first album or a smattering from both albums or something else entirely. I don't even know what to call it -- I'll refer to the collection of songs I heard on Sunday as Immersive Ideal since Drew Doucette told me in July that that was one of the potential album titles and they've given it no other name since then, but who knows, really. Whatever it was I heard, I can't wait to own it and play it anytime I want, even if it will never sound as ridiculous and beautiful as it did in surround sound that day. If what I heard is an album, it'd certainly be a very early candidate for my favorite album of 2012. The fact that my trip to hear to the album ended up with lots of complications* just made the whole thing feel more like a pilgrimage, the listening experience being an island of calm in a stressful day.

The first song on the album is "Afrikaner Barista," which was released online a few days ago, before the end of the installation, making it only the second new song Beauty Pill have released to the public since 2004. Since I knew I was going to hear the whole album soon, I resisted listening to the MP3 until afterward. Reaction to the song on the internet has been appropriately enthusiastic, but let me just say this: you really have no idea how good this stuff sounded in that room in Artisphere, sitting in the middle of four towering speakers. It's quite good on stereo headphones, the song itself and the general texture of the production come through, but it's just not so amazingly alive (the Soundcloud page amusingly and fittingly lists songwriting credits as: song (charcoal sketch) by chad clark, music (mural) by beauty pill). Sitting there, it occurred to me how absurd it is that most of us only get a surround sound experience like that when watching an action movie in a theater (or a rich friend's living room or whatever), very rarely is that technology actually used to listen to music. That made it all the more exhilarating to hear not just any music at all that way but a new album, by a relatively unknown band that ordinarily would never get the opportunity to present or even hear their music in that way. Apparently there's talk now of taking the surround sound presentation of the songs to other cities, which if that happens I would of course heartily recommend anyone checking out, regardless of whether you're familiar with the band or not.

"Afrikaner Barista" opens with the sound of a spinning metal bowl, whirring for a moment and then snapping into a crisp kick/snare beat, which is soon joined by a secondary drum pattern, and soon a swarm of melodic textures, many of them warped and bent, darting in and out of view. This sets the stage pretty well for the dominant sonic signatures of the album: fluttering backmasked guitar, multiple drummers locking into playful polyrhtyms (or Devin Ocampo surrounding a thumping loop with jazzy accents), and a water bowl that once belonged to Chad Clark's late dog Lucy, who inspired the song "Dog With Rabbit In Mouth, Unharmed." That was the song Beauty Pill was working on the day I visited them in the studio, and I actually didn't recognize it right away on Sunday, since so much had been added to the skeleton (Clark's loop with Devin Ocampo and Basla Andolsun playing guitar and bass over it) that I'd heard six months earlier. "Dog" is also the only song I heard in at Immersive Ideal featuring lead vocals by Jean Cook, the member of Beauty Pill who joined after their previous album and sang lead on "Ann The Word"; all other lead vocals were by Clark.

One song called "Drapetomania!" featured no vocals at all in its incarnation at Immersive Ideal -- it's the song the band talked about mutating into a cartoonish "Fat Albert" theme song-like variation in my Splice Today interview, which apparently will be released in its original arrangement with lyrics on one of the albums. And the only reason I knew which song it was, honestly, was because Clark had mentioned on Twitter that it'd be played as an instrumental in Immersive Ideal -- I didn't recognize it as the absurd, strangely funky thing he'd described in the interview because it wasn't actually any more surreal or unusual than most of the other songs it was surrounded by. Try to imagine the creative zone that would lead a person to single out a song as totally crazy without even realizing how crazy everything else they've made sounds by the same standard. So much of the charm of these songs is in how the more audacious arranging or producing ends up too visceral to be inaccessible, too inviting to be indulgent, too fun to be pretentious.

I first heard Chad Clark’s previous band, Smart Went Crazy, in 1998, on a school trip when a friend who apparently knew a member of the band (I still have no idea who) lent me their first album, 1995’s Now We’re Even. I returned home, excited to learn more about this band and hear more, but after searching around on the internet (which was of course a bit harder to do usefully back then than it is now), I learned that they had just broken up, having only recorded one other album, 1997’s Con Art. Like any short-lived band, especially one that disbanded within months of their crowning achievement, Smart Went Crazy left behind a lot of curious new fans who never got to see the band live, including me, which translated to a large amount of free-floating anticipation from whatever would come next eventually, which turned out to be Beauty Pill.

Beauty Pill debuted in 2001 with The Cigarette Girl From The Future, the kind of EP that announces a band to the world with a tantalizingly small amount of music, and none more followed for over two years. First, another EP, 2003's You Are Right To Be Afraid, followed, and then finally the full-length album, 2004's The Unsustainable Lifestyle. Some of the initial interest around the band seemed to have dissipated by the time of those later releases, and these days Chad Clark himself seems to speak of Cigarette Girl as the release he's most proud of, implicitly agreeing with the consensus that perhaps The Unsustainable Lifestyle was a disappointment or a creative failure on some level. But I really grew to love that album, as muted and difficult to get a handle on as it often is, over the last few years that it remained the band's most recent release, and came to see it as a huge step forward in Clark's development as a lyricist.

When you hear a contemporary musician's records in the order they were made in released, whether at the time or after the fact, I think you really get a deeper sense of their artistic progression, because your understanding of them keeps changing. On Now We're Even, Clark seemed like a clever, sarcastic guy who was good at writing vengeful 'sugar in your gas tank' breakup songs, with some occasional gestures toward more literary or impressionistic writing styles. On Con Art, that style intensified and became darker, still very much an angsty breakup record, but one with a lot more wit and intelligence than most of the ones being made by guitar bands in the '90s.

Cigarette Girl presented, along with a sleeker, more groove-driven sound, a slightly more detached and conceptual approach to lyrics for Clark, while maintaining a consistent thread in the overall tone and approach to humor and narrative, and introducing the female vocal foil as a key component of the Beauty Pill sound (Jean Cook is the third member of the band to operate as female vocalist). But it was on The Unsustainable Lifestyle that I really think Clark hit upon a rich vein, looking out into the world more, at drug mules and dictators and assassins and racists, in addition to the more commonplace children and lifeguards and whimsical or Satan as movie studio executive or fantastical cigarette girls from the future that also populated his songs. It really felt like this guy was looking at a much larger cross section of the world we live in, and with real empathy and humanity, in addition to gallows humor and clever lyrical conceits that still abounded, than any other songwriters you might think of as his contemporaries.

That playful and sarcastic but also very humane and soulful way of looking at the world is all over the Immersive Ideal songs, particularly "Steven And Tiwonge," which as Clark told me in our interview, is named for the real life gay couple in Malawi who were arrested and nearly imprisoned for 25 years simply as a consequence of their relationship. The song itself, though is a totally apolitical narrative that uses the situation as a jumping-off point to examine how the different opinions and reactions of two people have to be reconciled or grappled with when those two people are in love, especially then that love itself is being challenged or forced out of existence. Another song about an actor, or at least a metaphorical actor (the only song whose title I don't know), uses an unreliable narrator device to first try to make dark things seem lighter or more innocent to a child, before the whole thing just gets darker and more confusingly warped.

Chad Clark has also mastered one of my favorite lyrical techniques, which is to turn a phrase slightly, from one verse to the next or from one chorus to the next, so that each time it comes back it's in a different tense, or referring to a different thing or person, or means the opposite of what it meant the first time. At least once I wrote down a lyric I especially liked, only to realize the next time the song played that it was a subtle variation on an earlier line, which wouldn't be done justice if quoted out of context. "Near Miss Stories" and "Steven And Tiwonge," in particular, do this really well, as does the one song whose title I'm not sure of (the one about the actor).

"Near Miss Stories," the only song to acknowledge Clark's life-threatening viral cardiomyopathy that temporarily sidelined the band a few years ago, literally only could have been written after the events that inspired it. But it also contains (probably unintentional) echoes of his Smart Went Crazy lyrics. The opening vignette about seeing a car driving haphazardly on the road immediately brought to mind Con Art's "A Brief Conversation Ending In Divorce," while the phrase "you have to laugh," used to deflate tension in a song that contemplates death, goes back to Now We're Even's closing song, "Gold Star." He's always let little flashes of joy and humor and optimism peek through his more morbid lyrics, and here it feels more earned, more sincere than it ever has before.

Immersive Ideal is an album full of rubber and metal, things that bend and wobble and warp, not just in the texture of the manipulated samples and found sounds and instruments (called 'treatments' in Beauty Pill liner notes), but in the way the rhythms and melodies often seem to lurch in seasick cadences. The surround sound especially made it feel like a psychedelic experience, with the Hendrix-via-De La Soul production aesthetic letting all these little difficult-to-identify sounds wheedle around like curious little windup toys. It's a record that sometimes flirts with becoming danceable, but more often than not is content to nervously bump and clang around in a way that's somehow more compelling than repellent. I halfheartedly attempted to write down some notes while listening to the album, and during "Ain't No Jury In The World Gonna Convict You, Baby," I wrote down two words about what I found the most sonically exhilarating song of the whole set: "disorienting" and "favorite."

^* _{Quickly the story of what happened on Sunday when I went to Arlington on Sunday: I drove around to a sidestreet near Artisphere, where I'd found street parking when I was there in July. No spots were open, but there was a parking garage with its doors open, no attendant or ticket-taking machine, and a sign that said "Free parking on Sundays." Tickled by my good luck, I drove right in and parked, and went to Artisphere. When I got back less than 2 hours later, the sign was gone and the garage was completely locked. After about an hour of frantically walked around the building, trying various service phones and trying to get some information about who owned the garage and how to contact them, I finally was told that the garage is kept open on Sunday mornings for a church group, and then closed up shortly after services, and that there was no contact info available for the group or whoever opens up the garage for them, so I'd have to just come back and get my car on Monday morning.

Complicating the above problem was the fact that I'd left my son's carseat in my car, with my wife at home with the baby in Maryland, nearly an hour away, so they wouldn't be able to come pick me up even if I'd asked them. After trying to reach the only people I knew in Arlington to see if I could crash there for the night, I finally gave up after two hours of wandering around in cold, windy January weather and took the Metro back to Maryland, calling my brother-in-law and asking him to pick me up at the Metro and take me home. Obviously, my wife was not thrilled about the predicament I'd gotten myself into, which had nixed some of our Sunday plans. On Monday morning, I got up at 5 a.m., called a cab to take me to the Metro, rode back to Arlington, walked into the garage (open this time but still unattended, strangely enough), and drove my car out without ever paying for parking or being ticketed or even asked how I got in there, and drove back to Maryland, gave my wife the carseat to take our son to school, and then drove further north to Baltimore for a full day of work. That I made this stupid mistake and had to suffer all these consequences in the course of going to hear Immersive Ideal, of course, doesn't make the album/installation at all responsible for my terrible day, it's completely blameless in the affair, but I definitely had dramatic feelings of "suffering for my love of music" that day.}

2012-01-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

I wrote about Baltimore rapper Caddy Da Don's new version of his single "Cookamonga" with Atlanta rapper Future for the City Paper Noise blog.

TV Diary

2012-01-22T09:53:00.002-05:00

a) "Smash"
My interest in this show stemmed initially from me continuing to just be agog at how ridiculously hot Katharine McPhee is and having thought it was just a tragedy every year since she was on "American Idol" that's passed without her being on TV regularly. But really I have a soft spot for musicals and this show may actually be better in execution than in its ambitious but slightly dodgy concept, since I managed to watch the pilot without thinking of goddamn "Glee" once.

b) "House of Lies"
The usual 'sexy' tripe from Showtime that isn't even particularly sexy, so far beneath everyone involved, especially Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell.

c) "Unsupervised"
The ads for this that FX was running for months and months made it look really unappetizing, but the first episode was actually pretty alright. None of the ads trumpted the actors doing the voices, so I didn't even realize until after watching it that Justin Long and (again!) Kristen Bell and Romany Malco are in it, didn't recognize their voices or anything. It kind of feels like "Beavis & Butthead" in that it depicts a certain type of hopeless teenage dirtbag with a rare amount of perceptive detail, although this show obviously has a little more pathos and realism than, well, "Beavis & Butthead" (and on the other hand isn't as funny).

d) "Napoleon Dynamite"
Seeing this worthless fucking movie done as a cartoon just makes me realize that "Beavis & Butthead" is actually the best thing this could possibly aspire to. Sad thing is it's not even the worst cartoon FOX has tried to shoehorn into the Groening/McFarlane block lately, though.

e) "Funny Or Die presents Billy On The Street"
The idea of a satirical 'man on the street' quiz show seems so dumb and threadbare but really this show is just hysterical and I've been watching it every single time it's on, Billy Eichner is insane.

f) "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!: A Royal Pain In The News"
My wife has become a serious NPR head in the last couple years and has gotten me into this show, so it was fun to see this TV version that the BBC aired as a year-end news review special over the holidays, if only to see what the people from the radio look like. They also did a BBC special version of the "Nerdist" podcast, which was a bit less interesting to me but I watched anyway.

g) "Excused"
It kind of bums me out that while every other mediocre 'sassy broad' standup comic out there seems to be getting network sitcoms, the very funny (and, well, very hot) Iliza Shlesinger who won "Last Comic Standing" a couple years ago is hosting a dating show on VH1. It is a pretty overtly comedic dating show, though, and Shlesinger gets a lot of room to improv -- really the best part of every episode is during the closing credits when they just show a bunch of outtakes of her riffing ridiculous insults about the contestants.

h) "Metal Evolution"
After "That Metal Show" came into its own and VH1 Classic had all the hype about their metal holiday, this mini-series really turned out depressingly bland and redundant with a lot of other stuff they aired.

i) "I Hate My Teenage Daughter"
It seems like at the beginning of the season there were a lot of sitcoms coming down the pike with kind of alluringly blunt titles -- "2 Broke Girls" didn't turn out too well and it'll be a while before we see "Don't Trust The Bitch In Apartment 23," but "I Hate My Teenage Daughter" is actually pretty good. Partly I just like the cast (the sister from "Pushing Daisies"! Cutty from "The Wire"!) but I also like the whole uncomfortable but inherently comedic premise and even if the execution is kind of straightforward and lowbrow there's some pretty good trad sitcom writing going on here.

j) "Work It"
I watched an episode of this cross-dressing sitcom just before it was canceled, because I knew it was gonna be canceled and it's kind of nice to feel like you're part of something that's probably going to be remembered as infamously stupid and wrong-headed for some time (although OK not that many people will really remember it even a year from now, possibly not even me).

k) "Last Man Standing"
Goes without saying that a new Tim Allen sitcom is just total garbage but he has a bunch of daughters on this show

l) "Man Up"
The only one of all of ABC's new misguided 'lol modern manhood' sitcoms that actually wasn't total shit, wasn't great or anything but the cast really worked well together and I kind of love Amanda Detmer.

m) "The Guy Code"
Another show full of moronic 'wisdom' about the culture of masculinity, this time in the form of VH1-style talking head bullshit. This is already apparently MTV2's highest rated original show ever, so look for them to run with this formula for a few years next.

n) "Once Upon A Time"
This show is starting to grow on me, even though the special effects are occasionally distractingly cheap-looking and the plot sometimes feels like it's working on more levels than I'm invested enough to bother figuring out, still pretty fun to watch and of course every woman on this show is really good looking.

o) "Homeland"
I wound up with pretty mixed feelings about this show's first season but it did more well than it did badly. I especially enjoyed how I thought they were going to move the pot forward very incrementally and just hint and what's going on (blame "Rubicon" for my expectations, I guess), and instead they just kept completely taking me off guard with how ruthlessly they'd propel things forward without hesitation, and took the story in some really interesting directions.

p) "Beyond Scared Straight"
I kind of randomly watched an episode of this reality show on A&E because they shot it at Jessup in Maryland, and it was interesting, but convicts shouting at teen delinquents is not the kind of thing I need to watch all the time.

q) "Face Off"
My wife is way more into this show than I am, but it is fun to see movie makeup pros compete, they make some pretty cool, creepy stuff.

r) "Shameless"
I forgot how low stakes this show can be in terms of offering any real compelling drama (and honestly it's not that funny, either), but right now I'm kind of enjoying how this sexy silly family show is kind of like the exact opposite of the shrill first world problem plotlines of "Parenthood" (which I also enjoy, but I'm just saying.

s) "Lost Girl"
Sorta 'new' Syfy show that it turns out has already been airing on Canada for a couple seasons, and is really kind of surprisingly good, in that the whole supernatural angle of the show isn't too cheesy or overly familiar, and the cast is all hot and/or likeable, good dialogue, etc., I'm kind of excited about this show.

t) "Hung"
I was always a little surprised this show made it to 3 seasons, so I can't act shocked that it finally got canceled, but man, they really left a lot of storylines unresolved, HBO should really give them like an hourlong wrap-up special. I liked the direction the show seemed to be headed in, too.

u) "Bored To Death"
Like "Hung," I'm not surprised it didn't last, and it was on a good roll, but I also kinda feel like it had done everything it could do already.

v) "Free Agents"
I decided to watch this Brit series after I enjoyed the short-lived American remake, but apparently the dialogue is very blue and BBC America noisily bleeps out curse words, so the whole thing quickly became kind of annoying and unsatisfying to watch, and I'm not sure I liked it as much as the NBC version anyway.

w) "The Adam Corrolla Project"
Sometimes I forget how entertaining Corrolla could be on "Loveline" back in the day but this goofy show about him getting together a bunch of friends to help him fix up a house is really a good showcase for him to just improvise and say a bunch of silly shit.

2012-01-21T08:27:00.001-05:00

This week the Village Voice ran the results of their annual Pazz & Jop music critics' poll, and I voted in it, as I have for the last 5 years or so (you can see my ballot here, although I kind of regard it as an abridged version of my full top 50 albums and top 50 singles of 2011). Last year, I wrote about the singles poll's decreasing crossover with the Billboard charts, and worked with Glenn McDonald to create the P&J&B database to illustrate that in detail. This year, I wrote about the singles poll, and the surprise of my #2 single, Beyonce's "Countdown," hitting #2 on the poll, in my latest Radio Hits One column for the Voice's Sound of the City blog.

2012-01-19T23:54:00.000-05:00

On Splice Today I ran down a list of thirteen albums Lil Wayne probably won't release in 2012.

Monthly Report: December Singles

2012-01-18T22:39:00.000-05:00

1. The Airborne Toxic Event - "Changing"
This is pretty old at this point but it took me so long to realize how much I liked this song that by the time I did I had already finished my 2011 singles list, which this otherwise would've definitely had been on. I barely even remember these guys' first big hit, which this sounds nothing like and is why I didn't even know who this song was by for so long, and my only knowledge of them is that they're one of those 'fake indie' radio bands that 'real indie' critics write savage takedowns of, which is probably a good thing. But man, this song is catchy as fuck.

2. Rihanna - "You Da One"
I continue to be confounded as "We Found Love" becomes not just another #1 Rihanna single but her longest running and perhaps her biggest hit since "Umbrella." But even more annoying than that stupid half-song with only one vocal melody is the fact that it's kind of steamrolled over its superior follow-up, which was probably released hot on its heels with the intention of both taking turns at #1 like "Only Girl" and "What's My Name?" had a year beforehand. Instead, this weirdly not terrible Dr. Luke foray into reggae pop is both one of my favorite Rihanna singles of recent vintage and by far one of her least successful, and they've already announced plans to move on and start working "Talk That Talk" as the next single.

3. Melanie Fiona - "4 AM"
After I fell in love with her voice last year with lush songs like "Gone And Never Coming Back" and "Fool For You," this cold, atmospheric track felt like not quite what I wanted to hear from Melanie Fiona and maybe even a jump onto Drake's muffled Canadian slow jam bandwagon. But this song is pretty dope, and that little drum'n'bass break that comes in for a few bars towards the end is a nice touch.

4. Bruno Mars - "It Will Rain"
As annoyingly ubiquitous as Bruno Mars is and as insipid as some of his songs are, I do think he's a pretty talented guy and he occasionally lands on a pretty undeniable tune (I still have a soft spot for "Nothin' On You"). I put up a good defense with this song for a while, especially since it's from a fucking Twilight soundtrack, but a couple times it's popped up on a local R&B station and I've realized that it really does work as an R&B song.

5. Jay-Z & Kanye West - "Gotta Have It"
I have no idea what the logic is behind the single choices for Watch The Throne, but I have to grudgingly respect it since "Niggas In Paris," as annoying as I think it is, was undeniably huge in ways I never would've predicted, and the follow-up is an even more surprising choice, while the songs that once seemed like obvious singles ("Lift Off," "That's My Bitch") languish as album tracks. In a way it's like a sequel to "Otis" and even comes directly after it on the album, except even shorter and more devoid of a typical chorus, which makes it all the more strange and enjoyable to hear on the radio. But the single most surprising thing about "Gotta Have It" is that it was produced by the Neptunes, which my brain still doesn't know how to process.

2012-01-17T08:41:00.000-05:00

On the latest installment of Radio Hits One, I look back on the year in mainstream rock and the preponderance of [blank] the [blank] bands (Foster The People, Cage The Elephant, Young The Giant), and consult Ask Billboard's Gary Trust on the exceptional extent to which AWOLNATION's "Sail" is a slow burning sleeper hit.

2012-01-15T22:24:00.000-05:00

I recommend listening to T-Pain's rEVOLVEr (or RevolveR or whatever asinine capitalization he ended up using) the same day as The Beatles' Revolver to get a good idea of just how unremarkable Pain's fourth album is, but listening to either of his first two albums, Rappa Ternt Sanga and Epiphany, would provide a suitable contrast too. Although my opinion of the guy never totally lined up with popular opinion (I always thought he was more talented as a songwriter and producer than just a guy who caught a lucky break with the AutoTune gimmick, and prefer a lot of his deep cuts to some of his biggest hits), but my decreasing interest in his music coincided with his commercial decline; his last couple albums sold 170 thousand the first week each, while rEVOLVEr only did about 34k. It's possible that T-Pain was never as famous as I thought he was; my wife, who's not a big R&B buff, saw the video for Flo Rida's "Low" today and said "who's the guy singing the chorus who sounds kind of like Nelly?"

T-Pain's flagging career was actually what revived my interest in his music, since I ended up writing a whole column about the six singles he released in advance of rEVOLVEr before one became a big enough hit to get the album a release date, and felt more curious to hear the album after that than I might've otherwise been. And while I wouldn't rate "5 O'Clock" up with the best songs of his peak period, it has turned out to be his biggest hit in years and, unfortunately, easily one of the best songs on a fairly uninspired album.

There are some decent songs on rEVOLVEr; "Default Picture" is one of the best slow jams T-Pain has constructed to date, and there's something kind of enjoyably surreal about a love song written to someone's Twitter avatar (especiall since since the person that wrote it is my Twitter avatar, kind of). But there's a lot of really bland stuff on here, even compared to Thr33 Ringz, which was a step down from his first two albums in quality anyway. The biggest disappointment, though, is that I was always an especially big fan of Nappy Boy Productions, and here T-Pain only did the beats for 5 songs, after producing every track on his first three albums, without any of the outside producers on rEVOLVEr doing much to help the album's quality or variety.

2012-01-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

I wrote about a couple new DJ Class songs for the Baltimore City Paper's Noise blog.

Monthly Report: November Albums

2012-01-11T22:38:00.000-05:00

1. Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu
I usually try to do these monthly reports in a timely fashion and wanted to do this one back in like early December, but then I got caught up in the year-end stuff and am just kinda doing this now for archival purposes. I already put Lulu in my top 10 for 2011, and that was admittedly kind of a rash decision, since it's such a long album released so late in the year that I'm still kind of digesting it. I stand by that decision, though: I genuinely enjoy this long, strange album and think that most of the people heaping "worst album ever" scorn on it were predisposed to say that before ever hearing it, if they even did hear it. As it happens, Lou Reed and Metallica both have kind of brittle, rigid aesthetics that work better together than they have a right too. "Brandenburg Gate" is such a perfect opener and "Iced Honey" and "Cheat On Me" are also favorites.

2. Javier Colon - Come Through For YOu
"The Voice" was a pretty great singing competition reality show, but the thing about the contestants being pretty uniformly good is that it was hard to muster a strong rooting interest in one singer over another. Javier Colon was always my default favorite, though, and I was happy he won. And I started to feel more and more sorry for him after writing this column about the celeb judges on "The Voice" and "Idol" getting more shine than the contestants, especially after "Moves Like Jagger" became one of the biggest songs of the year and Colon's post-"Voice" coronation album sank like a stone, actually debuting on the Billboard 200 lower than his previous major label album did in 2003. But what started as a sympathy listen ended up pretty rewarding, with the second half of the album picking up big time from the so-so first half. "OK, Here's The Truth" is a knockout song and "How Many People Can Say That" has some gorgeous vocal moments.

3. They Might Be Giants - Album Raises New And Troubling Questions
I already proclaimed Join Us my favorite TMBG album in over a decade, so it seemed like a good idea to check out the odds and ends digital album they released a few months later (especially since I preferred 2007's leftovers collection Cast Your Pod To The Wind to its parent album, The Else). This is definitely kind of silly and minor even by They Might Be Giants terms, but it's enjoyable more often than not, at least with quality originals like "Authenticity Trip" and great horn section live versions of early songs like "Boat of Car and "Mr. Me," not so much the webnerd in-joke tracks recorded for Homestar Runner and the Onion AV Club.

4. Yelawolf - Radioactive
Already talked about this a bit in the year-end list, it's by no means band but definitely frontloaded and kind of gently lets the air out of a lot of the things that made Trunk Muzik exciting. The fact that this album has a song that sounds exactly like "Aston Martin Music" is beyond depressing to me.

5. 2 Chainz - T.R.U. REALigion
This tape isn't as good as Codeine Cowboy but it's still pretty good, does a decent job of cementing 2 Chainz's basic goofball appeal and put him in the company of some bigger names but doesn't really feel like the leap forward career move that someone's first Gangsta Grillz tape is usually supposed to be.

Movie Diary

2012-01-09T09:51:00.000-05:00

a) Cowboys & Aliens
I had somewhat high hopes for this as big loud, dumb fun, and while it wasn't bad, it just wasn't the John Favreau popcorn movie I was expecting. Part of that might be down to the fact that Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford are the two craggiest, most stoic action stars you could ever ask for; there wasn't enough of a contrast for them do bounce of each other, and Sam Rockwell didn't do much to fill that role either. Some cool moments, though.

b) Ceremony
I feel like every single time I have tried to watch a random recent Uma Thurman movie in the last few years I have ended up actively irritated by it, so I didn't have high hopes for this, but it has a certain charmingly loose, rambling rhythm to it that made it much better than such a hoary crashing-a-wedding love triangle plot had a right to be. Lee Pace and Jake M. Johnson in particular filled out the ensemble well and made the movie kind of effortlessly funny. The movie even reminded me how bewitching Uma can be.

c) Peep World
I went into this thinking hey this might be really good, and very quickly began to hate every single thing about it. It's like every contemporary 'dysfunctional family of adult children' show or movie from The Royal Tenenbaums to "Arrested Development" mushed together with a plot that's like a meta riff on Running With Scissors and just 100% eye-rolling and insufferable.

d) Hall Pass
I was almost disappointed that this wasn't the total horndog schlockfest the trailers made it out to be, if only because it's not like anyone cares if a Farrelly Brothers movie secretly harbors a wholesome message about marriage and commitment that does more harm to the comedic value and overall plotting of the movie than whatever conceivable good it does for the world. The highlight was probably Richard Jenkins, who I didn't even recognize in the commercials.

e) Rubber
Totally ridiculous horror flick about a sentient and telekinetic tire who rolls around blowing people's heads up, was probably a little too tickled with its own premise (although how could it not be?) and had some annoying tics of direction and camera focus, but I still kind of enjoyed and admired how shamelessly batshit it was.

f) Due Date
It's kind of amazing how fast Zach Galiafinakis went from seeming slightly above dumb mainstream comedies to starring in some of the dumbest ones ever. This movie isn't quite as bad or as derivative of Trains, Planes & Automobiles as the trailers made it seem, but still pretty strained, and really putting Robert Downey Jr. in a comedy as the straight man is just a waste of resources.

g) My Soul To Take
A decent Wes Craven gorefest with a goofy concept and some really stupid ideas but also an okay cast and a few fun death scenes.

h) You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
It's amazing how every few months, without fail, I will watch a recent Woody Allen movie hoping for the best, and without fail, I will be amazed by how completely incompetent he has become at storytelling, dialogue, humor, symbolism, pretty much everything he was once great it.

i) Charlie St. Cloud
This was about as saccharine and silly as you'd expect and yet somehow not (I was reassured by an early scene between the brothers with talk of "rubbing one out" and "something corrosive in the shit" of geese), mostly I was just watching it for the hot chick, though.

j) Black Death
Very, very bleak medieval horror flick starring Sean Bean that my wife was watching, my son and I were playing with his train set so I don't remember much about it.

k) Please Give
Once again a good cast tricks me into watching another indie dramedy that epitomizes everything I hate about modern indie dramedies.

l) Howl's Moving Castle
My wife keeps watching these Hayao Miyazaki movies that keep confirming for me that I just do not get any anime, even the stuff that's supposed to be kind of respectable.

2012-01-06T10:52:00.000-05:00

So I'm turning 30 today! And on Saturday night I'm going to be throwing a big party at one of my favorite Baltimore venues, The Windup Space, with a couple of my favorite Baltimore bands, Soul Cannon and The Water. Those you who are in Baltimore this weekend, whether you know me or the bands, you should really consider stopping by, it's only $5 to get in and we're gonna have a lot of fun. Doors open at 9, music starts at 10.

On a related note, I recently wrote PR copy for some friends that are helping out with the show -- the announcement of Mobtown Studios and the Windup Space's 2012 NOVO Festival, and the announcement of The Water's debut album Scandals And Animals, which is available to pre-order and hear a few songs from now, and will be out in a few weeks.

2012-01-04T14:22:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday night the Baltimore Sun sent me to Rams Head Live to cover an unusual event for the Midnight Sun blog, a 'Gridiron Sing Off' featuring several Baltimore Ravens players and hosted by Ray Rice. It was fun to be in the same room as a few members of the team during such an exciting season, and funny to see Vonta Leach singing "Achy Breaky Heart" and Ray Lewis rapping a few bars of "Hot In Herre."

(photo by Karl Merton Ferron)

The Top 10 Concerts I Saw in 2011

2012-01-02T07:52:00.009-05:00

A year ago, I listed the top 25 shows I saw in 2010. I saw less than 20 shows total in 2011, which is a pretty huge drop off from when I was seeing 70 shows a year in '07 and '08, and that drop is due to a variety of personal and professional factors. Plus I've just gotten really good at flaking out even on shows I really wanted to see and/or told people I was going to. But I made up for the low quantity with quality, because here are 10 really awesome shows I saw this year, with links when I wrote about them:

10. The Dismemberment Plan @ The 9:30 Club. Jan 22nd
9. Jumpcuts @ Joe Squared, May 25th
8. The Songwriter Sessions with Cameron Blake, Sea Couch, Sine Jensen and Adam Trice @ The Golden West, Jan. 15th
7. Out Of Your Head Collective with Susan Alcorn, Mike Cerri, Ethan Snyder and Dustin Carlson @ The Windup Space, Jan. 25th
6. U2 @ M&T Bank Stadium, June 22nd
5. Big In Japan with Katrina Ford, the Water, Infinite Honey, and Avocado Happy Hour @ The Ottobar, Jan. 7
4. White Life and Flock of Dimes @ Soft House, May 5th
3. War On Women and Crimes @ The Charm City Art Space, Oct. 9th
2. Mike Watt & The Missingmen @ The Ottobar, April 1st
1. Steely Dan @ Merriweather Post Pavilion, Aug. 2nd

Honorable mentions to the Foo Fighters, Little Feat and the Nels Cline Singers, among others. One thing I noticed while looking over this list is that several of these shows involved people that are now helping me out with my 30th birthday concert coming up on January 7th, which is definitely not a coincidence. Hopefully I can put on a memorable show on Saturday myself. Come out if you can!

2011-12-30T14:58:00.000-05:00

My last Radio Hits One column of 2011 is about how Billboard's year-end charts show how Hot 100 peaks can be deceiving as far as measuring a song's true degree of success.

2011-12-28T09:44:00.000-05:00

I contributed to the Baltimore City Paper's annual Top Ten issue as usual in 2011, and in The Year In Music I wrote blurbs for Mullyman, White Life and Celebration. I was also one of the many voters for The Year In Music, although I wrote no blurbs and the only album I voted for that made the top 10 was Beyonce (my ballot as submitted on the CP site is slightly different from the 'final' top albums of the year list I finished posting on my blog a couple weeks later, since I'm always making last minute changes to those things).

The 2011 Remix Report Card, Vol. 7

2011-12-27T09:22:00.001-05:00

"Bait (Remix)" by Wale featuring 2 Chainz, Rick Ross and Trey Songz
I was surprised to see an all-star remix of this song out since they've been playing it 24/7 on D.C. radio for months but I haven't seen it on any national charts and it's not even on every copy of Ambition, it's just a bonus track on the deluxe edition. I mostly find this song annoying but the original has a certain amount of momentum that the remix loses, partly because of the way the other rappers flow on this and partly because of not having that stupid "WORK WORK WORK WORK" chant upfront. I hate to give him props but Wale sounds the least awkward on this beat, and Trey Songz sounds by far the most awkward.
Best Verse: Wale
Overall Grade: C-

"Body 2 Body (Remix)" by Ace Hood featuring Rick Ross, Wale, Chris Brown and DJ Khaled
I know this is a big hit and all but it's not the kind of song anyone ever wants or expects a remix form, and it's kind of funny to hear them go all-out, Ace writing a whole new 16 and Khaled doing a goofy Puffy quote intro. Wale's topical Penn State punchline is just painful.
Best Verse: Ace Hood
Overall Grade: D

"Fly Together (Remix)" by Red Cafe featuring Trey Songz, Wale and J. Cole
This track ends with Red Cafe doing the same Puffy "Big Poppa" ad lib quotes that Khaled does at the beginning of the "Body 2 Body" remix, no joke. Small minds think alike. Yes, three remixes in a row with Wale. What the fuck is happening to the world. This song always kinda bummed me out because I hoped after "You Be Killin' Em" that Ryan Leslie would start producing a bunch of rap radio bangers and so far this has been the only one since then and it's kinda lame. At least Trey Songz acquits himself more admirably here than on the "Bait" remix with his verse and improves on the R-Les hook.
Best Verse: Trey Songz
Overall Grade: C+

"Good Life (Remix)" by OneRepublic featuring B.o.B
This is one from months ago that I missed at the time and am including for archival purposes. Obviously B.o.B is a fucking shameful joke and his presence on songs like this just further confirms that. I thought he was done after those bars at the beginning and then he came back later and it was even worse.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: F

"Hard White (Remix)" by Yelawolf featuring T.I. and Slaughterhouse
This is such an inert and commercially doomed attempt at a club banger that loading it up with a bunch of indulgent punchline rappers just makes it more depressing.
Best Verse: Crooked I
Overall Grade: D

"I'm A Boss (Remix)" by Meek Mill featuring T.I., Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, Birdman, Swizz Beatz and DJ Khaled
I love this song so I was just so amped to hear it get probably the most star-studded event remix of the year. The new Swizz addition to the hook is pretty pointless and I can't believe Birdman is still tagging along with Wayne on posse cuts, but T.I. and Meek murder it and I like the way Ross handled his first verse after those seizures.
Best Verse: T.I.
Overall Grade: A

"Magic (Remix)" by Future featuring T.I.
All Future songs suck, even a decent Tip verses doesn't really change that.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: D

"The One That Got Away (Remix)" by Katy Perry featuring B.o.B
A few months ago, people called foul when Katy Perry dropped a remix of "Last Friday Night" on iTunes to get her fifth consecutive #1s. Now she's trying to get a sixth, and after selling the song for 69 cents didn't quite work she's back to the remix well, with an insipid guest on an insipid song.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: F

"Shot Caller (Remix)" by French Montana featuring Diddy and Rick Ross
And once again, we have some '90s Puff Daddy quotes, this time with Mr. Combs himself getting involved. I'm really bummed out that French Montana is becoming too famous for me to pretend that I think that's the name of a sandwich at Arby's, but this song is dope, or at least the beat is. Diddy in the mix and bringing the hook full circle is cool, but giving Ross the "Benjamins" Biggie beat is so offensive I yelled "fuck you!" at the radio the first time I heard this.
Best Verse: Diddy
Overall Grade: B-

"Sleazy 2.0 (Remix)" by Ke$ha featuring Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, T.I. and Andre 3000
The only thing more disgusting that Ke$ha's voice on this track is the most appalling Wiz Khalifa fake laugh yet. Supposed perfectionist recluse Andre 3K jumping on a Ke$ha album track a year ago was pretty goofy, but now throwing his verse in the middle of a posse cut makes a little more sense, although T.I. totally upstages him.
Best Verse: T.I.
Overall Grade: C-

"Stay (Remix)" by Tyrese featuring Rick Ross and Faith Evans
I'd seen this song on the R&B charts for weeks and weeks without ever actually hearing it on the radio, so I had to pull up the original on YouTube before checking out the remix and it's a pretty nice, sweet song, definitely better than what I'm used to hearing from Tyrese. Once more we get some Puffy quoting ("you know we had to do a remix, right?" over bottle clinking) with Big's widow and his new generation wannabe on the track, but the actual track is jacked from Jay's "Politics As Usual," which is appropriate since at least half of Ross's songs get their whole aesthetic from that track.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

2011-12-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

My birthday is on January 6th, and I rarely have a big birthday party, I think largely because everyone, including myself, tends to be kind of partied out after the holidays and New Year's Eve. But I'm turning 30 this time around, so the weekend of my birthday, on Saturday, January 7th, 2012, I will be having a big old birthday bash at one of my favorite clubs in Baltimore, The Windup Space. There will be music from two great Baltimore acts, the hip hop band Soul Cannon and the instrumental duo The Water, and perhaps some more surprises.

I made a Facebook event page for the show, and have invited some folks on there, but really it's open for anyone who wants to come, whether they know me well or not at all. I just want to hang out and drink and hear some great music and be around people I love. It is a concert, so admission is $5, so you can consider paying that your birthday gift to me, if you like. But whatever, it's gonna be fun, if you're in Baltimore that night I hope you stop by. Doors open at 9pm and music starts at 10pm.

2011-12-17T10:16:00.000-05:00

My latest Radio Hits One column for the Village Voice's Sound of the City blog is about the grim realization that 5 of the biggest chart hits of 2011 featured relentlessly catchy and/or annoying whistling melodies.

My Top 50 Albums of 2011

2011-12-12T14:57:00.051-05:00

The album will never die, not just because people like me are still obsessed with that particular unit of measurement as the ultimate object of music consumption, but because recording artists will always record lots of songs and will want to release all of them, not just the occasional 'hit.' Whether we put the album on shuffle more often than not or cherrypick those hits and favorites after the initial listens doesn't matter, the 'new song bundle' or 'annual single artist playlist' or whatever we end up calling it is going to remain a commercially and artistically viable medium to whatever extent music itself will. At least, that's what I'm telling myself this year.

As per my tradition here, I'll be posting each of the 50 entries in the list one at a time throughout this week, 10 a day, and you can follow me on Twitter as I unveil each choice:

50. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
My initial opinion of Thurston Moore's first 'song-based' solo album, 1995's Psychic Hearts was that it was just a bunch of silly riff-based songs he wanted to knock out while Sonic Youth was on hiatus. Over time, I realized how significant it probably was that the first album he'd ever made without his wife and bandmate Kim Gordon while she was tending to their newborn daughter, was full of meditations on girlhood and womanhood and references to some of his female musical heroes (Patti Smith, Yoko Ono). Similarly, one can't help but listen to Demolished Thoughts at the end of 2011 differently than upon its initial release earlier in the year, in light of Moore and Gordon's recently announced split and the album's quiet, elegiac tone and vaguely relationship-themed lyrics. Maybe there is no connection, but with someone whose lyrics are often as opaque and abstract as Moore's, it's actually kind of helpful to get some sense of his inner life informing the music.

49. Yellowbirds - The Color
Sam Cohen of Yellowbirds is also a member of the great Boston band Apollo Sunshine, and was responsible for all of their amazing guitar solos but only wrote and sang some of their best songs. So his solo project is a predictably mixed bag as a collection of songs, but comes off pretty well as a whole thanks to generously textured production and beautiful pedal steel playing.

48. UNKLE - Only The Lonely EP
Coming about a year after after 2010's Where Did The Night Fall, I expected Only The Lonely to be some kind of odds and sods EP maybe padded out with some remixes. Instead, it was a surprisingly substantial-feeling collection of 5 new songs, including some guests as big (Nick Cave) and some songs as good ("The Dog Is Black") as anyone or anything on the preceding full-length, continuing in UNKLE's unlikely evolution into some kind of brooding modern rock act.

47. Diddy-Dirty Money - LoveLOVE vs. HateLOVE
Like that EP by UNKLE, LoveLOVE vs. HateLOVE is a kind of supplemental follow-up to a 2010 release that ends up feeling like a pretty impressive entity in its own right. This mixtape fearues reviously unreleased songs like "Sade" that rival the proper album's best tracks, while a surprisingly rich selection of remixes expand on the Last Train To Paris sound and mood.

46. "Weird Al" Yankovic - Alpocalypse
Although not as good as the late career peak of Straight Outta Lynwood, Yankovic's still got that silly chart pop parody magic. And now that everyone samples and remakes everything with relative easy thanks to technology, the detailed note-for-note reproductions of his targets are less impressive than the way he's able to rewrite the lyrics syllable-for-syllable so that, say, Miley Cyrus is signing about murdering people for the CIA. Also, "Polka Face" is his best polka medley in well over a decade.

45. The Lonely Island - Turtleneck & Chain
Ordinarily "Weird Al" wouldn't have to worry one bit about having the best musical comedy album in any given year, but he had to drop his latest within a couple months of the new kids on the block. Track for track 2009's Incredibad is funnier, but Turtleneck & Chain continues to develop both the rhythm of their joke writing and their ear for articulating every stupid joke smartasses like me wish we could think up while listening to rap mixtapes.

44. Yelawolf - Radioactive
In 2010, Yelawolf emerged as the first remotely exciting or commercially viable white rapper in years with the great Trunk Muzik mixtape and slightly less great major label re-release Trunk Muzik 0-60. In 2011, as he aligned himself with predecessors whose successes he can't possibly hope to match like Eminem and Kid Rock, much less talented white rappers like Mac Miller and Kreayshawn enjoyed greater visibility and chart sucess. So his proper major label debut landed with a thud, packed with too many power ballads aimed at radio formats that will never play him, but there's still a decent number of songs containing that spark that made him so exciting just a year or two ago.

43. Limp Bizkit - Gold Cobra
The Bizkit finally got back with Wes Borland and made an album in the same vein as Chocalate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water, but by that point the backlash had set in so thoroughly that they sold about 3% as much the first week as they had 11 years earlier. I kind of have to give them credit for staying true to their sound, though (and really, I never had a problem with that stupid, ugly, joyous sound). This concludes the white rapper trilogy portion of the list.

42. Incubus - If Not Now, When?
Like Limp Bizkit, Incubus were on the Family Values Tour back in the day and hilariously still have a DJ in their lineup, but otherwise they've gone as far in the opposite direction as possible in the years since then. If Not Now, When? is basically an adult contemporary album that rarely raises its voice or quickens its pulse (the band's big breakthrough ballad, "Drive," would be one of the liveliest things here if it was on this album). And while it's bizarre to even think of a band like Incubus maturing and mellowing out, and their idea of maturity is kind of a silly superficial one, they still actual made a pretty sonically rich album with a satisfyingly sustained mood.

41. Talib Kweli - Gutter Rainbows
I've been overrating Kweli since I was 16 and opining that he was better than Mos, and even now as I kind of shake my head at my own fandom of the guy I just can't quit him. And that's partly because after that dull letdown of a Reflection Eternal reunion album, Gutter Rainbows is actually kind of a return to form, with some impressively ambitious producing and rapping on "Cold Rain" and a monster banger on "Palookas" featuring Sean Price.

40. Styles P - Master of Ceremonies
Styles, like Kweli, is a NYC perpetual second-stringer whose days of even arguable significance are behind him that I will probably always be irrationally loyal to. I'm slightly less embarrassed about being a Styles fan, though, because dude has a great ear for beats and a unique way of putting together words, even if this is one of his more generic solo projects.

39. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
The way people talk about The King of Limbs being an almost laughably flimsy, incoherent album from a band that's gotten awfully good at selling that kind of thing as minimalist mystique, I remember that that's basically how I felt about In Rainbows. But honestly while parts of the album have that screensaver blankness of a lot of their recent work, some of it, especially "Giving Up The Ghost," make for the most I've enjoyed anything from Radiohead in a long time.

38. Gucci Mane - Writings On The Wall II
In 2011, Gucci Mane released probably a hundred songs over half a dozen albums, mixtapes and collaborative projects, and none of them made anywhere near the impact of his 2009 peak or even his already anticlimactic 2011. Writings On The Wall II, despite being a kind of depressingly convenient sequel to one of his best 2009 tapes that also coincided with his release from one of many stints in jail, was the closest he came this year to recapturing that earlier buzz or the effortless listenability of his best work.

37. Patrick Stump - Truant Wave EP
It should be no spoiler to say that Patrick Stump's album Soul Punk is very high on this list. But for most of the year I spent anticipating that record, I obsessed over the six songs on Truant Wave and got acclimated to the Fall Out Boy frontman's solo sound. And while the full-length contains most of his best songs, "Love, Selfish Love" alone is too great for me to simply let the EP fall by the wayside as a forgotten appetizer.

36. Social Distortion - Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes
After a few years of enjoying the hyper referential Americana punk of the Gaslight Anthem, it was fun to hear something new from the band that was basically their equivalent 20 years earlier, still plugging away at their weathered greaser mystique more and more convincingly over time.

35. Fishboy - Classic Creeps
The most endearing nerds from Texas this side of Sheldon Cooper returned this year with an album with an even more tangled and confusing storyline than 2007's secret classic Albatross: How We Failed to Save the Lone Star State with the Power of Rock and Roll, which they help explain this time around with a tie-in web comic, just to underline how absurdly geeky they are.

34. Marsha Ambrosuis - Late Nights & Early Mornings
Marsha Ambrosius began her post-Floetry solo career in earnest as an artist signed to Aftermath Records, which meant guesting on tons of huge Dr. Dre-produced hit rap albums but never releasing one herself. After half a decade on the shelf, though, she finally got the same itch that all Interscope artists stuck in Jimmy jail get, and left to restart her career elsewhere, and finally landed a couple of hit solo singles (including the instant classic "Far Away") and released a terrific album. The covers on the album feel a bit forced as statements ("Butterflies" to remind us that she wrote Michael Jackson's last great single, "Sour Times" to remind us that she's British), but the thing still holds together really well as a consistent listen.

33. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch The Throne
For almost a decade there were few people making music I enjoyed more consistently than Jay-Z, and for the later half of that time Kanye West was his biggest competition. My worship of them as artistically viable musicians still making great records ended a few years ago, though, and sometimes I wonder if it's afterglow or brand loyalty or something even dumber that's kept them still #1 and #2 in the hearts and minds of so many millions, still, after some of the garbage they've made. So I was pleasantly surprised to like Watch The Throne more than any album either of them has made since Graduation, mainly for "That's My Bitch" and "New Day" and "Gotta Have It," but even the lesser tracks aren't Blueprint 3 bad or anything. Shame about the Kanye honk, though.

32. J. Cole - Cole World: The Sideline Story
Cole made a slightly better record than the two guys he pitifully, transparently bases his entire existence upon, mostly because as a producer his sound is still pretty fresh, and his earnest star struck persona doesn't dominate his lyrics as much as, say, that other lame from Canada.

31. J Mascis - Several Shades of Why
The previous albums J Mascis released under his own name never felt too distinct from the band he's best known for -- a solo acoustic live record full of Dinosaur Jr. songs, and two J Mascis & The Fog albums that sounded exactly like Dinosaur but just happened to be branded differently. Now that he's gotten back together with Lou and Murph for a couple of good albums and a bunch of tours, though, J Mascis has finally decided to forge a distinct musical identity as a solo artist, even if it's just about exactly what you'd expect or hope for as far as a mellow and gorgeously produced acoustic studio album from J.

30. E-40 - Revenue Retrievin': Graveyard Shift
E-40's two latest installments in the Revenue Retrievin' series are the loudest albums I heard in 2011, and I don't mean that as some kind of euphemism about how hard the beats hits anything. I mean they are literally, by far, the loudest music on my iPod, so much so that they've kind of made my playlist of 2011 albums impossible to listen to on shuffle -- every few songs some E-40 slap comes up sounding twice as loud as the last song I had on and makes my ears bleed. I don't know if it's a quirk of mastering or what, and in truth it's kind of aggravating, but it also seems appropriate for such vibrant, relentlessly inventive and upbeat rap albums.

29. Dawn Richard - A Tell Tale Heart Mixtape
If E-40 made the most robust-sounding albums of 2011 that I had to turn down my iPod to listen to, Dawn Richard made the best one that was so poorly mastered (if it was mastered at all) that I had to turn my iPod up to listen to it. Of course, lots of rappers make low budget mixtapes that come up short in the production or post-production, but that often fits their grimy aesthetic. Dawn Richard, an R&B singer who was one of the driving forces behind one of the best and biggest-sounding major label albums of the past couple years, Diddy-Dirty Money's Last Train To Paris, deserves better. Ostensibly, that should happen whenever she gets to release the album A Tell Tale Heart that this 'mixtape' exists to promote, but really this feels pretty substantial in and of itself.

28. Deleted Scenes - Young People's Church Of The Air
The first time I heard the Washington, D.C. live favorites Deleted Scenes play the song "Bedbedbedbedbed" at a show last year, it had the kind of instantly familiar feeling that made me wonder whether they were playing a cover I couldn't put my finger on. And when they released their 2nd full-length with that song on it, I got the same feeling again and googled and racked my brain trying to figure out if it was somehow derivative of something. I've since given up and resolved myself to the idea that that's just the feeling you get sometimes when a song is that immediately catchy and appealing that you wonder how nobody wrote it before.

27. Evangelista - In Animal Tongue
Just four albums in, Evangelista is already the longest running and most preductive recording project Carla Bozulich ever maintained, even if both the personnel and the music have been amorphous and inconsistent, more of a free flowing supply of grim and gripping words and music from Bozulich's dark imagination than a band. I've never heard someone who seems so content and fulfilled making such unsettling music.

26. The Roots - Undun
It continues to amaze me that decisions like signing to Def Jam and becoming Jimmy Fallon's house band have somehow resulted in The Roots releasing darker and artsier albums at a quicker pace the last few years than they were able to at any earlier point in their career. Undun is less sonically arresting than Game Theory but moody in a more involving, seductive way than How I Got Over, and even if the whole narrative aspect of the album kind of goes over my head "The OtherSide" knocks.

25. Chevelle - Hats Off To The Bull
I used to use it as kind of an insult to say that Chevelle are a more pop Tool and a less weird Deftones, because ostensibly sanding the edges off of two of the more unique hard rock bands on mainstream radio in the last 15 years should be a bad thing, right? But the fact is, Chevelle really have gradually staked out a territory that is uniquely theirs, and the short, hooky songs they make really are more my speed than those of their most obvious influences.

24. Craig Wedren - Wand
Craig Wedren's voice, persona, lyrics and aesthetic are so fundamentally different from virtually any angular post-punk auteur you could possibly compare him to that he remains a singular, fascinating mind. And Wand is the kind of assured late career tour through all the different sounds he's touched on in the past that would so easily be kind of boring if Wedren wasn't still so hard to pin down or pigeonhole.

23. Jennifer Hudson - I Remember Me
Jennifer Hudson's self-titled 2008 album was by no means bad but was in many ways a misfire, coming along too late to capitalize on Dreamgirls and not featuring much from its all-star cast of producers and songwriters that made the most of that big, amazing voice. I Remember Me is not a very different album but is subtly superior in almost every way (despite not having a knockout hit on the level of "Spotlight":). This time the murderer's row of R&B hitmakers turns in more top shelf material, including Alicia Keys, who seems to be making the most of her maternity leave from stardom by writing some pretty good songs for others, and J-Hud just seems more comfortable and assured of what kind of music that voice should be accompanied by.

22. Parts & Labor - Constant Future
Parts & Labor made my top 10 three years in a row from 2006 to 2008, and when they took three years to follow up that run, the album they came back with was not really any kind of drop off, but I think I finally had more than I needed of their glorious, skronky, bombastic sound. So I can't say I'm heartbroken that these guys finally decided to pack it in a few months after the album's release; they had a good run, and a more consistent decade than most bands of their era.

21. Sonic Youth - SYR9: Simon Werner a Disparu
Meanwhile, you'd think I'd have had more than my fill of Sonic Youth by this point, but being as they are my favorite band of all time, I was pretty well freaked out by the prospect that they may be breaking up or perhaps even just not recording a new album anytime soon. As such, the latest and perhaps greatest installment of the SYR series represents not just perhaps their best long form instrumental work to date but maybe their last full-length collaboration, and feels all the more essential for that.

20. Sloan - The Double Cross
Now that Sonic Youth may be ceasing to be my favorite working band defying the odds to make good records past the twenty year mark, Sloan are stepping to celebrate XX years in the game with The Double Cross, continuing an impressive late career resurgence. The album is even more crisp and succinct than 2008's Parallel Play, but the opening three tracks retain the seamless running-into-each-other rock opera feel of 2007's Never Hear The End Of It. Unfortunately, the copy of The Double Cross that I bought from eMusic has big awkward pauses between tracks that totally ruin those segues.

19. Mouse On Tha Track - Swagga Fresh Freddie
A lot of really consistent and promising hip hop producers have quickly fallen the wayside if the label or star they were attached to goes out of the spotlight, and that certainly seemed like a foregone conclusion for Mouse On Tha Track when Trill Ent.'s hits started to dry up and Lil Boosie went to jail. So it was a pleasant surprise when Mouse not only kept up his visibility with this tape but turned out to be a capable enough rapper that it didn't feel like he was wasting good beats on himself. Probably the party record of the year.

18. bb&c - The Veil
Although I continue to voraciously consume virtually every release Nels Cline has any hand in, I definitely tend to prioritize projects in which he's a bandleader or composer, or a sideman to a songwriter I enjoy, over his more collaborative instrumental improv records. But this live debut by the trio bb&c, with saxophonist Tim Berne and drummer Jim Black, is one of Cline's most molten lava hot sets ever, just an ecstatic, unrelenting thrill ride of skronky melodies and propulsive rhythms.

17. Beyonce - 4
Beyonce created an incredible 8 song cycle of all the feelings of infatuation, exhilaration, frustration and vindication that come with love and marriage, complete with some of the most daring music and thrilling vocal performances of her already impressive career. And then she padded it out with some shitty singles like "Party" and "Run The World," because 4 was apparently named for the number of songs you need to remove from the album to make it a solid listen.

16. They Might Be Giants - Join Us
There's an art to the playful whimsy of They Might Be Giants' best songs: they're not jokes that exist solely for comedic value, or puzzles to be methodically taken apart and decoded, or even random bursts of absurdity to be enjoyed merely as catchy nonsense. Most of the songs on Join Us, their best album in at least 15 years (and that's saying something, since those have been 15 very prolific years) often threaten to be one or all of those things before ultimately becoming none of the above. "Can't Keep Johnny Down" and "When Will You Die" and "You Don't LIke Me" and "2082" and "Canajoharie" are like strange little short stories in song form, written by guys whose imagination is just bottomless in a way that might strike you as obnoxious but can also be something to behold.

15. Fiend (International Jones) - Tennis Shoes & Tuxedos
No Limit survivor Fiend released something insane like 5 mixtapes this year of his new smoked out suave James Bond persona, and to be honest I don't know if I need 5 mixtapes of anything, much less that, but I'm still bumping that first one that dropped back in January.

14. Butch Walker And The Black Widows - The Spade
Butch Walker made my #1 album of 2010, I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart, and while the follow-up didn't have the same kind of impact on me, perhaps because it wasn't the first album I heard by him, it helped cement him as one of my favorite songwriters in the world these days, while his backup band the Black Widows continue to gel into a perfect foil for him, even making contributions to the songwriting on The Spade.

13. Robin Thicke - Love After War
Robin Thicke's unlikely status as the only white guy in urban music who has virtually no pop crossover ("Sex Therapy" was an R&B chart-topper that scraped the Hot 100 at No. 100) makes his evolution from son of a sitcom star to soul music sex symbol kind of funny, but the truth is this guy is fucking talented, and 2008's Something Else remains one of my favorite R&B albums of the last few years. Love After War is a much longer and almost inevitably less consistent record, but it shares many of its strengths while showing that he still has some ideas up his sleeve, including a husky, almost raspy midrange that he sounds increasingly comfortable with after years of leaning a bit too hard on smooth falsetto.

12. The Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
Sometimes I wonder if other people have more sophisticated expectations from rock music than I do, because for them, the huge power chords and singalong choruses and propulsive drumming of Foo Fighters songs just isn't enough for them. And granted, Dave Grohl's songwriting is a bit formulaic, and his lyrics can be kind of a mess ("the heart is a clock/ just like a bomb it keeps on ticking away" is the most appalling mixed metaphor of 2011). But when these guys are on, they're pretty fucking good, and they were on for more of Wasting Light than nearly any other album they've ever made.

11. DJ Quik - The Book of David
His last album, 2009's BlaQKout with Kurupt, put its playful creativity up front and buried some pretty serious and hard won widom just beneath the surface, while The Book of David is an ostensibly more personal solo effort that puts its ugliest dirty laundry and hardest beats on prominent display while still being boatloads of infectious fun in its own right. I tend to prefer the former to the latter, but I respect both as formidable creative achievements.

10. Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin'
Stone Rollin' has largely been sold or discussed as a spiritual successor to 2008's overly faithful Motown pastiche, The Way I See It. And while the early rock'n'roll homages of Stone Rollin' root it in a similar retro aesthetic, the truth is it's a much more interesting and creative album, bridging its classic influences with a modern sensibility that's uniquely Saadiq like all his best work, from Instant Vintage to Tony! Toni! Toné! When all is said and done and this inevitably makes far fewer year-end lists than The Way I See It, please know that critics jumped the gun and rallied around the wrong album.

9. Tity Boi (2 Chainz) - Codeine Cowboy
For years I repped for Tity Boi as one of the most underrated Southern rappers wandering around the lower rungs of the major label system, back when he was saying memorably goofy shit like "my ring look like I peed on my pinky" on Disturbing Tha Peace posse cuts. But it remains a bizarre but kind of pleasant surprise to me that this tall, dorky looking old industry C-lister (who says he's 27 but c'mon, no way) has changed his name and shifted his career momentum to become the hottest rapper in Atlanta with no major deal. He's not an expert punchline rapper -- even his funniest lines are basically dad jokes -- but he's more clever than he gets credit for and a strange kind of everyman charisma.

8. Lou Reed & Metallica - Lulu
No, this is not a joke. No, I am not sure. But honestly, this is one of the more exhilarating listening experiences I've had. Metallica and Lou Reed have both made music that have meant something to me over the years, although not nearly as much as one or the other has for a lot of people, but the fact is neither of them was ever going to make anything by themselves at this late date that would be remotely as interesting as Lulu. And really they got where they are by not giving a fuck what anyone thought for decades, so why would they start now? The reaction to this album was very similar to Chinese Democracy, but the difference is that album was boring. This is the furthest thing from it -- the music and the lyrics live up to the album's conceptually ludicrous existence over and over and over, for 90 minutes, and I love it.

7. Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Lady Gaga came into public consciousness as the queen of the iTunes era, a #1 single factory who people vaguely respected for her musical talent but didn't necessarily want to hear a full-length record from. In 2011, though, her singles campaign for Born This Way did just fine but not excessively well (leaving Rihanna and Katy Perry to fight over the crown), while the album itself held together as a cohesive aesthetic statement about her commitment to both '80s retro and millenial club beats. She's the kind of artist whose albums should feel wrung dry by the end of the promotional cycle, but five singles later it's still full of deep cuts I love.

6. E-40 - Revenue Retrievin': Overtime Shift
Does this deserve to be so much higher on the list than its counterpart, Graveyard Shift? Probably not. But E-40 did release four of the best rap albums of the past two years (and has three on the way next year), and this one has the most songs I enjoy on it, so I wanted to make sure at least one got into my year-end top 10.

5. Meek Mill - Dreamchasers
As rap becomes a stratified layer cake of a thousand "everyone's a cult hero to somebody" micro-movements and nobody's happy with where their favorite artist lands in the pecking order unless it's someone from Young Money, you take your comfort with the new order where you can get it. For a young old head like me who just wants to be able to hear something that really knocks on the radio, seeing guys like 2 Chainz or especially Meek Mill on the come up in 2011 gave me a little bit of hope that I wouldn't have to totally give up on the new generation of Big Sean-type bullshit. "Ima Boss" and "House Party" were instant classic singles but the whole of Dreamchasers is full of songs of that caliber and very little else, especially that great title track and "Middle Of Da Summer." Now I'm in the awkward position of not even anticipating Meek's major label debut all that much because it's hard to imagine him capturing his voice and sound more perfectly with the right amount of pop sheen than he does here.

4. The Disciplines - Virgins Of Menace
Ken Stringfellow became one of my favorite songwriters of all time as co-leader of the Posies, mostly because he had such an unheralded talent for putting a little venemous punk rock energy into the band's gorgeous harmony-laden power pop. But he soon eased into a mellower solo career full of lo-fi acoustic ballads and piano pop and country twang, So when Stringfellow started a scrappy garage band with a bunch of Swedes for the Disciplines' 2008 debut Smoking Kills, it felt like kind of an odd left turn for its own sake from a guy with an increasingly scattershot discography. So I was amazed when the band's second album turned out to be a 34-minute thrill ride of scorched earth punk rock from a guy who learned enough from his tenures as a member of Big Star and R.E.M. to sneak a jangly hook into just about anything.

3. Lloyd - King of Hearts
If anyone should be able to oversee and exec produce a great major label R&B or rap album, it's Polow Da Don, but his first three attempts for his Zone 4 imprint, one by Rich Boy and two by Keri Hilson, fell short. Then the label picked up an established star on the rebound, and Lloyd became Polow's perfect foil, a little too sunny for his hardest beats but not so much that the contrast was more jarring than charming. At times Lloyd might have strained under the weight of trying not to be such a helium-voiced sweetheart, such as on that Trey Songz collab, but even on a strip club anthem like "Shake It 4 Daddy" he can't help but goofily address the woman giving him a lapdance as "miss stripper lady."

2. Patrick Stump - Soul Punk
"I'm not from Williamsburg or Silver Lake/ does anyone have any other obvious complaints?" is Patrick Stump's opening joke on "Cryptozoology," the second part of the 8-minute centerpiece of his debut solo album. By the end of the song, he's yelling out to the indie tastemakers that he knows will never give him the time of day "I don't have to prove myself to you," but the fact is you don't play and sing every note of an entire album yourself and put so much of your life and ideas and beliefs into the lyrics of each song if you don't have something to prove. Stump proved what a brilliant, talented guy he is on Soul Punk for anyone who might have enjoyed Fall Out Boy's classic swan song Folie A Deux who might not believe he could make as good an album on his own, but of course even fewer people are listening now than were listening then. I'd give anything for this guy to switch careers with Bruno Mars.

1. The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar
I wish every rock band was as loud as they were hooky as they were unpredictable, and were able to take whatever their particular sound and sensbility is to the hardest rocking and most shamelessly pop and restlessly arty extremes. If you can balance out all three of those qualities, you've got me. I don't expect that to happen very often, especially on a debut album, but The Joy Formidable reminded me that it doesn't have to be a futile pipedream.

2011-12-11T14:00:00.000-05:00

This is Dean Pelton, a character played by Jim Rash on NBC's "Community."

This is Richard DeLongpre, a character voiced by French Stewart on FOX's "Allen Gregory."

I am not the first person to note a similarity -- before I watched the first episode of "Allen Gregory" a friend of mine told me, "Allen Gregory's parents are 2 men! One of them is the dean from Community." Even after I realized his error while watching the episode, the other friend watching it with me said "Is that the dean from Community?" If you google, say, the terms "Dean Pelton" and "Allen Gregory" together, you'll see that this has been pretty widely noted discussed (although some, apparently, have compared DeLongpre to another bald, bespectacled cartoon character, Rusty Venture from "The Venture Bros.")

Here is small contribution to this conversation that I haven't seen anyone else make note of yet:

This is Jeremy, Richard DeLongpre's life partner on "Allen Gregory," voiced by Nat Faxon. The show frequently implies that the handsome Jeremy was a straight man that Richard initially forced into a gay relationship, which aside from being one of the many really strange and discomforting plot elements on "Allen Gregory," brings up another "Community" parallel, since the sexually ambiguous Dean Pelton has often seemed attracted to the show's handsome main character, Jeff Winger, and over time the show has been more overt about Dean Pelton being clearly gay and sometimes deliberately forcing Jeff Winger to spend time with him in somewhat romantic or sexual situations.

Now here's the weird part:

Here is Jim Rash, the Dean Pelton actor and Richard DeLongpre doppelganger, with Nat Faxon, the actor who voices Jeremy, Richard DeLongpre's life partner. In real life, Rash and Faxon are longtime collaborators and writing partners, who wrote the screenplay to the new George Clooney movie The Descendants together. You have to wonder if Faxon was ever aware of the similarities between these characters as he worked on "Allen Gregory," or if perhaps there was ever plans for Rash to voice DeLongpre, something that NBC could've nixed since "Community" upgraded Rash to a regular cast member this fall, around the same time "Allen Gregory" debuted on FOX.

2011-12-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

Last Monday when DatPiff.com premiered the new Los mixtape The Crown Ain't Safe, hosted by DJ Ill Will and DJ Drama, I was one of the first to listen to the mixtape and liveblogged my reactions for the Baltimore City Paper's Noise blog.

My Top 50 Singles of 2011

2011-12-05T07:06:00.049-05:00

I've always enjoyed writing about singles and the singles chart, but this year more than any other I feel like that's been the biggest and most rewarding category of my music writing. Between the Singles Jukebox, my new Radio Hits One column, and the Monthly Report here in which I pick my five favorite singles every month, I've gotten to keep track of what I like and how it's doing pretty closely throughout the year. The interesting thing, though, is only about half of this top 50 was featured in that Monthly Report -- a lot of songs I was excited about when they were new kind of dropped off the charts quickly and I didn't have a chance to really appreciate how they'd hear on a daily basis like the best pop singles. Meanwhile, a lot of songs that I hated at first and gave low marks on the Singles Jukebox or just didn't think were anything special slowly wormed their way into my heart. So I feel like the end of the year is a good time to just admit which songs I really liked, whether I wanted to or not.

As per my tradition here, I'll be posting each of the 50 entries in the list one at a time throughout this week, 10 a day, and you can follow me on Twitter as I unveil each choice:

50. Jennifer Hudson - "No One Gonna Love You"
From 2002 to 2005, Rich Harrison was one of the most exciting ascendant producers in R&B, mixing the sample-driven funk bombast of hip hop with subtle songwriting and a sumptuous sense of texture. And then, for some reason, the hits dried up, and even the occasional megastars that still worked with him didn't pick his tracks as singles, while his girl group brainchild RichGirl was a bust. 2011 finally offered a little bit of hope, as Harrison scored a couple of great minor urban radio hits, "No One Gonna Love You" and Marsha Ambrosius's "Late Nights & Early Mornings," that retained his strengths as a songwriter and producer without clinging to his over-the-top signature sound.

49. Lil Wayne f/ Rick Ross - "John"
Rick Ross has been a part of a lot of great songs, but is so rarely the best thing about them. I can count on one hand the solo tracks he's done that I actually consider really good and memorable, and "I'm Not A Star" is one of them. So as odd as it was for Lil Wayne to invite Ross onto a remake of a year-old album track as one of the advance singles for Tha Carter IV, I enjoyed that he breathed new life into a good, kinda slept on song, and that Polow Da Don brought a little something new to his version of the original J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League beat. Shame about the title, though, seems just stupid to name the song so awkwardly after that stupid Lennon namecheck.

48. Britney Spears - "Till The World Ends"
I'm on record as hating pretty much every Britney single besides "Crazy" and "Toxic," but this one gradually got past my defenses bit by bit after the local Top 40 station played the remix with Nicki Minaj and Ke$ha into the ground. Still a pretty overrated song, but not bad.

47. Rihanna - "S&M"
Another song that I warmed to after a remix involving Britney, but in this case it was because Britney sounded so incredibly timid and wrong trying to sing that chorus that it made me realize how great Rihanna sounded ripping into it. It's pretty pathetic that this was the best of the SIX singles from Loud, though.

46. Sick Puppies - "Riptide"
Last year's "Odd One" was the Sick Puppies song I really like, but this one has a pretty nice triplet-heavy hook, and a prominent bassline for no other apparent reason than to give the hot chick bass player lots of face time in the video. It just cracks me up that there's a band with a name like Sick Puppies whose frontman basically sings like Jamie Walters that co-writes all their songs with Rock Mafia (who produced most of Miley Cyrus's hits).

45. New Boyz f/ The Cataracts & Dev - "Backseat"
Rap history is full of opportunists who stumble onto the charts via a buzzing regional scene, and then jump any bandwagon they can to stay in the national spotlight, but few have done it faster or more shamelessly than New Boyz, who are featured on the current Hot fucking Chelle Rae single. But I gotta say, I like this song better than "Like A G6," it's just some catchy, cool-sounding garbage.

44. Taylor Swift - "The Story Of Us"
I don't begrudge Taylor Swift her success but I really do wonder what the critics I know who worship her hear that I don't, because I feel like everything she does well as a songwriter is equalled by Sara Bareilles or any other garden variety VH1 adult contempo type. But now and again she comes up with something that actually has a pulse and I do get hooked in.

43. Sara Bareilles - "Gonna Get Over You"
As I alluded to above, Sara Bareilles is my Taylor Swift, I just adore her and almost every song and video she does for some reason. There are some singers where I just kind of have a crush on their voice and get all daydreamy whenever I hear it (see also: Kelly Clarkson, Keri Hilson, Eleni Mandell, Kelly Rowland).

42. Jason Aldean f/ Kelly Clarkson - "Don't You Wanna Stay"
Unfortunately, nothing on Clarkson's latest album made me swoon like this song. Man she needs to do a country album.

41. The Red Hot Chili Peppers - "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie"
At first I hated this as much as most other recent RHCP hits, especially once I realized how much that stupid "hey now, we've got to make it rain somehow" chorus resembled their last hit, "Snow (Hey Oh)." But something about the groove of the song and the way it kind of stretches out and builds this nice relaxed atmosphere eventually grew on me, against all my better instincts. And these lists are about being honest about what I enjoy above maintaining my dignity, for better or worse.

40. Three Days Grace - "Lost In You"
Three Days Grace is one of those post-grunge bands bands that you're absolutely sick of if you listen to rock radio, but have barely even heard of if you don't (alongside Seether, Theory Of A Deadman, Shinedown, etc.). But trust me, these guys are pretty awful and you'd hate them more than Nickelback if they were as visible. But this, the fourth single off their 2011 album, turned out to be a rare moment of tasteful restraint with a great guitar tone, and was somewhat predictably their second-least successful single ever.

39. Nicki Minaj - "Super Bass"
I don't really like most of this song all that much, and kind of feel like people have overrated it since it's so much closer to what a good Nicki Minaj solo single should be than earlier efforts like "Your Love" and "Right Thru Me." But the bridge has a strangely strong emotional effect on me, it wa really one of the best middle eights in pop music all year.

38. Rebecca Black - "Friday"
The whole Rebecca Black thing ceased to be any fun about as quickly as any other meme, but this was still one of the funniest, strangest, most accidental novelty hits the internet era has given us, and every moment of the song and the video is tattooed on my brain forever.

37. Katy Perry - "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)"
I thought it was weirdly sweet of Katy Perry to kind of take Rebecca Black under her wing (particularly for one of the actual good singles from the neverending Teenage Dream campaign), because I think if everyone's really honest about it there's really not much of a talent gap between them.

36. Michelle Branch - "Loud Music"
I'm bummed that this song didn't really pop off, it sounded like such a hit to me. Would've been huge if Katy did it, obviously.

35. Maroon 5 f/ Christina Aguilera - "Moves Like Jagger"
This song seemed like the most garish desperate mistake on first blush, but as it quickly dominated the charts and pop radio I realized that I really like the vocal melody and Adam Levine's performance, and don't really mind the rest of it either. At any rate, it's an improvement on the uninspired initial three singles from Hands All Over before this bonus track swooped in and saved the project from being a total flop.

34. Diddy-Dirty Money f/ Trey Songz - "Your Love"
For most of Last Train To Paris, Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper basically act as the Greek chorus of Diddy's oddyssey of heartbreak, tenderly singing out the emotions he can't quite express with his own voice. So it's kind of jarring, in a great way, when "Your Love" shows up with filthy come-ons like "want me to be your little slut?" or "LET YOUR TONGUE WALK ON THIS PUSS-AY!" In the context of the album it feels like one of the less adventurous cuts, but when it popped up on the radio it stuck out as one of Polow Da Don's most dramatic and thunderous productions yet, with all that subsonic bass and gorgeous vocoded backing vocals.

33. My Chemical Romance - "SING"
As much as I can't stand "Glee" and think the shower of shitty covers it fills the Hot 100 with these days is abhorrent, and kind of respect the rock bands like the Foo Fighters and Kings of Leon who refuse to have their songs featured in the show, I like what it says about My Chemical Romance that they didn't give a shit and were fine with it, especially for a song like this that actually makes sense on "Glee."

32. Lady Gaga - "Judas"
It's a testament to the enormity of Gaga's success that this is the lowest charting of her first 11 singles and widely considered a flop but still cracked the top 10. I kind of get why people think this is annoying or too similar to her other RedOne collaborations, but I still think it sounds really kinetic and inventive, and over time I've slowly come to prefer it to the bigger hit it was supposed to be the follow-up to, "Born This Way."

31. Miguel - "Quickie"
This song could so easily be too smugly obnoxious to stand, but the unexpected richness of Miguel's harmonies on that "I don't wanna be loved" hook and the creeping, swinging pace of the Fisticuffs beat make it just sound too damn good to dismiss.

30. Black Eyed Peas - "Just Can't Get Enough"
No matter how ridiculous and cartoonish BEP get, I can't help but appreciate that will.i.am still buries all this rap nerd detail in their songs, like the "Jam Master Jay" drums in "Just Can't Get Enough" that are so deep in the mix on "Just Can't Get Enough" that virtually nobody talks about it.

29. Melanie Fiona - "Gone & Never Coming Back"
Melanie Fiona's 2009 single "It Kills Me" went #1 on the R&B charts and left me could. This huge-sounding stadium soul banger stalled at #37, and she issued the relatively subdued "4 AM" as a follow-up that did even worse at radio. Hopefully that album will drop in 2012, though.

28. Nicki Minaj f/ Drake - "Moment 4 Life"
This is really one of the best beats of the year and I'm not sure why there weren't a billion freestyles over it. Nicki's singing on this is awful and her rapping isn't much better but Drake steps up for possibly the one and only time when he's the best MC on a collaborative track.

27. Young The Giant - "My Body"
A totally moronic, ridiculously anthemic song of which there just aren't enough on rock radio these days. According to the band they just threw it together one day in practice as a way to blow off steam, and then it became their first hit that they, for some strange reason, got invited to play at the VMA's. Not a promising band by any means, but the singer's voice is really unique and appealing so they've probably got a future.

26. R. Kelly - "Love Letter"
R.'s gradual commercial decline in the last few years has been a real bummer, especially because he clearly still knows how to write a great song but has lost his 'touch' in other, more intangible ways. When the Love Letter album was preceded by the nightmarishly desperate retro of "When a Woman Loves," I kinda gave up hope on the whole project, but then the album turned out to be pretty good and the title track was a great little sleeper hit that seemed to stay on the radio all year.

25. Chris Brown - “Yeah 3X”
I never really felt any kind of guilt or conflict about continuing to enjoy R. Kelly's music after he was revealed to have done some morally questionable things in his life, but I kind of strongly disliked Chris Brown's whole personality and voice and everything even before he turned out to be an abusive shithead. But the frustrating thing is that his music actually kinda got better after what should have been a career-ending ordeal, and so it became increasingly hard not to grudgingly enjoy at least one of his dozen or so post-comeback hits. For most people the track they made exceptions for was Chris's tribute to the rap stylings of Jermaine Dupri, "Look At Me Now," but personally I thought the cheesy Europop single he had out at the same time was, well, one of the best cheesy Europop R&B songs of the year. It says a lot about Chris's state of mind, though, that one of the most upbeat songs he's ever done still tells haters to "shut the fuck up" (while his biggest seductive slow jam of the year repeatedly berates a woman, "don't you be on that bullshit").

24. Pink - "Fuckin' Perfect"
By the time Pink released a greatest hits collection, I felt like a full blown fan of her singles and especially her last album, Funhouse, so I was happy that she threw a couple new songs out there and kept her hit parade running a little longer before having a baby and taking a well-deserved break. "Raise Your Glass" was nice but felt kind of short-lived, while "Fuckin' Perfect" seemed to hang around much longer and took a while to really grow on me, but it did. I still think the post-Cee Lo "look what kind of song title we can get on the pop charts" name of the song is kind of lame though.

23. Lupe Fiasco - "Show Goes On"
I'm fine with artists selling out if I have no real respect for their true artistic vision. The advance singles like "I'm Beamin'" that Lupe Fiasco released for his third album were horrible and after the album was (justifiably) shelved, fans protested and, according to Lupe, Atlantic Records basically gave him this song, told him not to say anything too deep or political on it, and that they'd use it as his lead single and release the album. It worked, his career's on a huge upswing, and he owes it all to making this stupid, catchy song (which I already really liked by the time I even had any idea about that damn Modest Mouse interpolation).

22. Incubus - "Adolescents"
"Adolescents" hit rock radio as Incubus's 'weird' new single, midtempo and brooding but also not quite one of their heartthrob power ballads. Then the album If Not Now, When? revealed that that was the closest thing to a radio single they'd written, and the song kind of started to sound huge and anthemic in the context of the album, which made me appreciate it more on the radio.

21. Meek Mill f/ Rick Ross - "Ima Boss"
E-40 has a song called "Rick Ross Horns" but I feel like horn loops have been sorely missed in mainstream rap lately, including in Ross's music and especially the kind of cheap synth horns that make "Ima Boss" sound like such a great hard plastic banger.

20. Coldplay - "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall"
Coldplay are forever teetering between major backlash and widespread "OK, they're not that bad" resignation, and I've been personally firmly in the latter camp ever since Viva La Vida, so I was happy to embrace a song with a title as designed to ignite the former sentiment as "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall," especially since it was so beautifully assembled and produced.

19. Lloyd f/ Awesome Jones!!!! - "Cupid"
There were murmerings of Polow Da Don doing a solo album after he upstaged his own artist, Rich Boy, on his biggest hit, "Throw Some D's," but it never seemed like something he was actually interested in pursuing. So Polow's odd relationship with the spotlight took a new turn when he started doing basically mixtape shouts on R&B songs, screaming "NEW LLOYD!" and "NEW SHIT" at the top of verses all over Lloyd's King Of Hearts and for some reason giving himself a featuring credit as 'Awesome Jones!!!!' on the album's best single.

18. Death Cab For Cutie - "You Are A Tourist"
It's weird to realize that two of the biggest indie rock success stories on mainstream radio over the past decade are bands that I still kind of think of as "Built To Spill wannabes but more mellow and songwritery" (Death Cab) and "Built To Spill wannabes but more rough and eccentric" (Modest Mouse). And it remains that the Death Cab singles I like the most are the ones that make me think "why is Built To Spill on the radio?" the first couple times I hear it, between "Cath..." and especially "You Are A Tourist," which actually has some BTS-y guitar leads.

17. Trey Songz f/ Drake - "Unusual"
In a year when both of these guys were badly overexposed, it was nice that they had the decency to occasionally grab a really hot beat.

16. The Joy Formidable - "Whirring"
It's interesting how when this song was released on an indie EP as they were an up-and-coming band, it was a 3-minute pop song, but by the time it became a major label radio hit, it was a 6-minute monster with a long noisy instrumental outro (although a lot of stations still played a shorter edit). In either incarnation, though, a great great song.

15. Travis Porter - "Bring It Back"
I didn't much care for their breakthrough hit "Make It Rain" (partly because what is even the point of having a song with that title after there was a much bigger hit with a much catchier Lil Wayne hook by that name not long ago), but this one was really just a blast, especially when the drums drop out for the chorus and that weird synth that sounds like a woman singing comes in.

14. Waka Flocka Flame f/ Kebo Gotti - "Grove St. Party"
Even though Flockaveli was one of my top 10 albums last year, I was never really that big on any of its first three hit singles. So I was happy when one of my favorite tracks became the late-breaking fourth single, as well as one of the first Lex Luger tracks on the radio that didn't sound like all the others people were used to from him.

13. Avril Lavigne - "What The Hell"
I feel kind of bad for Avril, her singles were surprisingly good this year but she kind of fell by the wayside of all the other girls with lesser Dr. Luke tracks crowding up the charts.

12. Marsha Ambrosius - "Far Away"
After sinking most of his post-Roc-A-Fella career into the supposedly important careers of Saigon and Jay Electronica, it's nice to occasionally hear Just Blaze remind us that he can actually make great left field radio hits. The times when I'd hear the full 7-minute album version on the radio were really special.

11. Adele - "Rolling In The Deep"
Every once in a while a song seems to just steamroll over the world with such a massive sense of ubiquity and consensus praise that I feel like whatever I have to say about it good or bad matters even less than usual. And while I would still occasionally throw my pointless, powerless dissenting opinion at a song like "Hey Ya," this is one of those times where I'll just say yeah, "Rolling In The Deep" is pretty fucking good, but you knew that already.

10. Kelly Rowland f/ Lil Wayne - "Motivation"
I never thought I'd see a year in which Kelly Rowland had a bigger hit than Beyonce (the biggest hit from 4, best thing I never had, peaked one spot higher on the Hot 100 than "Motivation," but only went gold where "Motivation" went platinum). I also never thought Destiny's Child's resident nice girl beta female would pull of such an ominously sexy femme fatale slow jam. I was happy to be proven wrong. I wish I could just wipe Lil Wayne's whole presence off of the song, though.

9. Cee-Lo Green f/ Melanie Fiona and Philip Bailey - "Fool For You"
A year after every cornball who doesn't really listen to R&B lost their shit for the horrible Bruno Mars-penned retro novelty "Fuck You," Cee-Lo finally got the biggest urban radio hit of his long career with an actual gorgeous soul song, dueting with one of my favorite new female voices in R&B over lush harmonies by a member of Earth, Wind & Fire.

8. Brianna - "Marilyn Monroe"
With most new female rappers following Nicki's wacky lead and crisply overenunciating in goofy fake accents, it was refreshing to hear Miami's Brianna casually knock out all these punchlines in such a loose drawl. This song still hasn't really hit big but every time I hear it on the radio it just feels so perfect and destined to be huge.

7. AWOLNATION - "Sail"
An electronic side project by the singer of post-grunge one hit wonders Home Town Hero, AWOLNATION provided rock radio with its most arresting and unlikely hit of 2011. In the year of shitty electro alternative like Foster The People, "Sail" was the perfect dark tangled flipside to the braindead hooks of "Pumped Up Kicks." And now it's in its 44th week on the Alternative Songs chart, and is still in the top 10.

6. Pitbull f/ Ne-Yo, AfroJack and Nayer - "Give Me Everything"
Early in his career, Pitbull seemed poised to become a major star, a fun, charismatic rapper who was at the center of several movements just then peaking in popularity (Miami rap, Lil Jon's crunk empire, and the new wave of Latin rap and reggaeton), with each single from his debut album hitting bigger than the last and some great guest verses raising his profile. Then, his momentum stalled and a half decade after everyone kind of forgot about Pit, he emerged as pop radio's rapper of choice at the exact moment when the clubby dance rap he excels at became the sound of popular music. I don't like most of his new music as much as 2004's M.I.A.M.I. (Money Is A Major Issue), but "Give Me Everything" was a pretty perfectly little encapsulation of what he does well intersecting with what's popping right now, and remains superior in every way to the song that supplanted it at #1 and ultimately became a bigger hit, LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem."

5. The Foo Fighters - "Rope"
Once a band has a greatest hits collection as packed with hits as the Foo Fighters and then keeps on releasing radio singles as good as "Rope," they're basically just showing off, going into overtime. The fact that they finally broke with the "All My Life"/"The Pretender" formula for a different kind of taut, brooding lead single with a more spacious groove and a buttrock cowbell jam section and a more unique, unpredictable melody just makes it even better.

4. Meek Mill f/ Young Chris - "House Party"
Instead of Kid N Play nostalgia or a more calculated club banger, the most fun single from 2011 rap's grimiest new star is an appropriately ugly, twisted jam detailing one fucked up party over creepier bells and synths than most of the year's street rap anthems.

3. Lady Gaga - "The Edge of Glory"
Clarence Clemons playing a solo on a huge top 10 hit for the first time in decades weeks before his death was both one of the most exhilarating highs and heartbreaking lows of 2011 pop music. I'm still really pulling for some kind of Clarence tribute, maybe at next year's Grammys, where Gaga and Springsteen sing a medley of this and "Hair" and some E Street classics.

2. Beyonce - "Countdown"
Every week that "Party" sits higher on the Hot 100 and R&B charts than "Countdown" just kills me. Why is this song not joining the pantheon occupied by "Crazy In Love" and "Single Ladies," or even just reaching the heights of a sleeper Beyonce classic like "Get Me Bodied"? Like my Gaga/Springsteen fantasy, I like to imagine this being refashioned as a New Year's Eve anthem and rocketing to #1 in the last week of 2011.

1. Miguel - "Sure Thing"
This was such a sleeper hit, slowly crawling both into heavy rotation and the deepest recesses of my consciousness, that I didn't even expect after "All I Want Is You" left me cold, that even when I first wrote about liking it, I ranked it lower than Rebecca fucking Black. But gradually this strange, offbeat track full of hamfisted metaphors revealed itself to be both an amazing production and a perfect vocal performance, and I drank in every second of it every single time it came on the radio, often singing it to my son in the backseat, because it's the kind of love song that's really easy to alter the lyrics to so it's not necessarily a romantic sentiment but just a song of total commitment and devotion to anyone you care about.

2011-12-03T21:49:00.001-05:00

Playing Armchair A&R With The Singles From 2011's Biggest And Best Albums is the name of my latest Radio Hits One column, which is about what singles I would've picked if I had any say in that kind of thing.

My Top 50 TV Shows of 2011

2011-11-28T07:34:00.052-05:00

I've done these year-end TV lists for the last five years (plus the end of decade list), and have slowly expanded from a top 10 to 20 to 25 and now to 50, the same way my album lists gradually got longer and longer. And as usual, I acknowledge the insanity of documenting and ranking so much of anything, but there's something I really enjoy about doing something like this to such an absurd degree. Plus, my two years of being a stay-at-home dad ended recently, so this year kind of represented the apex of my period of just being home all the time and watching virtually any show I had the slightest interest in seeing, so this may be the only year I can muster a top 50 list like this and I wanted to take advantage of that.

As per my tradition here, I'll be posting each of the 50 entries in the list one at a time throughout this week, 10 a day, and you can follow me on Twitter as I unveil each choice:

50. "Death Valley" (MTV)
MTV is primarily known for its soul-killing reality shows these days, but its less infamous scripted programming is often even worse: "Awkward." is a horrifying show in which the hero is a 15-year-old girl desperately trying to get the guy she's regularly having sex with to officially date her, and the animated series "Good Vibes" gets my nod for the worst TV series of 2011. But amidst that wasteland is "Death Valley," a surprisingly funny and smartly executed show that sounds like it should be hokey and played out: a mockumentary about cops in a California overrun with vampires and zombies and werewolves. Even the special effects and makeup, while definitely not expensive, feel just original enough and strangely realistic that you can kind of get caught up in the whole idea, in ways that you can't with something as po-faced as "The Walking Dead."

49. "The Big Bang Theory" (CBS)
This year "The Big Bang Theory" finally overtook its troubled older sibling "Two And A Half Men" as the most watched sitcom on television, and went into syndication on seemingly half the channels on my cable package. As far as pop culture juggernauts go, though, it's still a surprisingly charming and resilient show that remains as worth tuning into as it's ever been, whether or not you ever thought it was to begin with. The writers have managed to avoid either diagnosing or painting Sheldon into a corner, and have finally found a funny female foil for him, while the ensemble cast continues to get bigger and goofier yet more relatable as stereotypical geeks rather than geek stereotypes.

48. "The Killing" (AMC)
One of the consequences of my following such an insane number of shows this year, and for much that time doing it as a stay-at-home dad, is that often I was just kind of keeping up with new episodes, and not paying very close attention. But in the era of a thousand TV recap sites, you can still be a very casual surface-level viewer of a show while someone else catches the little details and points them out to you online. So by the time "The Killing" got to its defiantly, hilariously resolution-free first season finale, I'd already had dozens of plot holes and logic lapses pointed out to me, all the while enjoying the show from week to week as just a nicely acted and directed murder mystery, with a great aesthetic and sense of atmosphere and foreboding dread. It wasn't as smart as it wanted to be, sure, but I kind of feel that way about every AMC show, and this one offered more satisfaction in the way of visceral mood-building and moment-to-moment drama for me than most of the others.

47. "Single Ladies" (VH1)
I don't watch a lot of things for camp value or defend them as a 'guilty pleasure,' but this hilariously braindead primetime soap, a brazenly transparent attempt at a black "Sex And The City," is just a lot of stupid, poorly acted fun. It helps that Stacey Dash and LisaRaye are the most smoking hot 40-plus eye candy on TV, but really the show itself raises incompetent writing and acting to an artform on its own. My personal highlight of the first season was Mac Miller showing up in a story arc that was almost a precise reenactment of Saigon's stint on "Entourage."

46. "Episodes" (Showtime)
I initially found this show more interesting to think about and write about on a conceptual level than to actually watch it, and was reserved about the idea of some of the creators and stars of "Friends" and "Mad About You" belatedly jumping on a bunch of different bandwagons (single camera sitcoms, show biz meta, stars playing broad caricatures of themselves, British comedies of embarrassment). But as the show unfolded and Matt LeBlanc got more ridiculous with each episode, it really came into its own.

45. "Suburgatory" (ABC)
This fall's slate of new sitcoms has been pretty dire overall (it says something that shows as mediocre as "2 Broke Girls" and "Man Up" could actually be considered bright spots compared to "Whitney" or "How To Be A Gentleman"). My pick for the best of the season so far might've been "Free Agents" if it had lasted more than four episodes, but at the moment I'm going with "Suburgatory," which has an adorable lead actress in Jane Levy and a supporting cast full of funny people like Alan Tudyk, Cheryl Hines and Rex Lee, and is a lot more charming and creative than a show based on nothing but a city girl griping about living in the suburbs should be. It's a little awkward, however, that there's only a 15-year age difference between Levy and Jeremy Sisto, who plays her father, and that she calls him "George" instead of "Dad" on the show -- several people I've talked to were confused about whether they were supposed to be a couple, as was David Letterman when he interviewed Levy.

44. "That Metal Show" (VH1 Classic)
The hosts are irredeemably dorky, and the music they cover is really a pretty wide net of hard rock rather than just metal, but both of those things that bothered me at first ultimately make it a more endearing and enjoyable show to watch. Where else on TV is anyone ever going to argue about whether Neil Peart or Bon Scott is a better lyricist, or fawn over the guy from King's X?

43. "Live! with Regis and Kelly" (syndicated)
I feel weirdly sentimental about the recent retirings (and in some cases deaths) of broadcasters that have been ubiquitous on TV for as long as I can remember like Larry King and Andy Rooney and, a little further back, Bob Barker. I always avoided Regis's show in the Kathie Lee years, and then only found it occasionally a pleasant morning distraction with Kelly Ripa, but really Regis is just such a strange and ingratiating presence that I really will miss just having the option of tuning into his show now and again when I'm home in the morning.

42. "State of Georgia" (ABC Family)
Nobody will ever ever believe me about this, but the show starring Raven-Symoné that ABC Family ran for 12 episodes over the summer was actually really surprisingly funny the few times I saw it, she had a real comedic chemistry with Majandra Delfino and the whole show had kind of a throwback "I Love Lucy" screwball sensibility to it.

41. "Rizzoli & Isles" (TNT)
Cable is beating the networks at hourlong dramas so soundly these days that even in the one format that the networks still do well at, law enforcement procedurals about implausibly attractive people, the best show in that category is on basic cable. Or at least the one with the prettiest people (see also: USA's "Fairly Legal").

40. "Breakout Kings" (A&E)
A prison break-themed show from the writers of "Prison Break" that FOX passed on and ended up on a channel that people don't even have any idea does original scripted series (it also has "The Glades," which is pretty decent). But a great ensemble including Jimmi Simpson and "The Wire"'s Domenick Lombardozzi rose the show above what anybody would've reasonably expected from it, especially over the course of the first season as the dynamics between the characters evolved and revealed themselves much more subtly and more interestingly than you usually see on a criminal-of-the-week kind of show.

39. "Ebert Presents At The Movies" (syndicated)
It probably makes sense that I grew up to be a critic since I'd been watching and enjoying Siskel and Ebert on TV since I was a kid (I even saw the episode where they tore apart North when it originally aired!). They were replaced by an increasingly depressing sequence of new critics in the years after Gene Siskel died and Roger Ebert lost the use of his voice, and the only reason I gave the latest reboot of the show a chance is that Ebert is behind it. Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky might not be the greatest critics or the greatest TV hosts, but they're both credible enough with their opinions and are starting to have a nice onscreen dynamic, and Ebert still gets a word in here and there (usually with someone else reading his reviews or commentary as a voiceover).

38. "Game of Thrones" (HBO)
I have not and probably never will read any of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but my wife has, and so she's become an invaluable translation tool in me even beginning to understand and appreciate this show. It still goes over my head a little and isn't necessarily up my alley, but I am enjoying it. Really, it's worth watching just for Peter Dinklage, I was so happy when dude won the Emmy.

37. "The Whitest Kids U' Know" (IFC)
For five seasons "The Whitest Kids U' Know" was just yet another of the dozens of sketch troupes with some occasional funny moments, a whole lot of bad ideas, and comparisons to "Monty Python" or "The Kids In The Hall" that they couldn't possibly live up to. In its fifth and final season, though, I finally started to feel some real affection for the show and appreciate the inherent comedy in their over-the-top concepts and defiantly half-assed acting and staging. Each episode of the last season featured excerpts from a ridiculous longer work called "The Civil War On Drugs" that even showed something approaching ambition from these guys.

36. "Grimm" (NBC)
There's been a bit of snickering about the fact that the networks have invested in two different fairytale-themed new dramas this fall, but against all odds both are actually pretty entertaining and well-made, with this slightly edging out "Once Upon A Time" as my favorite at the moment, particularly for its really impressive, unique special effects aesthetic.

35. "Pop-Up Video" (VH1)
It's really a shame that this show ever went off the air, and I'm just glad it's back. Music videos as a viable programming option for even channels once created to show them have been dead for a while (real talk: MTV2 would actually rather play "Boy Meets World" reruns at this point than videos), so we might as well have ways to sneak them on the air with some added content.

34. "Beavis & Butt-Head" (MTV)
"Beavis & Butt-Head" was off the air for even longer than "Pop-Up Video" and once offered even more entertaining commentary on music videos, but I have to admit I'm surprised how fine I am with the return of the show tackling shows like "Jersey Shore" instead of just new videos. As much as I laughed at the show in its heyday, I was never really sure at the time whether Mike Judge wasn't a one-trick pony who might not be much smarter than his characters. After Office Space and "King Of The Hill," I don't have to wonder that anymore, and enjoy what brilliant comic creations Beavis and Butt-Head are even more.

33. "Mike & Molly" (CBS)
As Chuck Lorre shows go, this is less "Two And A Half Men" nastiness than "Dharma & Greg" cartoony sweetness, except not horribly annoying like the latter, and it's actually kind of nice to see a sitcom that's just about a couple and the blossoming of their relationship, no on-again-off-again. But mostly it's just a show full of funny women, not just the deservedly Emmy-winning Melissa McCarthy but also Katy Mixon and Swoosie motherfuckin' Kurtz.

32. "The Green Room With Paul Provenza" (Showtime)
With the explosion in podcasts and documentaries dedicated to interviewing standup comics or otherwise dissecting their profession, I like that The Aristocrats director Paul Provenza found a way to get four or five great comics in a room at once (usually more like two or three great ones and a couple of seat-fillers, but hey) for what usually amounts to a really vulgar, funny bull session, uncensored on late night premium cable. Insight into the art of comedy or one comic's creative process occasionally happens, but it's kind of a detour en route to something funnier and weirder.

31. "Bored To Death" (HBO)
The third season of "Bored To Death" has been a little off from the peak of sudden, unexpected hilarity this show broke into in its second season, mostly because Zach Galiafinakis's adventures in parenthood have been one hackneyed predictable scenario after another, but it's still pretty funny.

30. "Hung" (HBO)
Like "Bored To Death," this is the kind of underachieving, good but rarely great show that would probably never get a third season anywhere but HBO. That's a problem when it's something like "Treme" that just needs to be so much better to justify its existence, but in the case of "Hung" I'm just happy it's been around this long and is slowly finding new ways to have fun with its premise and its characters, which were pretty entertaining to start with.

29. "Breaking Bad" (AMC)
"Breaking Bad" is the kind of drama that a lot of people I know or talk to online really, really love and think is the best thing on TV, and I always feel like I kinda get it, but not really, I just don't feel that love. At times it can deliver some pretty amazing moments, but more and more I feel like the writers are just making shit up as they go along and throwing a lot of sketchy plot and character developments at the wall in hopes of just totally blowing the minds of whatever potheads are watching.

28. "Parks & Recreation" (NBC)
"Parks & Recreation" is the kind of sitcom that a lot of people I know or talk to online really, really love and think is the best thing on TV, and I always feel like I kinda get it, but not really, I just don't feel that love. In the last two episodes that aired in 2010, Rob Lowe and Adam Scott joined the cast and I instantly liked them more than pretty much everybody already in the cast and was prepared to finally start really enjoying the show. Lowe has been great, although Scott has alternately been a wet blanket and a boring love interest, so that addition didn't totally pan out like I'd hoped for, but a bigger ensemble still means less Aziz Ansari overall.

27. "Sports Show With Norm Macdonald" (Comedy Central)
The worst part about Norm MacDonald's "Saturday Night Live" firing was not just the ridiculous injustice of it but that that was the best possible format for Norm's style of humor, taking the unique sensibility of his standup and putting him behind a news anchor desk to add just the right dash of stilted absurdity to the whole thing. And it took him 13 years to finally get back on TV in a project that just let him do that again. And then Comedy Central fucking canceled it.

26. "Cougar Town" (ABC)
A friend of mine made a weird running joke out of being really into "Cougar Town," and excitedly tweeting about the show when it came on every week, months before the whole thing with Abed on "Community." I played along with it, while at the time was really coming around to genuinely and unironically enjoying the show, which dials down the broad silliness of its predecessor "Scrubs" while retaining its punchy, oddball rhythms and tight chemistry between cast members.

25. "True Blood" (HBO)
After three seasons of putting all of its characters through a constant, unrelenting sequence of crises, it felt like a really great, refreshing idea for the fourth season of "True Blood" to start with jumping forward a year. Even if it made no real difference in the viewer's experience, just knowing that the characters got a breather and that you got to leap forward a little in their lives, and that they had a relatively catastrophe-free year offscreen, helped kind of put the whole thing back on track to near its season 2 peak.

24. "Being Human" (Syfy)
After "Death Valley" and "True Blood," I feel a bit ridiculous putting a total of three shows about vampires and werewolves on this damn list. But whatever, the BBC show is really good and entertaining and the first sesason of the American adaptation is almost as enjoyable.

23. "Men Of A Certain Age" (TNT)
The first season of "Men Of A Certain Age" that aired in 2009 and 2010 won a Peabody and got Emmy nominations, and was shaping up to be a long-running, prestigious cable hit. Then, the second season debuted in January, got terrible ratings, and was pulled from TNT's schedule after a few episodes, with the second half of the season relaunching in the summer and not faring any better, resulting in the show's cancellation soon after. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but the show's swift and sudden downfall had nothing to do with the quality of the show, which never faltered.

22. "Wilfred" (FX)
The first lengthy trailer I saw for "Wilfred" on FX was just a great WTF moment of having no idea whether it was a series or a movie or why the hell anyone would think either would be a good idea, and yet still being strangely amped about the whole thing. The show frequently didn't quite live up to that moment, but it was also in some strange ways richer and more unpredictable than the silly guy-in-a-dog-suit premise. And from what I watched of the original Australian series, I have to say they improved upon it here.

21. "The Colbert Report" (Comedy Central)
When "The Colbert Report" debuted, I was a little worried that its heroic commitment to the host's hilarious self-caricature would quickly turn Colbert into a one-trick pony without the long term shelf life of "The Daily Show." But six years later, I still laugh at that ridiculous intro sequence, and every interview entrance, while each night's twist on the headlines gets more perversely creative.

20. "The Onion News Network" (IFC)
As great as Stephen Colbert is at creating a satirical newscaster persona that bears his own name, there's a whole other layer going on with "Onion News Network" anchor Brooke Alvarez, played by actual longtime TV reporter and occasional FOX News personality Suzanne Sena. She plays the whole thing so straight, in just the perfect newscaster tones with a tiny little knowing glint in her eye, that you can almost forgot how hilariously evil everything she's saying is.

19. "Raising Hope" (FOX)
"Up All Night" coming off to me almost as bland as that cartoon version of "Baby Blues" was kind of the reassurance I needed that my love for "Raising Hope" wasn't just a reflexive embrace of any show that can make comedy about life with a newborn that I can identify with since I've spent the last two years as a father. Parenthood raises the stakes on everything,

18. "Louie" (FX)
The first season of "Louie" was frustrating to me in the same way as when a band makes a record like, I dunno, Kid A, abandoning certain facets of the artist's intrinsic appeal and genre tropes without necessarily putting a lot of ideas in to fill that void. It kind of felt like an artsy "Seinfeld Chronicles," with the awkward marriage of a pro standup doing what he does best mashed into some seriously half-assed acting and storytelling. The second season didn't change all that much, and is still clearly all about Louis C.K. doing whatever the fuck he wants, but what he wanted to do made me laugh or drew me in a lot more often this time around, especially in episodes like "Subway/Pamela" and "Eddie" and "Oh Louie/Tickets" where he was really genuinely getting away with great, great stuff that no other show on TV would even think of trying.

17. "Childrens Hospital" (Cartoon Network)
The whole idea of 5 or 10-minute 'webisodes' being produced as any kind of supplement or alternative to actual half-hour and hourlong television episodes has always been kind of inherently hard for me to take seriously. But when Rob Corddry decided to turn this little web series into an actual TV show, he actually chose Cartoon Network over Comedy Central because they could give him one of those 15-minute timeslots that work so well for its cartoons. And I have to say, it was the right choice -- there's so much satirical absurdity packed into every minute of this show that a half hour would either be overkill or would feel slack by comparison.

16. "Conan" (TBS)
I hate to say it, but I can't stay up past 12:35 all the time to watch my favorite late night shows like I could back in Conan's NBC heyday, not with a son that wakes up at dawn every morning. So my favorite thing about his move to TBS might be that he's on even earlier than during that brief "Tonight Show" tenure, so I've actually been watching his show more consistently than the '90s, if ever, and he and Andy definitely seem to be enjoying their new home, however they got there.

15. "Workaholics" (Comedy Central)
Comedy Central has canceled so many shows after one season, especially virtually any attempt at a live action sitcom, that Daniel Tosh will never run out of former CC shows to reference every week. So "Workaholics" coming back for a second season just a few months after the first, and already having been renewed for a third, is a testament to the fact that this crude, seemingly unpromising little series is onto something. Adam DeVine is just about the oddest motherfucker on television these days, but the whole trio at the center of the show has really strange, hilarious chemistry.

14. "The Voice" (NBC)
As a lapsed "American Idol" fan I was kind of happy to watch any kind of singing competition show that didn't involve Randy Jackson or a month of cringe-inducing amateur auditions. But "The Voice" went the extra mile of actually having a refreshing format, some judges and coaches I actually respect as singers, and a brisk pace that made it more engaging than "Idol" had been in ages.

13. "How I Met Your Mother" (CBS)
As "How I Met Your Mother" stretches into its seventh season, and is committed to go at least eight, the call gets louder and louder that it's past its peak and/or that they need to get on with it and reveal the mother (as if it's "Lost" or some shit and resolving the 'mystery' is really key on this show). And while there are some definite bumps in the road -- season 7 opened with two back-to-back episodes featuring stale plots about YouTube infamy -- I really think the show is about as funny as it ever was, give or take, and that the characters are still enjoyable to watch and kinda grow older with.

12. "Happy Endings" (ABC)
In the 17 years since "Friends" became a rating phenomenon, the networks have lobbed a thousand sitcoms on the air featuring amorphous groups of attractive urbanite twentysomethings, and other than "How I Met Your Mother" virtually all of them have been short-lived and worthless. When "Happy Endings" aired its first episode in the midseason no man's land of April, there was no reason to believe it wouldn't quickly suffer the same fate (it even echoed the "Friends" pilot with the runaway bride premise!). But somehow it got a second season, and so far has just gotten tighter and funnier and more its own show than a collection of 'hangout comedy' cliches with each episode. Gotta give Damon Wayans, Jr. some respect for getting his career going with something like this instead of a Scary Movie sequel or that upcoming "In Living Color" reboot, too.

11. "The Soup" (E!)
I want "Community" to stay on the air as long as possible, but I have to admit, I'd be a little bummed if it'd become successful enough that Joel McHale would consider leaving "The Soup." The move to Wednesdays is kind of weirding me out because it's been such a part of my weekend ritual for the past 7 years, but I'm not complaining.

10. "Eagleheart" (Cartoon Network)
Chris Elliott was my first comedy hero who felt like a true cult figure, from the Letterman sketches to "Get A Life" to Cabin Boy, he was the guy I thought was hilarious that none of my friends at school seemed to know about. But for a long, long time, it felt like he'd lost his niche and was just bumbling along, in that one abortive year at "Saturday Night Live" and undistinguished sitcom guest spots and Scary Movie sequels. Then, Conan O'Brien produced an Adult Swim series satirizing "Walker, Texas Ranger," and it finally felt like Chris Elliott was back in a role he was born to play.

9. "Saturday Night Live" (NBC)
A funny thing happened over the summer as "SNL" was gearing up to begin its 37th season: nobody got fired or hired. Usually over every hiatus between seasons, the show loses some valued cast member, and often replaces them with one or two new featured players that may (but probably won't), but this year the cast actually stayed the same. And I have to say, I'm really happy about that, I like pretty much everyone on the show right now, even people like I used to be kind of skeptical of like Bobby Moynihan, and even if Kristen Wiig has kind of run through her whole bag of tricks a few times over now, she's still a welcome presence (although I'm looking forward to Nasim Pedrad taking over as alpha female the moment she leaves).

8. "Shameless" (Showtime)
"Shameless" is that special kind of show where a really hot actress you'd never expect to get naked onscreen like Emmy Rossum is just doing constant sex scenes. Also it's pretty well written and has a great ensemble cast and a fun freewheeling atmosphere, for what it's worth.

7. "The Daily Show" (Comedy Central)
It seemed like this year there was a higher incidence than usual of nitpicky wet blanket articles about why "The Daily Show" is taking itself too seriously or is sexist or whatever, but fuck that noise, still worth watching every damn night. I never much cared for Kristen Schaal on "Flight of the Conchords" or in her standup, but "The Daily Show" has really figured out how to use her well, especially in that amazing 'money rape' segment that's possibly one of my top 10 favorite "Daily Show" bits of all time.

6. "Bob's Burgers" (FOX)
AKA the other reason I am now a fan of Kristen Schaal, along with all the people involved in this that I love dearly from "Home Movies" (including H. Jon Benjamin, who's still a TV MVP even as "Archer" and "Jon Benjamin Has A Van" pulled down his batting average this year). FOX has tried so many times to fill out their Sunday night animation lineup with a non-Groening/McFarlane production, especially since "King Of The Hill" finally went off the air, and this is the first one I can remember really rooting for and hoping it sticks around.

5. "Suits" (USA)
I remember in the '90s, when I used to joke about how the USA network was giving the country a bad name with all those "Wings" reruns. Now, like them or not, they're the #1 rated cable network. The original programming that got them there is pretty fluffy across the board -- even the justifiably award-winning "Monk" was a very goofy show, and their big action series, "Burn Notice," is so lightweight that I just couldn't watch it for more than a couple episodes. This year, they threw out a lot of new shows that I found myself enjoying and even respected more than I expected to, including the unapologetically fluffy "Fairly Legal" and "Necessary Roughness." But "Suits" was the first show that made me feel like USA could put something on the air that can compete with more 'serious' networks for my attention. It's not exactly dark, and it's very snappy and has lots of really good-looking people, but it's one of the smarter and better written legal shows on the air in recent memory. I think NBC should pick it up and put "Harry's Law" on USA where it rightfully belongs.

4. "30 Rock" (NBC)
I have never placed "30 Rock" outside the top 5 of my year-end lists for as long as it's been on the air. I thought about it this year, but only because it was off the air for the fall so there were a lot fewer new episodes in 2011.

3. "Justified" (FX)

I thought the praise for "Justified" in its first season was a bit overbaked, I mean people compared it to "The Wire" fer chrissakes. But in its second season it almost immediately grabbed my attention in ways it never had in the first year, especially with the whole plot involving the Bennett clan and its matriarch, played by the very deserving Emmy winner Margo Martindale.

2. "Sons of Anarchy" (FX)
As good as "Justified" was this year, "Sons Of Anarchy" remained my favorite show on what's become my favorite network for cable drama. In the last few years as cable shows have gotten away with more and more sex and gore and violence, I've developed what I like to call 'shock value fatigue' where the more crazy transgressive stuff happens on "Breaking Bad" or "Boardwalk Empire" or especially "American Horror Story," the less I give a shit about the characters or what's happening to them. But almost every episode of "Sons" this year has left me genuinely exhausted from kind of gasping in disbelief and being kind of amazed at how it feels like a climactic culmination of everything the show has been building to and yet this isn't the last season. The show's placing on this list has definitely been inflated by the fact that I'm still devouring the last few episodes and waiting for the finale.

1. "Community" (NBC)
My inner 'give someone else a turn' instinct kept telling me I can't put this show at #1 two years in a row. But I finally decided to give in and do it anyway last month, just before NBC announced it was gonna take it off the schedule for a while and everybody freaked out, so I'm glad I made that call before that factored into it. Really this gets the spot for the My Dinner With Andre homage in "Critical Film Studies" alone, but "Early 21st Century Romanticism" and "Paradigms of Human Memory" and "Advanced Gay" were also amazing episodes up there with the best of the show's incredible 2010 run. Even the episode that just aired last night was great. Shame this show spawned Childish Gambino, though.

2011-11-22T09:13:00.009-05:00

A couple Fridays ago, I went out with my brother and some of his friends to celebrate his birthday with the Foo Fighters show at the Verizon Center. As it happens, it was also the day VH1 Classic and "That Metal Show" had dubbed National Metal Day, choosing 11-11-11 in tribute to Spinal Tap despite the fact that that's already, y'know, the day that we honor our nation's military veteran's and all that. The Foo Fighters aren't really metal by any definition, but being as they're probably the hardest rock band currently playing arenas besides I guess Metallica, it seemed like an appropriate day to see them. And with opening acts The Joy Formidable and Social Distortion, the bill represented the bands who have made some of my favorite rock albums of 2011, certainly the three best major label ones.

Unfortunately, I had a whole ridiculous family ordeal involving my wife and son being locked out of the apartment and their key being out of the state, so I had to make an unplanned stop on the way to the show, and missed The Joy Formidable's set that I'd been really looking forward to. But I did get to see Social Distortion, which was pretty fun. The last time I saw a concert at the Verizon Center, Ted Leo opening for Pearl Jam kind of underlined the crucial difference between seasoned arena rockers and bands with a long history of playing clubs, so I was a little concerned that Social D would kind of get swallowed up by the size of the venue like Ted Leo did. They carried it pretty well, though, they do have a pretty big sound and don't play especially fast despite their punk roots. They didn't play a lot of familiar singles aside from "Story of My Life" and "Ring of Fire," but I appreciated that they did my favorite song off the new album, "Gimme The Sweet and Lowdown."

Still, the Foo Fighters are very much pros at this kind of large scale rock show, in a way that even seasoned vets like Social D will never be. It wasn't the biggest rock concert I'd seen this year; over the summer I'd caught one of the final dates of the U2 360° Tour, which is now in the history books as the largest grossing tour of all time. But the Foo Fighters put on a more archetypical arena rock show than U2, with an emphasis on huge riffs, shredding solos, blitzkrieg drum fills, and hoarse screaming. Outside of Metallica, nobody plays as heavy and as loud on as large a scale as the Foo Fighters anymore, and that in and of itself makes them a worthwhile show. But it helps that they've got enough radio hits to fill two and a half hours with nearly wall-to-wall fist pumping singalong anthems, and a balance of goofy showmanship and serious musicianship that few bands can match.

It was really fun to see Dave Grohl play so close to where he grew up in Virginia, especially that particular night because, as he noted, it was the first time he'd "sold out the big fuckin' arena in my hometown." Throughout the night, he ranted about visiting the Springfield Mall, fondly recalled winning a Grammy for an album he recorded in his basement in Alexandria, promised an intimate show at the 9:30 Club next time the band are in town, and passionately sang the bittersweet new ode to his old stomping grounds, "Arlandria."

The first time I saw the Foo Fighters live, at the 2008 Virgin Mobile Festival, I enjoyed the wall-to-wall hits festival set, while telling myself that if I'd prefer to someday see the band headline their own gig and hopefully dig a little deeper into their catalog -- they're a consummate singles band, but I could pretty easily fill a mix CD with great album tracks. But for better or worse, they're know at the stage of their career, in terms of both success and longevity, that every show is pretty much the hits plus the new album. And I mean that literally: early every Foo Fighters song played at the Verizon Center show can be found on either this year's Wasting Light or the Greatest Hits collection the band released in 2009. The only two exceptions were "Stacked Actors," an awesomely heavy minor hit from 1999's There Is Nothing Left To Lose, and "Cold Day In The Sun," a vocal showcase for drummer Taylor Hawkins from 2005's In Your Honor (maybe that promised 9:30 Club show will pack in some deep cuts).

On record, the Foo Fighters are masters of the concise four-minute rock song; there are occasional solos, but the focus is on riffs and vocal hooks. At one point, Grohl jokingly introduced his bandmate Chris Shiflett as "the lead guitarist...that only plays lead guitar on three songs." But at a Foo Fighters concert, there is quite a bit more jamming and showboating, with the overwhelming majority of songs either featuring an extended outro, or a lengthy mid-song breakdown. Occasionally it paid off, but after a while it started to feel like every song was being unnecessarily padded -- if any song does not need a slow-burning instrumental bridge, it's "Monkey Wrench." When the band played "Let It Die" simply and straightforwardly, with no digressions or interpolations, it was kind of a relief.

Despite the tendency toward overkill, the show was ultimately a satisfying spectacle, from the first roaring opening riffs of "Bridge Burning" to the final chorus of the band's one consensus classic, "Everlong." In between, highlights included an acoustic mini-set with a great rendition of "Best of You," and a cameo from Washington, D.C. resident Bob Mould, who guested on Wasting Light's "Dear Rosemary" as well as a cover of Tom Petty's "Breakdown." The band has swelled to three guitarists and a keyboard player, but Hawkins is still the band's secret weapon and Grohl's perfect foil, the only man that the drummer from Nirvana seems happy to have sitting behind the kit (although Hawkins seems to completely misunderstand how the chorus of "My Hero" should sound).

Late in the night, Grohl went on a rant about how no matter how great a night he was having, people who write about the show will open by talking about what he did 20 years ago, before concluding "fuck 20 years ago." And while the recent anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind has brought about a new wave of nostalgia for the record that will always cast a tall shadow over Grohl's career, I honestly would never have even thought of it during the show if he hadn't brought it up. Aside from the visibility it gave Grohl, Nirvana's success is the reason a band that sounds like the Foo Fighters can sell out arenas today, but by the same token, the cult of personality around a tortured, tragic figure like Kurt Cobain is the same reason people will never look at a happy-go-lucky riff writer like Dave Grohl as a great rock star. But a great rock star he is, just one cut from a different cloth than his old bandmate.

Reading Diary

2011-11-19T09:16:00.003-05:00

a) Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis On Rock Music by Ellen Willis
I've never done a lot of homework on early rock criticism of the '60s and '70s, aside from a good amount of Christgau, who I tend to find off-putting more often than not. But Willis's New Yorker columns that make up the bulk of this collection are just incredibly clear-eyed, incisive perspectives on rock fandom that really helped me realize what kind of music writer I aspire to be. Willis pores over rockcrit staples like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and actually makes me want to think about them and approach them from different angles, while also writing incredibly insightful stuff about CCR that I never realized anyone was doing back then and making me curious about some groups from the period I've never heard.

b) Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition by Oliver Sacks
I remember watching a TV segment about this a few years ago when it first came out and thinking it sounded really fascinating. This later pressing I borrowed from a friend actually supplements the original book with things people wrote or showed to the author after the initial publication to kind of help enrich the whole thing. Sometimes it gets bogged down a little too much in showing every anecdote and historical example in a given subject, but mostly Sacks does a great job of getting into what a unique role music plays in the human mind, really has been good food for thought.

c) Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
I'm only maybe halfway through this, I feel like there are definitely passages of this that have stuck with me as visceral, evocative reading experiences, but for the most part it's just kind of watching over me and not gelling into anything that feels like a narrative I have any kind of investment in. I'm wondering if I should've tried some other Pynchon first but mainly I don't think I'm really cut out for this stuff.

2011-11-16T09:17:00.002-05:00

My latest Radio Hits One column for the Village Voice's Sound of the City blog is about Cee Lo Green's great sleeper hit "Fool For You" becoming the biggest song he's ever had on the R&B chart.

Monthly Report: November Singles

2011-11-13T11:00:00.000-05:00

1. Meek Mill f/ Young Chris - "House Party"
I raved about "I'm A Boss" in this space a few months ago, but I think I like this even more. I love how the beat has some of the most sinister, foreboding synths on the radio but the hook gives the track a party vibe and makes it feel like a hit. I've never been a big Young Chris fan but it's kinda cool to hear him on this, brings home that I think Meek Mill is in what I've always felt is a tradition of Philly having rappers like State Prop or Cassidy or Eve who come across really grimy while having pretty good commercial instincts and managing to not feel like that's as much of a compromise or contradiction as it tends to be with NYC that seem so weighted down by their city's history.

2. Roscoe Dash - "Good Fucking Night"
Throughout Roscoe Dash's whole precipitous rise, I never really got the sense he was capable of anything I'd much like. I didn't like "All The Way Turnt Up," and I fucking hated "No Hands" and "Marvin & Chardonnay," but at this moment when he's on the verge of total ubiquity, he went and made something I really dig. This feels kind of instantly huge in the same way that "Black & Yellow" did when it first dropped, but I never actually liked that song like I like this. I even like how Roscoe raps the first verse, but he switches up for the second verse to the flow he usually does that I hate.

3. Ne-Yo f/ Trey Songz and T-Pain - "The Way You Move"
The first time I heard this song introduced on the radio, the lineup sounded kind of random and perhaps a little desperate on Ne-Yo's part. But I quickly came to realize that the song's strength is that it takes these 3 R&B stars with very distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches and finds this perfect middle ground they can all meet on while still being themselves. Shame Ne-Yo's album is apparently called The Cracks In Mr. Perfect.

4. Cobra Starship f/ Sabi - "You Make Me Feel..."
As a huge stan for the Patrick Stump album, I've been really bitter about the fact that it's been a total commercial failure while two of the douchiest groups he used to be Decaydance labelmates with in the Fall Out Boy days, Cobra Starship and Gym Class Heroes, currently have top 10 hits. But I have grudgingly begun to enjoy this one, which started innocently enough with me watching the video over and over because Sabi is one of the most insanely gorgeous women I've ever seen. The song itself, though, does has its charms -- at first I thought the drums were a bit weak and that that was a symptom of it being half-assed hipster dance pop, but now I've come to realize that the lack of pummeling beats makes it feel a bit lighter and more charming than the more aggressive Eurodance productions. it's sharing pop airwaves with.

5. Flo Rida - "Good Feeling"
I've already made peace with my embarrassment over enjoying "Club Can't Handle Me," so I guess I can deal with liking Flo Rida's latest shameless ploy to stay on the pop charts longer than any reasonable person could've expected, this time assisted by Dr. Luke. Mainly I just like the Etta James hook.

TV Diary

2011-11-10T22:36:00.003-05:00

a) "Hell On Wheels"
Given that I've never really fully loved or fully hated any of AMC's previous shows, I'm approaching this one with a lot of caution bordering on disinterest. First episode seems pretty good but almost determined not to surprise me or give me anything beyond what I'd assume from the advance promotion. Also, fucking Common.

b) "Rock Center with Brian Williams"
Brian Williams always comes off like such a bro but I never actually watch him on TV because I don't watch network newscasts, so I checked out his new primetime newsmagazines. I like this format, I used to watch "Dateline" all the time in the '90s, and there were some interesting stories in the episode I watched, but I dunno, just not something I make a point to watch much anymore.

c) "Allen Gregory"
I'm not sure how or why Jonah Hill became so overexposed, but I've kinda had my fill of dude. This show isn't necessarily bad, though, it's funny enough and has some potential, even if the whole premise and setup is a little odd and I'm not sure what groove this thing would settle into in a best case scenario.

d) "Good Vibes"
Another animated show about a kid voiced by a chubby funnyman, but in this case it's "Daily Show" weak link Josh Gad on a horrible flash animation MTV show full of cartoon T&A that is basically a Big Johnson t-shirt come to life (and this is actually the second recent MTV series I have compared to Big Johnson shirts, after "R.J. Berger"). Quite possibly the single worst television show of 2011.

e) "Man Up"
Between that new Tim Allen show and the already canceled "How To Be A Gentleman" and this, there's a lot of stupid new sitcoms on this air this fall that are overtly about men being manly men and even have 'man' in the title. And of those, this is easily the best, but that's not saying much. Just a mildly ingratiating single camera sitcom with a decent cast that doesn't feel like it's built to last.

f) "Once Upon A Time"
This has a good cast and is doing fairly interesting things with the potentially awful premise, but I haven't really paid it enough attention to totally grasp what's going on, and my wife definitely likes it more than me.

g) "Grimm"
This other fairy tale-themed new show is much more my speed, though, mostly because it's basically a police procedural with some funky supernatural stuff and really cool painted-looking CGI effects, and just the right amount of levity.

h) "Dave's Old Porn"
I never thought Dave Attell would ever find a TV vehicle as uniquely suited to his dark debauched sense of humor than "Insomniac," but this show where he watches '70s and '80s porn with other comedians and occasionally porn stars might be it. The best part of this, besides the ridiculous concept and the remarkably relaxed and often surreal conversations, is that they basically talk on a couch in front of a green screen, and then show the porn they're watching in the background, with the people and the couch constantly moving around to, um, strategically block the more explicit shows.

i) "Boss"
I've only gotten into one episode of this so far and it hasn't really hooked me but I like the whole look and style of it, feels like it could get interesting.

j) "Terra Nova"
It felt very liberating to give up on this show, what a boring piece of crap it was.

k) "Beavis & Butt-Head"
It's hard to expect much from any show coming back after a decade or more away, but I have to say it's good to have these guys back. I was skeptical about them moving away from just watching videos but watching stuff like "Jersey Shore" really is inspired, and Mike Judge hasn't missed a beat.

The 2011 Remix Report Card, Vol. 6

2011-11-08T20:55:00.000-05:00

"Dance (A$$) (Remix)" by featuring Nicki Minaj
I hate to admit how much I love the beat on this song, and that while I begrudge it being given to Big Sean, it almost makes for the closest thing to a Big Sean song I can actually dig and kind of works his annoying flow and obnoxious sense of humor to its advantage. But obviously Nicki murders him on this song anyway.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

"Just In Love (Remix)" by Joe Jonas featuring Lil Wayne
As much as I wanted to hate this song when it came out it is kinda catchy. Putting a generic Weezy verse on it is weirdly a good look, it's just two different kinds of pleasantly mediocre finding a good common ground.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: C

"Moves Like Jagger (Remix)" by featuring Mac Miller
"Moves Like Jagger" actually has quietly turned into one of my favorite pop radio jams of the year, so I'm kind of disappointed that they turned remix duties over to this fucking cornball who makes me almost miss Asher Roth. This trend of clubby pop songs having rap remixes with halftime drums like "Till The World Ends" and "T.G.I.F." is starting to feel a bit predictable and stale too, and the breakdown here isn't nearly as good as it is on those remixes.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade:

"Niggas In Paris (Remix)" by featuring T.I.
I really can't stand this ugly fucking beat but T.I. at his best has a way of sounding natural and effortless on any track, the uglier the better.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B+

"Party (Remix)" by Beyonce featuring J. Cole
Maybe Andre 3K realized how garbage the last couple singles he's been on are, since he didn't show up to the video shoots for either. In the Lloyd video, a CGI cat lip syncs his verse, while in the Beyonce video her
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: F

"Quickie (Remix)" by featuring Big Sean
I hate Big Sean so much that I was prepared to just give this an F but he actually kinda calmed down and worked to fit the vibe and tempo of the song (even if he still speeds up ahead of the beat a little here and there like he always does), so grudging respect I guess, that he can do something that isn't completely annoying.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: C

"She Will (Remix)" by Lil Wayne featuring Rick Ross and Drake
This version leaked right before or at the same time as the album version, so not really a remix so much as just an alternate version that for some reason wasn't used as the proper single. Anyway Ross is Ross, no surprises here.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: C+

"Spend It (Remix)" by 2 Chainz featuring T.I.
Another remix from the newly freed Tip's recent run from cameos, anointing ATL's next big buzz. I like 2 Chainz in general but "Spend It" always felt kind of generic and perfunctory, like a placeholder single until he scores a serious solo hit. Not as much fun as the "Niggas In Paris" verse but still pretty dope, this is the kind of beat T.I. needs to be getting on his next solo record.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

1998, Reconsidered

2011-11-06T10:45:00.000-05:00

Top 50 Albums of 1998:

1. The Boredoms - Super Ae
2. Big Punisher - Capital Punishment
3. Firewater - The Ponzi Scheme
4. Amon Tobin - Permutation
5. Rufus Wainwright - Rufus Wainwright
6. Sixteen Horsepower - Low Estate
7. Mos Def And Talib Kweli - Mos Def And Talib Kweli Are Black Star
8. DJ Quik - Rhythm-al-ism
9. Pulp - This Is Hardcore
10. Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
11. Busta Rhymes - E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event): The Final World Front
12. Juvenile - 400 Degreez
13. Eels - Electro-Shock Blues
14. Goodie Mob - Still Standing
15. System Of A Down - System Of A Down
16. Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach - Painted From Memory
17. DMX - It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot
18. Outkast - Aquemeni
19. La Lengua Asesina - Hotel Opera
20. E-40 - The Element Of Surprise
21. Soul Coughing - El Oso
22. 8Ball - Lost
23. 4Hero - Two Pages
24. R. Kelly - R.
25. Pearl Jam - Yield
26. Jay-Z - Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life
27. Sonic Youth - A Thousand Leaves
28. Buffalo Daughter - New Rock
29. Los Amigos Invisibles - The New Sound Of The Venezuelan Gozadera
30. Cat Power - Moon Pix
31. The Posies - Success
32. Luaryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
33. Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos - The Prosthetic Cubans
34. Elliott Smith - XO
35. The LOX - Money, Power, Respect
36. R.E.M - Up
37. Sonic Youth - Silver Session (For Jason Knuth)
38. A Tribe Called Quest - The Love Movement
39. Fugazi - End Hits
40. Lee Ranaldo - Amarillo Ramp (for Robert Smithson)
41. Rocket From The Crypt - RFTC
42. Money Mark - Push The Button
43. Loren Mazzacane Connors - Evangeline
44. Two Dollar Guitar - Train Songs
45. Jeff Buckley - Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk
46. Scarnella - Scarnella
47. Ozomatli - Ozomatli
48. The Rock*A*Teens - Baby, A Little Rain Must Fall
49. UNKLE - Psyence Fiction
50. Sonic Youth/Jim O'Rourke - SYR3

While I was kind of conflicted about 1999 when I started this series a couple months ago, I feel much more viscerally enthusiastic and perhaps even nostalgic about 1998. I was 16 that year, and I started my first job and didn't have any real life expenses yet, so my CD buying habit probably hit its all-time high, which is why it was really easy to hit 50 albums for this year (and there are still albums I really like by Sloan, Tricky, the Nels Cline Trio, Squarepusher, Timbaland, Garbage, Grand Lee Buffalo and others that didn't quite make the cut).

Late 1998 was the first time I made a year-end list of my favorite albums (although for at least a couple years before that I'd made up my mind about what my album of the year was). I posted my top 10 on some of the newsgroups and AOL message boards that were my main outlet for talking about music at the time, when that hobby was in its infancy, and I wish I'd kept a copy, but of course it's long gone now.

That said, 1998 was a good year but not a great year for albums. A lot of stuff hasn't aged especially well, or even if it remains great feels somehow dated or of its time. A lot of great bands that defined the '90s were winding down around then and releasing their last or one of their last really good albums, but few of them really released their best album that year. It was also the height of my Sonic Youth obsession, and one of their most productive years, in terms of an album, some EPs and several side projects.

One thing memorable about 1998 is that September 29th was one of the biggest release date Tuesdays ever, especially for hip hop. The albums 7, 16, 18, 21, 26, 38 and 49 on this list were all released then, and my brother and I went to the store and bought several of them that day. I was reading Decoded recently and Jay-Z had this to say about September 29th and the year in general:

1998 was an important year for hip-hop. It was two years after Pac had been gunned down, and just a year after Biggie was killed. DMX dropped two number one albums that year. Outkast released Aquemini, a game-changing album lyrically and sonically, but also for what it meant to Southern rap. (Juvenile's 400 Degreez, also released in '98, was a major shot in the growing New Orleans movement. I jumped on a remix of his single "Ha," which was a great mix of regional styles.) Mos Def and Talib Kweli had their Black Star album, one of the definitive indie rap records of all time. The prototypical "backpack rappers," A Tribe Called Quest, released their last album, The Love Movement. And the biggest album of the year in any genre was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

It was a beautiful time all the way around in hip-hop. The album I released that year, Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life, was the biggest record of my life. The opening week was unreal for me--we did more than three hundred thousand units, by far the biggest opening number of my career at that point. The album moved Lauryn Hill down to number four, but Outkast's Aquemini was right behind me, and The Love Movement was number three. Those four albums together told the story of young black America from four dramatically different perspectives--we were bohemians and hustlers and revolutionaries and space-age Southern boys. We were funny and serious, spiritual and ambitious, lovers and gangsters, mothers and brothers. This was the full picture of our generation. Each of these albums was an innovative and honest work of art and wildly popular on the charts. Every kid in the country had at least one of these albums, and a lot of them had all four. The entire world was plugged into the stories that came out of the specific struggles and creative explosion of our generation. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of what was happening in hip-hop that year.

Top 100 Singles of 1998:

1. Aaliyah - "Are You That Somebody?"
2. Juvenile - "Ha"
3. DMX - "Ruff Ryders Anthem"
4. 'N Sync - "Tearin' Up My Heart"
5. Busta Rhymes - "Gimme Some More"
6. N.O.R.E. - "Superthug"
7. Stardust - "Music Sounds Better with You"
8. Lauryn Hill - "Ex-Factor"
9. Wyclef Jean - "Gone Till November"
10. Next - "Too Close"
11. The Backstreet Boys - "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"
12. Dru Hill - "How Deep Is Your Love"
13. Timbaland & Magoo - "Luv 2 Luv U (Remix)"
14. The Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band - "Blue On Black"
15. Jermaine Dupri f/ Jay-Z - "Money Ain't A Thang"
16. Robbie Williams - "Angels"
17. Monica - "The First Night"
18. Pras f/ Mya and Ol' Dirty Bastard - "Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)"
19. Big Punisher f/ Joe "Still Not a Player"
20. Mya f/ Silkk The Shocker - "Movin' On"
21. Missy Elliott f/ Magoo and 702 - "Beep Me 911"
22. Natalie Imbruglia - "Torn"
23. Pearl Jam - "Given To Fly"
24. Semisonic - "Closing Time"
25. Low Fidelity Allstars f/ Pigeonhed - "Battle Flag"
26. Metallica - "Fuel"
27. Sarah McLachlan - "Sweet Surrender"
28. Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop (That Thing)"
29. New Radicals - "You Get What You Give"
30. Puff Daddy f/ Busta Rhymes and the Notorious B.I.G. - "Victory"
31. Xzibit - "What U See Is What U Get"
32. Big L - "Ebonics"
33. Foo Fighters - "My Hero"
34. Three 6 Mafia - "Late Nite Tip"
35. DMX - "Get At Me Dog"
36. Jay-Z - "Hard Knock Life"
37. Silkk The Shocker f/ Mystikal - "It Ain't My Fault"
38. Gang Starr f/ Big Shug and Freddie Foxx - "The Militia"
39. Faith Evans - "Love Like This"
40. Fuel - "Shimmer"
41. Sheryl Crow - "My Favorite Mistake"
42. Rammstein - "Du Hast"
43. Janet Jackson - "I Get Lonely"
44. Harvey Danger - "Flagpole Sitta"
45. Big Punisher f/ Noreaga - "You Came Up"
46. Trick Daddy f/ Trina - "Nann"
47. Dave Matthews Band - "Stay (Wasting Time)"
48. Redman - "I'll Bee Dat"
49. Usher - "My Way"
50. Pearl Jam - "Do The Evolution"
51. Third Eye Blind - "Losing A Whole Year"
52. Garbage - "Special"
53. DMX - "How's It Goin' Down"
54. KoRn - "Got The Life"
55. Everclear - "Father of Mine"
56. Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz - "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)"
57. Barenaked Ladies - "One Week"
58. Timbaland & Magoo - "Clock Strikes (Remix)"
59. Busta Rhymes - "Turn It Up (Remix)/Fire It Up"
60. The Black Eyed Peas - "Joints & Jam"
61. Ice Cube - "We Be Clubbin'"
62. Blink 182 - "Josie"
63. Jimmy Ray - "Are You Jimmy Ray?"
64. Jay-Z f/ Ja Rule and Amil - "Can I Get A..."
65. Will Smith - "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It"
66. Gang Starr - "You Know My Steez"
67. Beenie Man - "Who Am I"
68. Madonna - "Frozen"
69. Neil Finn - "She Will Have Her Way"
70. Smashing Pumpkins - "Perfect"
71. Cam'ron f/ Ma$e - "Horse & Carriage"
72. The LOX f/ Lil Kim and DMX - "Money, Power & Respect"
73. Jennifer Paige - "Crush"
74. Destiny's Child f/ Wyclef Jean - "No, No, No (Part 2)"
75. Playa - "Cheers 2 U"
76. Destiny's Child - "No, No, No"
77. Puff Daddy f/ Ma$e and the Notorious B.I.G. - "Been Around The World"
78. Missy Elliott - "Hit Em Wit Da Hee"
79. Puff Daddy f/ Jimmy Page - "Come With Me"
80. Master P f/ Fiend, Silkk the Shocker, Mia X and Mystikal - "Make Em Say Uhh!"
81. Lenny Kravitz - "If You Can't Say No"
82. Big Punisher f/ Fat Joe - "Twinz (Deep Cover '98)"
83. Memphis Bleek f/ Jay-Z - "It's Alright"
84. DJ Quik f/ El Debarge and 2nd II None - "Hand In Hand"
85. Girls Against Boys - "Park Avenue"
86. Pearl Jam - "In Hiding"
87. Outkast - "Rosa Parks"
88. DMX - "Stop Bein Greedy"
89. Gang Starr f/ K-Ci & Jojo - "Royalty"
90. Ma$e f/ Total - "What You Want"
91. Brandy & Monica - "The Boy Is Mine"
92. Juvenile - "Follow Me Now"
93. Sarah McLachlan - "Adia"
94. The Cherry Poppin' Daddies - "Zoot Suit Riot"
95. Limp Bizkit - "Faith"
96. Timbaland f/ Jay-Z - "Lobster & Scrimp"
97. Outkast f/ Raekwon - "Skew It On The Bar-B"
98. Pearl Jam - "Wishlist"
99. Lauryn HIll - "Can't Take My Eyes Off You"
100. The Beastie Boys "Intergalactic"

Now, '98 was a really fucking awesome year for singles, that moment when Bad Boy was still riding high but Roc-A-Fella and Ruff Ryders were coming and making NY rap a little harder but still very commercial, and Cash Money was coming on strong, just a crazy charged year. That was a year when rock radio started to kinda suck, even more than it has in some recent years, but there was still some really good hard rock and alternapop here and there. In general, this is a year that seems way better if I look at it through these kind of selective rose-colored glasses.

Movie Diary

2011-11-03T22:35:00.002-04:00

a) From The Sky Down
I've been on a bit of a U2 trip lately from seeing them live over the summer and listening to Achtung Baby, so I love that they just did this documentary about the making of the album. The whole reinvention mythology of that album fascinates me so it's cool to see that stuff articulated in detail and here some of the jam sessions that created the songs and interviews with Eno and stuff.

b) Pearl Jam Twenty
I'm glad this aired on PBS since I'd been listening to the soundtrack lately and thought it'd be months before I get a chance to see the actual movie. Between this, the U2 movie and the Foo Fighters movie, there's really been a wealth of good documentaries about popular, long-running rock bands lately. I didn't see the whole thing, but this was really enjoyable from what I saw, since I basically lived through the '90s as a huge Pearl Jam fan and there was a lot of small revelations and rare footage that I would've killed to see back then.

c) I Am Number Four
I didn't totally understand what this movie was going for, but it was pretty enjoyable anyway. Also the two gorgeous blondes in this movie really had me straying from my preference for brunettes. I feel bad for Timothy Olyphant, he's had like 3 great TV shows but really has been in zero great movies as far as I can tell.

d) It's Kind of a Funny Story
I may complain about Justin Long and Michael Cera and Jay Baruchel playing every awkward young guy protagonist role in Hollywood over and over and over, but the guy who ended up with this role after presumable all three of those guys passed isn't much better or anything. Emma Roberts is pretty and all but the way this ended was barf.

e) Love And Other Drugs
I watched this mainly for the nude Anne Hathaway but it was pretty solid. Kind of weirdly TV-ish (what with all the Hank Azaria and Oliver Platt and Judy Greer and that goddamn Josh Gad) and lightweight, but not to its detriment. I still have no idea what is up with Gyllenhaal, even when he gets a decent character to play it feels like there's nothing there, any other leading man could've at least had some presence playing that part. Hathaway's really good, though, and after all the stupidity of the plot the love story ends up resonant in spite of itself.

f) Cyrus
This is the most nothing, pointless, useless character study dramedy in a whole little run of them that seems to be going around like Greenberg. Was I tricked into watching a 'mumblecore' (ugh) movie by a recognizable and likable cast? Motherfuckers.

g) The 6 Wives of Henry Lefay
It's weird how Tim Allen movies like this and Big Trouble make me kind of like him in the moment but then he does that "Last Man Standing" show that reminds me of how absolutely I used to loathe him for "Home Improvement."

h) A New Leaf
I realized when I reflectively pulled this up OnDemand that Walter Matthau is one of those actors I will watch in pretty much anything, and that that has a lot to do with the fact that Matthau kind of did one thing really well in almost every movie and you're almost guaranteed a certain kind of movie when he's involved. This one seemed pretty good, but I didn't really pay much attention, it was kind of on in the background.

2011-11-01T08:46:00.001-04:00

I reviewed Bosley's new album Honey Pig for the November issue of Urbanite Magazine.

Monthly Report: October Albums

2011-10-30T09:40:00.001-04:00

1. Patrick Stump - Soul Punk
My feverish anticipation of this album is finally over, and I have to say it's pretty much worth the wait. Actually, I may be starting to love this album as much as Fall Out Boy's Folie à Deux (which would be a shortlist candidate for my favorite album of the past 3 years). What really comes across on this record is not just that Stump is a dynamite vocalist or that he really went nuts playing every instrument on the record, but that he really has a whole personality and perspective that permeates every song and makes songs like "Greed" and "The 'I' In Lie" all fit together as a complete worldview. Both "Run Dry (X Heart X Fingers" and "Cryptozoology" are especially great but I wish they weren't stuffed onto the same track, they feel like very distinct separate songs to me. The bonus tracks on the deluxe version are by and large as good as anything on the proper album, and some days I wish I could swap a couple songs out for "Bad Side of 25" or "Love, Selfish Love" from the Truant Wave EP for an ideal version of the album, but in any event this whole project is just my shit right now.

2. Craig Wedren - Wand
Before Stump, Shudder To Think's Craig Wedren was the guy with the best voice in modern rock and some wild genre-defying solo work, so it's been fun to have a good new record from him this month too. I wasn't sure what to really expect from this album and in a pleasant surprise it's kind of a fast, fun tour of all the things he does well: hooky hard rock, weird synth and drum machine experiments, jangly pop, gentle acoustic tracks, all kind of ping ponging around in this really confident, comfortable way that only a guy who can do this many things this well for this long can pull off. It's almost a little hard to really get into as an album, because as soon as I really enjoy a song like "I Know" or "Make Me Hurt You" it switches gears into something different and equally good, but that's a small complaint.

3. Styles P. - Master of Ceremonies
Styles has been such a consistent, underrated rapper with album after solid album the last few years that I always have to just give him props, even if there is something undeniably workmanlike (in all the good and bad ways) and low stakes about his records that makes it hard to hail any of them as a masterpiece. This one has more high profile guests than usual, but only the Busta/Rick Ross song feels like an unnecessary capitulation to starpower, and Styles still defines his surroundings and makes sure his hardnosed sensibility comes across in every beat and hook.

4. My Brightest Diamond - All Things Will Unwind
There's a lot of talent and energy and ideas flying around on My Brightest Diamond albums, but I think the first two, especially the first, were a little more my speed. When this stuff is a little darker and moodier, it sounds fantastic, but when Shara Worden goes lighter and more clever, as on the first few tracks of All Things Will Unwind, she just comes off a little too whimsical and impressed with herself. But then it gets to something kind of epic and dramatic like "Be Brave" and I'm back on board.

5. Kelly Clarkson - Stronger
Earlier this year when Kelly Clarkson appeared on Jason Aldean's "Don't You Wanna Stay?" I said "If this signals that Kelly is finally going for the inevitable, commercially shrewd move toward country, then good for her, she sounds fantastic doing this kind of stuff." I was wrong, and listening to Stronger, I kinda wish I wasn't, because this feels like diminishing returns and more of the same to an even greater extent than All I Ever Wanted, Kelly sticking to her increasingly familiar wheelhouse but not trying as hard to squeeze a hit out of her sound as it quickly goes out of vogue. The trio of Greg Kurstin productions early in the album is pretty good and it's fun to hear his The Bird And The Bee sounds applied to something bigger and more bombastic, but most of the album is kind of stuck in a generic Kelly Clarkson holding pattern than even Ester Dean and Rodney Jerkins don't really break out of. "You Can't Win" and the bonus track "Don't Be A Girl About It" have so much more personality and attitude than boring old "Mr. Know It All."
"You Can't Win" is this great bitter little song at the end of the album

TV Diary

2011-10-27T22:04:00.000-04:00

a) "American Horror Story"
It was hilarious how quickly all the buzz around this show dissipated once people started seeing the pilot, and now that I've seen it I totally understand why (and have yet to try watching any subsequent episodes). It's not even that this show is that crazy or weird, but just how totally tonedeaf it is to the basic rhythms of horror movies -- that there needs to be some occasional lulls or slowly gather stormclouds instead of just one scene after another of WTF imagery and clanging background music. Also Dylan McDermott's face is some kind of visual shorthand that translates in my mind to "show you don't want to watch."

b) "Homeland"
So far I'm enjoying "My So-Called Spy," I don't really know how much mileage there really is in this premise but it's the kind of thing that at least has a lot of grist for a few good episodes.

c) "Enlightened"
I don't really get this show? It seems like some kind of elaborate ironic twist on something I don't know or care about, and all the characterization and plot they fill it in with seems kind of dumb.

d) "Why Am I Still Single?!"
It's weird for VH1 to have two shows with the same basic premise on at the same time and "Tough Love" is definitely better, but I do find these kinds of shows strangely entertaining.

e) "Whitney"
I think Whitney Cummings is a decent standup and always kind of welcome hoary old school studio audience sitcoms about people's boring domestic problems, but this one just feels so drained of personality or ideas, like they're trying to make the most generic 'relationship sitcom' ever. You know you're doing something wrong when you make people think about how much more "Mad About You" was able to mix it up now and again.

f) "2 Broke Girls"
The other show Cummings created is a little better as a show but still kind of hobbled and full of useless genre conventions, this time the long dead 'colorful characters in a diner' sitcom. I keep trying with this show, and forever shall continue as long as it's on the air, because Kat Dennings is ridiculous, but I have to admit she's kind of the problem with the show, she keeps getting handed all these sassy bitchy lines and doesn't really know how to sell them and kinda falls flat.

g) "Person of Interest"
I'm watching this right now but now really -- all these new network dramas have like this and "Unforgettable" and "Prime Suspect" have just become the shows I leave on when I decide to listen to something on headphones and pretend I'm still 'keeping up' with these shows and 'giving them a chance.'

h) "Boardwalk Empire"
I've only watched one episode of this season, it wasn't as boring as I remember last year being but I still want to kind of kick the habit and leave this alone, it's just not for me.

i) "Bored To Death"
This show got so unexpectedly great in its second season, I'm also prepared for it to let me down now but they seem to be still on a good roll.

j) "Hung"
Last year "Hung" kind of lost my interest while "Bored" commanded it, now I'm ready for them to switch roles again, this year it seems to be kind of finding the fun in its premise again and do something less predictable with the characters.

2011-10-25T10:12:00.001-04:00

My latest Radio Hits One column for the Village Voice's Sound of the City blog takes a look at T-Pain's rEVOLVEr, which just got a release date on the heels of its 6th 'lead single,' as a case study in how long major labels keep hip hop and R&B albums on the shelf these days if their singles aren't major hits.

2011-10-24T09:49:00.003-04:00

All of the talking points about Evanescence's new self-titled album -- that it's their first in 4 years, that after more lineup changes Amy Lee is left as the only original member, that she experimented with 'electronic' elements this time around -- point toward an album that might sound at least slightly different from its two hugely successful predecessors. It isn't. Like, not the slightest bit. I have only heard Evanescence's multi-platinum debut Fallen in passing maybe a few times, and I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between any non-singles on it or Evanescence in a blind taste test.

That's not really a complaint, since I essentially like Evanescence and think they're good at they do, even if what they do is a pretty narrow lane and one can only handle so much of it (which is why those long breaks between albums are appreciated). Amy Lee is still kind of mind-bogglingly hot in that way where even her voice sounds hot, and her big silly dramatic stadium goth songs hit all those big notes and big feelings well. But again, the band work well in small doses, and I don't know if there's anything here that would hit me by themselves the way "Call Me When You're Sober" or "Going Under" have. I can't even single out any tracks as especially good or bad, it all just kind of runs together. And over the 12 tracks (16 on the deluxe version, although I couldn't make it through all of those), the cumulative effect is numbing, as you kind of get Evanescence fatigue from too much big loud flowery dark piano rock.

Monthly Report: October Singles

2011-10-23T09:35:00.002-04:00

1. Beyoncé - "Countdown"
I already gave this a 10 on Singles Jukebox and have basically just been patiently waiting for it to actually become an official single before I made it #1 in this space. Really incredible song that I've listened to so much lately that I hope I don't make myself sick of it. Those 32nd note hi-hats are at the moment the element I am boggling at the most.

2. Sara Bareilles - "Gonna Get Over You"
Oddly while the "Countdown" video I'm kind of ambivalent about was making the internet go nuts, this was the adorable dance video that was making me fall in love with a song. Bareilles is kind of MOR and embarrassing both for musical taste and for a celebrity crush but she is kind of adorable to me and I have to say I pretty much wholeheartedly love 4 of the 5 songs she's released as singles at this point.

3. Brianna - "Marilyn Monroe"
I've been thinking lately about how I've generally enjoyed music by almost every mainstream female rapper through the history of hip hop up until the current Minaj/Kreayshawn/etc. era, so it was fun to hear this song on the radio and feel genuinely excited and curious about who it was by. Apparently Brianna is from Miami but for some reason her song seems to be blowing up on D.C. radio the most, kinda hoping it hits big.

4. Mary J. Blige - "25/8"
Remind me sometime in the future to talk about my fixation with songs that fantasize about adding more time to our existing clocks and calenders (which also includes "Eight Days A Week" and Ciara's "Speechless").

5. AfroJack f/ Eva Simons - "Take Over Control"
Every time I hear this on the radio, I think "this should've been the new Rihanna single," the same way people were saying that about "Whip My Hair" a couple years ago. Also, this makes I guess the first month of singles I've done where the vocals are 100% performed by women.

2011-10-20T23:00:00.000-04:00

I wrote about Rome Cee's new single "Black Ring" on the City Paper's Noise blog.

Movie Diary

2011-10-19T22:08:00.000-04:00

a) Hereafter
This is the kind of slow maudlin spiritual movie I almost never want to watch, but I put it on when I was in kind of a lousy mood and it suited me fine. The Matt Damon/Bryce Dallas Howard stuff is especially sweet and sad and well handled, and overall I didn't dislike the thrust of the movie as much as I feared, Eastwood at least set the mood well.

b) Vampires Suck
Everyone's justifiably tired of quickie parody flicks, especially Friedberg/Seltzer ones, but this is definitely one of the best things they've done. Partly that's because Twilight is so ripe for mockery (although I haven't seen it and my wife, who has and hated it, had to explain some of the jokes to me), partly because they actually do a pretty good job being faithful to the look and the casting of the original and just being really fun and over the top with it.

c)Step Up 3D
When I saw Step Up 2 The Streets, which I actually kind of liked, I joked about how these movies take place in Baltimore but in no way resemble the existing Bmore club dance culture. So it was funny to me that in the third movie in the series, which lacks even the modest charms of the last one, the franchise finally leaves Baltimore but you hear Rye Rye and Blaqstarr in the background of a scene.

d) Thirst
This movie really took the fun out of being a horror flick featuring Lacey Chabert in a tanktop the entire time by being a pretty realistic and grisly depiction of people getting stranded in the Mojave Desert and slowly dying of dehydration. And since it wasn't exactly 127 Hours in terms of the artistic merit of the filmmaking, it ended up just being kind of slow and punishing to watch.

e) The A-Team
This wasn't terrible but my indifference to this kind of '80s retro blockbuster bullshit is such that it was like 45 minutes before I remembered that this and G.I. Joe are two completely different movies (theoretically), I was actually waiting for Cobra Commander to show up.

f) Everybody's Fine
I put this on figuring it would be kind of light and pleasant but it turned out to be kind of a bummer, at least up to the stupid pat ending.

g) Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
My strange awakening of affection for Matthew McCoughnahey after The Lincoln Goddamn Lawyer resulted in me thinking hey maybe some of his non-Kate Hudson rom coms aren't all bad after all, and this one has Emma Stone in it so what the hell. And really it wasn't terrible but it was pretty douchey and not especially funny.

h) Middle of Nowhere
I watched this mainly because Eva Amurri is in it, for totally shallow reasons, figuring that it'd be a dull indie drama that I'd sit through just to gawk at the lead actress. But I was really a little bowled over by how good it was, the rare coming-of-age movie that actually reminded me of my own adolescence in some vague but undeniable way, feeling very true and lived in without being 'realistic' in any particularly way. And all this from the director of Turistas and Blue Crush, shockingly.

i) Hamlet 2
I rolled my eyes big time at this movie's commercials and feared it would be some big inescapable phenomenon, but since that didn't happen now I can watch it on TV and go ok, that wasn't bad, pretty funny in parts.

j) Long Weekend aka Nature's Grave
A really, really bad Jim Caviezel horror movie with the hilarious premise of nature 'taking revenge' on a couple of inconsiderate campers in the wilds of Australia, which kind of has a payoff in the crazy graphic death scene toward the end.

k) Game 6
This is a movie Michael Keaton and Robert Downey Jr. made a few years ago, at the height of each being kind of off the radar, and I think both guys are really talented and watchable, so I had high hopes for this. It had its moments, but mostly it's just appallingly poorly written for a movie about a playwright -- the way the dialogue drips with clumsy exposition in Keaton's first scene with Bebe Neuwirth is ridiculous (although Neuwirth looks pretty incredible), and the big climactic scene at the end is just plain stupid. Keaton's good, but Downey is kind of squandered.

l) Ed Wood
Somehow I never watched this whole movie before, and man it is just awesome.

2011-10-18T21:58:00.002-04:00

My latest Radio Hits One column is about VH1's recent list of the Greatest Songs of the '00s.

2011-10-17T21:10:00.000-04:00

This weekend the American Studies Association will be hosting the 2011 ASA conference in Baltimore on October 20-23. I've been invited to speak about Baltimore club music, and on Saturday at 10am at the Baltimore Hilton, I'll be giving a presentation with the first public airing of some of the research and interview material from the book I'm writing, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore club Music.

2011-10-16T09:24:00.001-04:00

Jams Run Free: The Best of Sonic Youth 1996-2011

disc 1:
1. Wildflower Soul (from A Thousand Leaves, 1998)
2. Reena (from Rather Ripped, 2006)
3. What We Know (from The Eternal, 2009)
4. Incinerate (from Rather Ripped, 2006)
5. Jams Run Free (from Rather Ripped, 2006)
6. Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style (from Murray Street, 2002)
7. French Tickler (from A Thousand Leaves, 1998)
8. Anagrama (from SYR1, 1997)
9. Unmade Bed (from Sonic Nurse, 2004)
10. NYC Ghosts & Flowers (from NYC Ghosts & Flowers, 2000)
11. Theme de Simon (from SYR9: Simon Werner a Disparu, 2011)
12. Sunday (from the SubUrbia soundtrack, 1996)
13. Blink (from the Pola X soundtrack, 1999)

disc 2:
1. I Love You Golden Blue (from Sonic Nurse, 2004)
2. No Way (from The Eternal, 2009)
3. Hoarfrost (from A Thousand Leaves, 1998)
4. Rain On Tin (from Murray Street, 2002)
5. New Hampshire (from Sonic Nurse, 2004)
6. Turquoise Boy (from Rather Ripped, 2006)
7. Free City Rhymes (from NYC Ghosts & Flowers, 2000)
8. Malibu Gas Station (from The Eternal, 2009)
9. Karen Koltrane (from A Thousand Leaves, 1998)
10. Karen Revisited aka Karenology (from Murray Street, 2002)
11. Stil (from SYR2, 1997)

After reading David Browne's Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth earlier this year, I lent it to my friend Mat, who I frequently trade music books with. He mentioned that his familiarity with the band's catalog since 1995's Washing Machine is pretty spotty, and since I consider the second half of the band's 30-year career to be frequently amazing, I was happy to put together an overview for him. I also made the mix into a Spotify playlist, although only 19 of the 24 tracks are on it, since "Karen Revisited" is one of those songs they deemed too long to make available and most of the SYR and soundtrack stuff isn't on there. That makes that version of the mix a bit shorter and more accessible without those instrumentals, but I obviously feel like that's a big part of this period of the band that completes the overall picture.

Of course, I happen to be posting this now, a couple days after the quite frankly devastating news that Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have separated, and that the future of the band is uncertain. Obviously they've had a good run and they need to do whatever makes them happy in their own personal lives and that's their business. But this incredibly long-running band always seemed to be built on the foundation of a seemingly rock solid marriage, and the idea of that ending is just heartbreaking to me, beyond them being my favorite band that I thought would just be together and making awesome music as long as they're alive.

And seriously, the music I collected on these mixes is awesome, all of it. It may not be Daydream Nation, and it may be a little mellower than their earlier stuff, but I really feel that no band in rock history has made more great music well beyond their first decade together. Using after Washing Machine as the cutoff point was actually kind of cool because I could just start right at the point where they build their own studio and started the SYR series, which I really feel marks an important cahpter for the band. "Wildflower Soul" kicks off the set since it kind of marks the beginning of Thurston's hippie jam phase, which hit its peak with "Rain On Tin" (possibly my favorite Sonic Youth song ever at this point). Although I consider Murray Street and Sonic Nurse the best albums of this period, Rather Ripped ended up with more songs here, since it has so many nice concise, uptempo songs that are easy to drop anywhere in a mix. And even though this selection features a lot of the band's 7+ minute epics, I did want to keep it somewhat accessible for Mat and anyone else whose interest in the band has waned since Dirty.

2011-10-15T08:15:00.000-04:00

One of the tricky things about bands reuniting after years apart is that even if they went out on top, they rarely truly pick up where they left off. Blink 182's self-titled 2003 album was one of the more unlikely entries on my my top 100 albums of the '00s, a percussion-heavy production showcase of weird hooky power emo. But I figured it was naive or wishful thinking to expect them to return to that sound, which wasn't really the one they were most identified with, for their new album Neighborhoods, after all those years of the members being apart and starring in TV shows and making rap albums and playing in that horrible Angels & Airwaves band.

Neighborhoods is actually closer to Blink 182 than I'd figured on, with Travis Barker's busy loops and bombastic fills still dominating the mix and the songs leaning more towards grandiose arena rock than lean punk pop. But the underwhelming lead single "Up All Night" illustrates exactly how badly this sound can turn out if the songs aren't there, and while that track is one of the low points of the album, the high points aren't a total triumph either. Tom Delonge's enunciation is as entertainingly bizarre as ever, but his singing voice is kind of strangely, unpleasantly weathered, and the more listenable voice of the band, Mark Hoppus, isn't in top form either. Thankfully, the album gets better as it goes along, with the convincing Dude Ranch throwback "Heart's All Gone," and my favorite track, "Wishing Well," perhaps the most seamless combination yet of pop punk early Blink and Cure-worshipping drum-crazy later Blink.

2011-10-13T23:02:00.003-04:00

Some recent The Singles Jukebox blurbs:

Evanescence – What You Want [7/5.86]
Drake – Headlines [3/3.71]
Monica ft. Rick Ross – Anything (To Find You) [4/5.67]
Jessie J – Domino [5/3.22]
Bruno Mars – Marry You [5/5.44]
Rihanna – Cheers (Drink To That) [1/5.20]
Beyoncé – Love On Top [7/6.80]
Coldplay – Paradise [4/4.18]
Big Sean ft. Kanye West & Roscoe Dash – Marvin & Chardonnay [2/3]
Wale ft. Rick Ross & Jeremih – That Way [3/5.29]
J Cole ft. Trey Songz – Can’t Get Enough [2/5.29]

2011-10-12T19:59:00.001-04:00

The personal significance of Pearl Jam's twentieth anniversary is that they became my first favorite band shortly after the release of Ten and have been one of my favorite bands ever since. And I'm not 30 yet, so this band has been a major part of my life for 2/3rds of it. Beyond that, I'm interested to see the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary but in no rush, and in the meantime have enjoyed digging into the 2-disc soundtrack.

The challenge facing Pearl Jam as far as assembling a soundtrack for a biography of the band is that almost any shape it could take already exists in their enormous discography. It could've been a career-spanning best-of, but there's already Rearviewmirror. It could've been a rarities collection, but there's already Lost Dogs. It could've been a live album, but there are literally hundreds of those already commercial available. So the soundtrack ends up being all of the above, a grab bag of ephemera that's mostly of interest to fans only, although as a fan I have no problem with that.

3/4ths of the Pearl Jam Twenty soundtrack is live, running the gamut of "SNL" and "MTV Unplugged" appearances to random concert performances of a random assortment of songs, which I can only imagine were picked because video footage of those performances was used in the film (although it's fun to have a reminder of how laughably awful "Bu$hleaguer" was). Of particular interest to me are the 4 tracks on the first disc from the brief Jack Irons era, which I'm a huge fan of and has been woefully underdocumented in the band's official live releases, which started up just after he was replaced by Matt Cameron.

But really the fun stuff is the demos on the first half of the second disc. The two Temple of the Dog demos are hardly revelatory, but fun to hear because I love that album as much as a lot of Pearl Jam albums. A couple pre-Ten demos that never became proper songs are interesting to hear, and Mike McCready's home demo of "Given To Fly" is beautiful. But the best is "Need To Know," Cameron's demo that contains virtually all of the music for what later became Pearl Jam's last great song, "The Fixer," and is a great window into how much creative input he's had into the band's later years. As a lifelong fan, even I know how inessential and fleetingly interesting this stuff is, but I would still happily listen to a whole album of demos like this, which I imagine will come down the pike at some point. By comparison, I listened to a few tracks from the Nevermind reissue the other night and quickly got bored and put on something else; Nirvana was great but I was always a Pearl Jam guy.

2011-10-11T17:37:00.000-04:00

I wrote a post for the City Paper's Noise blog about Baltimore's Reina Williams appearing on TV's "The X-Factor" last week, including a video of her segment on the show.

TV Diary

2011-10-10T12:38:00.002-04:00

a) "Terra Nova"
This has pretty much all the same flaws as the other Spielberg-produced series that debuted over the summer, Falling Skies: overly familiar premise, bland cast, ill-advised 2 hour pilot episode, special effects that are impressive for TV but quickly lose their novelty. Actually I already somewhat like the characters on this show more than Falling Skies, but it's still just kinda lame.

b) "How To Be A Gentleman"
It makes me so sad to see Dave Foley slumming in a show like this, even if his bits tend to be pretty decent in and of themselves, and I kind of hope it stays on the air and does well enough to help him out of his depressing financial situation. Kevin Dillon was always hilarious to me as Johnny Drama but his character here is a more generic meathead, and his suit-wearing blond foil is like some kind of lame tame off-brand Barney Stinson. That said, the writing on this show is pretty decent, it's mostly the premise that makes everything feel corny.

c) "Suburgatory"
This show definitely isn't the cutting satire it wants to be, and a whole show of a city girl just constantly being condescending about the suburbs is pretty obnoxious. But said girl is really, really cute and a pretty engaging lead for the show, and the supporting cast is solid, so this could actually work.

d) "Pan Am"
I feel like even Mad Men can be annoyingly on the nose and glib about the era it's set in, so with shows like this and The Playboy Club that are almost intentionally broader and clumsier about portraying the '60s, I'm content to just relax and try to appreciate the eye candy (and I've been crazy about Kelli Garner for so long that I'm just happy to have her on a TV show). This is actually kinda sorta better than I expected, if still dumb.

e) "A Gifted Man"
I like Patrick Wilson and this show seems kind of smart and well written, but I just don't know if I can handle any of these brooding network shows about people who talk to ghosts.

f) "Charlie's Angels"
This show just feels so low rent and half-assed, even for what it is, that it reminds me more of that '90 syndicated Pamela Anderson lady spy show "V.I.P." than anything on a network, even something as campy as the original "Charlie's Angels." And I just don't think I'm into Minka Kelly enough to even watch this for shallow reasons.

g) Mel Brooks/Dick Cavett Together Again
Man, I loved the hell out of watching these awesome old dudes sit and talk about the old days for an hour while they've still got their wits about them. Brooks may not be capable of making hilarious movies anymore, but he's definitely still a great storyteller and joke teller.

h) "Happy Endings"
This show was good in its half season in the spring, but it really feels like it's hitting the ground running this fall and cementing itself as probably the best new sitcom of 2011, cast is gelling and the writing's on fire. I'm as surprised as you are.

i) "Whisker Wars"
The world of competitive beard and mustache growing is exactly as absurd as you'd expect, but it doesn't really make for interesting TV.

j) "Ridiculousness"
The idea of this old-ass uncharismatic pro skateboarder from the '90s becoming one of MTV's biggest franchises with 3 shows now is just bizarre to me, and the latest might be his biggest piece of shit yet: another show rehashing YouTube videos, without the joke writing of "Tosh.0" or "Web Soup" or even the slightest attempt to be anything other than idiots laughing at videos you've already seen.

k) "The Big C"
This season had a few good moments and the finale kind of ended with a bang but man I really lost interest in this show.

l) "Parenthood"
I like this season of the show so far but they continue to put these likable characters through some of the dumbest, most eye-rollingly obvious and torturous storylines possible. I'm actually impressed that some of the stupid plots they set into place in the season premiere have yielded some good moments since then.

m) "Tough Love Miami"
I've always enjoyed this silly VH1 self help dating show, so I'm glad it's back. I'm already kind of getting into a groove of rolling my eyes at certain women, although usually I actually kind of like some of them or root for them more.

n) "Breaking Bad"
I have mixed feelings about this season, which I guess is better than feeling totally jerked around and close to giving up on the show entirely at points in the 2nd and 3rd seasons. Now it at least has an end date and feels a bit like they're building toward something instead of making up things as they go along, although it's kind of hilarious how much they've totally forgot that the main characters have a newborn baby. Saul's secretary chewing out Walter in the last episode was just perfect, though, perhaps my favorite moment of the show ever.

o) "Sons of Anarchy"
This season has gotten off to a good start, especially with Rockmond Dunbar from "Terriers" as the new sheriff in town. Man do I miss "Terriers," though.

p) "True Blood"
Totally got sucked (no pun intended) back into this stupid crazy show this year,

q) "Wilfred"
After really enjoying the American adaptation, it was interesting to watch a few episodes of the original Australian series.

r) "Entourage"
This show had an appropriately empty and braindead ending, it was almost kind of fun to see how completely they could abandon all sense of what was even slightly entertaining about "Entourage" to begin with.

s) "Pop-Up Video"
So happy to have this show back, I was literally talking to my wife about how they need to make new episodes like 3 days before they announced it.

2011-10-07T22:48:00.000-04:00

Trans Am played their Futureworld album live in Baltimore on Thursday, and I reviewed the show for the City Paper's Noise blog.

Monthly Report: September Albums

2011-10-06T22:08:00.000-04:00

1. Deleted Scenes - Young People's Church Of The Air
I feel like I fell into being a fan of the Washington, D.C. band Deleted Scenes somewhat by accident; I've seen them live about five times because they keep playing show in Baltimore with bands I like, and over time their songs really grew on me and their 2009 full-length debut Birdseed Shirt became kind of a sleeper favorite. This album seems maybe more consistently enjoyable overall, with some pretty impressive and creative production choices, but the highlights don't stand out as immediately and addictively as the 3 or 4 best songs on Birdseed Shirt.

2. J. Cole - Cole World: The Sideline Story
J. Cole is kind of a bland rapper, but in a year where the other big major label debuts in hip hop are Big fucking Sean and Mac fucking Miller, he deserves credit for not being outright terrible. And his beats on pre-album singles like "Who Dat" and "Blow Up" were impressive enough that I kind of had to check the album just for the production, which really is pretty dope, I'm kinda hoping that his career pops off enough to the point that he starts doing beats on everybody's albums. He thankfully doesn't actually sound like Drake despite all the comparisons, but he does share that pathetic earnest 'I'll be jerking off to the day I got my record deal for the rest of my life' vibe that permeates the album, and is even less appealing in cocky mode on that stupid Trey Songz song. All in all this is a pretty solid album, though, more the 2nd half than the slow 1st half, especially that great song with Missy.

3. Evangelista - In Animal Tongue
Carla Bozulich has carved out such a nomadic creative existence over the years (even her best and best known band, the Geraldine Fibbers, only made two albums) that it's strange and bittersweet to me that she's now got a steady, long-running creative outlet and that I have pretty mixed feelings about it. But her fourth Evangelista album is probably my second favorite to date, after 2008'a Hello, Voyager, continuing to stretch her already pretty visceral and forbidding aesthetic to new breaking points of spooky raw nerve atmospherics.

4. Wild Flag - Wild Flag
Nobody in Wild Flag was really my '90s female indie rock hero because, well, that was Carla Bozulich, and as far as Sleater-Kinney goes I prefer Corin to Carrie. But Janet Weiss is a great drummer and I've really come to have a lot of respect for Mary Timony over the years, so this is pretty solid if not at all revelatory in the tradition of the best supergroups.

5. Wilco - The Whole Love
Ever since Nels Cline joined the band, every time Wilco releases an album I think I should really check it out to see if he has any good parts on it, and I usually never do (although I really love that "Impossible Germany" song and enjoyed the festival set I saw them do a few years ago). I decided way back circa Summer Teeth that I just do not have much compatibility with Jeff Tweedy's voice and songs, but I am glad I checked this out, even if there's not a whole lot of noticeable Nels, mainly because the album is bookended by two really great long songs, "Art of Almost" and "One Sunday Morning.

2011-10-05T14:06:00.001-04:00

Respect Magazine recently interviewed me about the book I'm writing, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music.

2011-10-04T13:21:00.000-04:00

I wrote about Skarr Akbar and DJ Jabril's The Beautiful Mind: Block Work Bootleg for the City Paper's Noise blog.

Netflix Diary

2011-10-03T12:10:00.001-04:00

a) "Community," Season 2
Before anything else, let me just say that I still think Netflix DVD rental is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will continue to use it (under any name, under any price rate) for a long, long time, and I'm not really sure what everyone's shitting their pants about. Anyway, I had a lot of fun a few months ago revisiting the first season of "Community" on DVD and watching all the commentary tracks and other bonus features. But I might've started watching these too soon, especially since I was watching the season 2 reruns all summer, because it just kinda feels stale and makes me want to just focus on watching the new episodes now that the third season has started. Still an amazing season of a great show, though.

b) Sucker Punch
I think my wife thought this was more depressing than the fun she expected, but I kind of liked the downer aspects of it. It really wasn't much of a "yeah, chicks kicking ass!" movie after all, though, and a few cool scenes aside I wasn't that impressed by the visuals, and I say that as someone who doesn't have much of a problem with Zack Snyder -- Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole probably looked better, to be honest.

c) The Lincoln Lawyer
I remember seeing the first big trailer for this and just going "HOLY SHIT MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY IS The LINCOLN LAWYER FUCK YEAH" perhaps just out of total shock of him doing something that looked actually interesting instead of another romcom with Kate Hudson. And it really did live up to my expectations, it's a really cool, smartly assembled thriller with a great supporting cast that McConaughey actually doesn't feel out of place in.

d) The Adjustment Bureau
There's nothing I hate more than big action/sci-fi movies that make everything hinge on a love story without making the slightest effort to make the viewer actually care about the couple or their relationship beyond casting two attractive famous people. So this movie was really refreshing and engaging right off the bat just by virtue of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt having great screen chemistry and believable and funny banter, so much so that at times the whole huge concept of the movie almost felt secondary, or like it maybe should have been. The only time the whole ridiculous premise started to feel a little silly was when somebody ominously said "everybody with a hat is a threat," which really should have been the tagline on the poster. But really, despite some rough patches this was solid.

e) Rango
Visually this was pretty cool but it kind of washed over me, which may be my fault, I wasn't paying much attention.

f) The Mechanic
There's something just too perfect about Jason Statham starring in a Charles Bronson remake. My wife loves both Statham and Ben Foster so this was right up her alley, and I enjoyed it too, some pretty dope action setpieces, although nothing super memorable or over the top like Statham's best flicks.

g) The Rite
Anthony Hopkins: another actor my wife is kind of strangely a huge fan of. This had some cool creepy scenes but I'm a big fan of The Exorcist and it always feels like other movies about exorcisms consistently fail to avoid obvious comparisons, which are inevitably unflattering.

h) The Dilemma
I don't feel like a lot of people really enjoy Vince Vaughn just being chatty and obnoxious like I do, but when he's on, man, he's on, and this movie features him in better form than, I dunno, Couples Retreat or Four Christmases, and he has a good dynamic with Kevin James here. The movie as a whole is kind of a mess, but it's an interesting mess that diverts from the romcom formula in as many good ways as bad ways.

i) 127 Hours
I wasn't particularly jazzed about the idea of seeing this, partly because the trailer's (understandable) reliance on the lighter moments of the movie made it look overly goofy, partly because I kinda knew it would be really uncomfortable to watch. I was kind of surprised how moved I was by the end of the movie, though, I really kinda felt for the guy and what he went through and was more impressed by Franco's performance that I thought I'd be.

j) The King's Speech
This was whatever, I didn't love it, didn't hate it.

k) True Grit
I generally prefer Coen Bros flicks when there's a bit more comedy in the mix, so I was apprehensive about having the same problems connecting with True Grit that I had with No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man. But I really enjoyed this, felt very character driven and involving, great use of the cast, had me on the edge of my seat toward the end.

l) "Better Off Ted," Season 1
I'm still so annoyed this show was canceled, it was so sharp and quick and meanly satirical, but hey, that's what DVDs are for, and it holds up well to multiple viewings.

m) Brooklyn Lobster
I can't even remember how I ended up with this movie on my queue, but man was it boring and pointless, which made slightly more sense after I watched a behind the scenes featurette explaining how the director wrote the movie about the true story of his own family's lobster shack. Martin Scorsese "presents" this movie according to the DVD cover but I have no idea what that really means and the prestige of his supposed involvement doesn't have any discernable effect on the quality of the movie.

n) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Man I fucking loved this movie, enjoyed The Long Kiss Goodnight and the first couple Lethal Weapon movies but didn't realize what a total genius Shane Black is until I watched this, so psyched about him directing the next Iron Man movie now. This movie is also the closest Val Kilmer has ever coming to recapturing his energy from Real Genius, which in and of itself is enough to make a movie classic in my eyes.

o) "Deadwood," Season 2
Even though I put this on my best TV of the decade list I still don't feel like a total convert to this show; there are a lot of great individual moments of acting and dialogue writing and set design and atmosphere-building, but it hasn't quite added up to a cohesive whole that I genuinely care about yet.

p) "Huff," Season 1
I feel weird about finally deciding to rent this show just before a new Hank Azaria show started airing (and doubly so because I'm concurrently watching new episodes of another Showtime series co-starring Oliver Platt, "The Big C"). This is occasionally a really good show but it also feels a bit over top with all the standard premium cable edginess and nastiness, and it's unnerving how this show seems to have so much of the same people behind the music and direction and production as "Dead Like Me" (which was on Showtime around the same time, natch), so it all feels kind of eerily familiar.

q) "Mystery Science Theater 3000" - Gunslinger
Once again, watching some old Joel-era "MST3K" I'd never seen before. This one didn't seem especially funny, but they're all good, obviously.

r) Empire Of The Sun
This was good, although I think I enjoyed the performances more than the story or anything else. Not just young Christian Bale but also early Malkovich and Joey Pants were pretty good. Like with a lot of these movies, though, I wasn't paying super close attention because I was chasing around my toddler half the time.

2011-10-02T09:53:00.001-04:00

Demi Lovato's first two albums, 2008's Don't Forget and 2009's Here We Go Again, came out 10 months apart and were both pretty great little slices of slick guitar pop, and I thought she was well on track to a career path along the lines of Kelly Clarkson or Pink, but perhaps more interesting by virtue of her love of metal. But like most other Disney-bred starlets, Loevato had to go through growing pains sooner or later, and that happened last year when she had a whole public meltdown that involved punching a backup dancer and going into inpatient treatment for cutting and an eating disorder.

It seemed like Lovato owned up to and dealt with her personal problems pretty well, so in a way I felt like it was more of a bad omen for her music that she started talking about her third album taking more of a clubby R&B direction. When the lead single finally arrived, "Skyscraper" swung in an opposite but not necessarily preferable direction with a histrionic power ballad that may have been trying to wring her personal problems into big cathartic pop moment but mostly just stumbles on that stupid chorus lyric. So I wssn't really sure what to expect with Unbroken, but either was I wasn't expecting much.

As it turns out, the album is pretty committed to the club vibe, and "Skyscraper" is an outlier (along with "Fix A Heart," which is a far better wounded ballad). The album opens with the first Timbaland/Missy Elliott collaboration we've heard in years, and it's both underwhelming and just not a good fit for Lovato's voice. In fact in general she has a voice that suits pop/rock well but comes off a bit thin and brittle over R&B tracks, which kind of dooms the whole album to sound like a doomed mistake. Some songs, especially the title track and "Hold Up," combine some cool production textures with a tune that's in Lovato's wheelhouse, but those moments are few and far between.

2011-09-30T21:16:00.000-04:00

Over on the Village Voice's Sound of the City blog, my latest Radio Hits One chart column is about the follow-ups to the last few Hot 10 chart-toppers and their odds of reaching the same level of success.

2011-09-29T20:55:00.001-04:00

In light of the news of Ponytail announcing their breakup, I reviewed their final album Do Whatever You Want All The Time for MobtownStudios.com.

2011-09-28T08:33:00.000-04:00

Green Naugahyde is Primus's first full-length album in 12 years, and it's been even longer since they made a good album, so it's hard to go into it with high expectations to begin with. But I was mainly disappointed to hear that Herb Alexander, the drummer on all their best early albums who reunited with the band for several tours in recent years, was again out of the fold.

In that sense, I was pleasantly surprised that Green Naugahyde is not bad. Founding drummer Jay Lane is no Herb, but he definitely is a suitable drummer for the band. And as much as Primus get knocked for having such a narrow, specific aesthetic, pretty much every album they've made has had its own subtly distinct sound and mood, and Green Naugahyde has this kind of dark, muddy feel that kind of contrasts nicely with the noodly musicianship and goofy lyrics.

Ultimately, though, Green Naugahyde is just as uninspired and overly familiar as most everything Les Claypool has done since the early Primus albums. The sound and tone of his bass is often more inventive than the actual grooves he's playing, and it sounds like the other guys are just kind of along for the ride. And worst of all is that Claypool's always dark, sarcastic worldview starts to come off downright surly and crotchety with his grumbling monotonous delivery, especially when his idea of injecting 'current events' into his songwriting is to reference Octomom -- I don't know what's more shameful, if he's writing lyrics about Brangelina and Octomom in 2011 or if he wrote them back when they were fresh references and held onto them this long.

Monthly Report: September Singles

2011-09-26T15:44:00.000-04:00

1. Cee-Lo Green f/ Melanie Fiona and Philip Bailey - "Fool For You"
It bums me out that I haven't really been able to get behind Cee-Lo becoming hugely successful, mainly because "Fuck You" is such a shitty plastic Motown pastiche that I associate more with Bruno Mars and the Smeezingtons than Cee-Lo's own obvious and undeniable grasp on classic soul and ability to make that sound his own. So it's refreshing that The Lady Killer finally has a moderate R&B radio hit that's really fantastic, with backup vocals from Philip Bailey of Earth Wind & Fire. What really makes it great to me is the single mix that was turned into a duet with Melanie Fiona, whose voice I've really fallen in love with lately after her solo single "Gone & Never Coming Back."

2. Ximena Sariñana – "Different"
This is one of those artists that VH1 tried to make happen with the whole 'you oughta know' thing and it didn't seem to do much good, but hey, I liked it. Cute girl, cute video, really catchy song and punchy arrangement, even if the vocal lacks a certain punch that might've made it a pop hit.

3. Marsha Ambrosius - "Late Nights & Early Mornings"
"Far Away" is already one of my favorite R&B singles of the year but it's great to hear a follow-up that's almost as good and, from a production standpoint at least, a bit more unique and arresting. A lot of mainstream R&B has used that '80s Prince LinnDrum sound to great effect in recent years but this just takes it a little further out there with that smeared texture and halting triplet rhythm, really awesome track.

4. Seether - "Tonight"
Seether is, in my opinion, one of the least redeemable grunting neo-grunge bands that have dominated active rock radio for forever now, but like all their peers, they still occasionally stumble onto a hook. At first this sounded so vaguely familiar that I thought it might be a cover, then I thought maybe because it was called "Tonight" and had a chorus that mentioned rooftops that it reminded me of that Hot Chelle Rae song. Then I realized that the said 'rooftop' line is actually very similar to Republica's "Ready To Go," which is extra hilarious since Seether's first hit, "Fine Again," copped its hook from a line in Alanis Morrissette's "Head Over Feet." So now I just picture the South African grunge cavemen from Seether just being so into stuff like Alanis and Republica that it starts subconsciously influencing their songwriting.

5. David Guetta f/ Usher - "Without You"
I don't like a lot of American R&B stars going Eurodance and especially not Usher, but for some reason I'm kind of into this song. The weird thing though is that the first couple times I heard it I was so sure it was a comeback single from Mario, and I still hear a lot of Mario in the vocal performance.

TV Diary

2011-09-23T21:03:00.006-04:00

a) "Prime Suspect"
This show feels like it has a little more to it than the average procedural but I think I like the character more than Maria Bello's performance, so I'm not sure if it's got legs.

b) "Person of Interest"
Michael Emerson getting his own show is probably the one "Lost" alumni development I've been most excited about over the past year or two, but now that it's finally here, I dunno. Pilot was not bad and kind of better than I expected but it's positioning itself as the kind of intriguing show you get obsessed with, not one you sit back passively entertained by.

c) "Revenge"
This just kind of washed over me too much to even work as campy stupid prime time soap opera fun.

d) "The X Factor"
"The Voice" was like oh wow this is everything I like about "Idol" without all the crap I'd gotten sick of. "The X Factor" is all that crap back in an unappetizing new package.

e) "H8R"
Lots of people have talked about how odious the whole concept of this show is but I have to admit that I was curious to actually see it in action, and it was amazing that I picked a night when that Scott guy from "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" showed up trying in vain to prove to someone that he's not a total douche, which was just priceless.

f) "Unforgettable"
A procedural with a goofy gimmick about a woman with perfect memory is not really my thing, but I have to say that I enjoyed the pilot for this, especially because within the first 5 minutes they show her making money counting cards, which is just the kind of thing you'd want a character like that to do but usually wouldn't on a show like this.

g) "The Playboy Club"
This show isn't entirely just dumb, stylish eye candy, but it's not far off. Can't see this having long term appeal but ehh it's OK.

h) "2 Broke Girls"
I love Kat Dennings enough that I will watch every episode of this no matter how bad it is. And it's not bad, really, there were a few genuine laughs in the pilot and I could see it getting better. But there is something undeniably hokey about a lot of it.

i) "New Girl"
I don't really have much affection for Zooey Deschanel so I don't think I'll be able to stomach this very far past the pilot, although it actually was better than I expected, if still pretty obnoxious.

j) "Free Agents"
It was kind of hard to muster any enthusiasm for this ahead of time despite Hank Azaria and the involvement of "Party Down"/"Veronica Mars" writer/producer John Enborn, but so far this has taken a small lead as my favorite new comedy of the season so far. The supporting cast feels very stock and annoying, but there's something I really like about Kathryn Hahn and she has good chemistry with Azaria.

k) "Up All Night"
I appreciate the attempt to do a show about life with a newborn that's kind of adult and not too cutesy, and the cast is pretty strong, but something about this just comes across kind of toothless and wishy washy (aside from the bit cursing about how cute their baby is). Christina Applegate is good but has been better, it's refreshing to see Will Arnett play an everyman and not a douchey villain type who always speaks in a husky whispter, and Maya Rudolph is hilarious as ever but is kind of awkwardly integrated into the family storylines. So it's hard to say if they can turn a great cast on paper into a great show.

l) "I Just Want My Pants Back"
This is a show that I guess is starting next year but MTV played the pilot after the VMAs and it was just amazingly stupid and oversexed even compared to other recent scripted MTV shows like "Awkward." and "Skins."

m) "Necessary Roughness"
This never quite rose above being a light USA trifle, but it's a pretty well written one with a likable cast, so I'm glad it's coming back next year.

n) "Death Valley"
As much as MTV's scripted programming these days is generally awful, and the concept of this show (a "Cops" type show in a world overrun with vampires and werewolves and zombies) is not that brilliant, it is pretty goofy and funny and surprisingly enjoyable, the kind of thing that could've been done better (or at least cooler) on Adult Swim but is still fine here.

o) "Raising Hope"
This show gets by on a lot of charm and whimsy and cast chemistry, but I'm really starting to respect how clever and inventive the writing can be, too. This was brought home during the season premiere, which featured both an oblique "Happy Endings" reference and perhaps the most tasteless 9/11 joke ever snuck onto a primetime sitcom.

p) "Haven"
Jason Priestley has been a surprisingly good addition to the cast of this show!

q) "How I Met Your Mother"
I was pretty appalled to see an episode based around a character having YouTube infamy (in 2011!) in the season opener, and then doubly so that the second episode that ran the same night also had a YouTube subplot. Really, just such a tired storyline. But the show is still funny (my wife laughed at 'Beercules' for about five minutes straight).

r) "Two And A Half Men"
As one of the rare people willing to defend "Two And A Half Men" as a comedy show, and someone who never thought Charlie Sheen was that big a part of why the show worked, I will say I had mixed feeelings about the reboot. But the way they killed off Charlie was pretty perfect, and Ashton Kutcher's introduction in the second half of the episode was not great shakes but felt surprisingly natural in the context of the show.

s) "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation"
I tuned in a little bit just for the weirdness of Ted Danson replacing Larry Fishburne but this didn't seem like a continuation of the unlikely late Danson renaissance of "Damages" and "Bored To Death." What the hell has even been happening on this show the last few years since I gave up on it?

2011-09-20T21:04:00.002-04:00

The City Paper's 2011 Best of Baltimore issue is out this week, and as usual I helped write a little of the issue.

(photo by Christopher Myers)

1999, Reconsidered

2011-09-19T09:58:00.006-04:00

Top 50 Albums of 1999:

1. The Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I
2. Sparklehorse - Good Morning Spider
3. The Roots - Things Fall Apart
4. Ginuwine - 100% Ginuwine
5. Destiny’s Child - The Writing’s On The Wall
6. Built To Spill - Keep It Like A Secret
7. Superchunk - Come Pick Me Up
8. Eightball And MJG – In Our Lifetime
9. Jay-Z - Vol. 3... Life And Times Of S. Carter
10. Joan Of Arc - Live In Chicago, 1999
11. Missy Elliott - Da Real World
12. Sleater-Kinney - The Hot Rock
13. Method Man And Redman - Blackout!
14. Eleni Mandell - Wishbone
15. Dr. Dre - 2001
16. Tom Waits - The Mule Variations
17. DMX - ...And Then There Was X
18. Lil Wayne - Tha Block Is Hot
19. Beatnuts - A Musical Massacre
20. Beck - Midnite Vultures
21. Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile
22. Mark De Gli Antoni - Horse Tricks
23. Sloan - Between The Bridges
24. Nels Cline/Gregg Bendian - Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music Of John Coltrane
25. Krust - Coded Language
26. Mos Def - Black On Both Sides
27. Incubus - Make Yourself
28. The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
29. Lee Ranaldo - Dirty Windows
30. Counting Crows - This Desert Life
31. Ben Folds Five - The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
32. Rage Against The Machine - The Battle For Los Angeles
33. Saves The Day - Through Being Cool
34. The Foo Fighters - There Is Nothing Left To Lose
35. Beth Orton - Central Reservation
36. Chris Rock - Bigger & Blacker
37. "Weird Al" Yankovic - Running With Scissors
38. Moby - Play
39. Sonic Youth - SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century
40. Wilco - Summerteeth
41. Sting - Brand New Day
42. Our Lady Peace - Happiness...Is Not A Fish You Can Catch
43. Pavement - Terror Twilight
44. Fugazi - Instrument Soundtrack
45. Ben Harper - Burn To Shine
46. Guided By Voices - Do The Collapse
47. Ani Difranco - Up
48. Squarepusher - Selection Sixteen
49. Macy Gray - On How Life Is
50. Cibo Matto - Stereotype A

Since I finally finished my extensive review of my favorite albums and singles of the 2000s recently, I decided to go right back into the preceding decade, once again going backwards with my 25 favorite albums and 50 favorite singles from each year. Then I kept listening to music and thinking about what was released that year and decided to go for broke with 50 albums and 100 singles.

I was 17 in 1999, and hormones and various formative social experiences tend to leave one with a lot of vivid memories of that age, so a lot of this music is wrapped up in that for me. It was the last full calender year that I lived at home with my mom and brother, so in a way what this list conjures up that the '00s lists didn't is the music I got into via my family and various high school friends (about half of the albums here I first heard because my brother owned them).

In a way 1999 felt, both at the time and more recently in retrospect, like the first year that I regarded the critical mainstream as just as untrustworthy or divorced from my musical interests as the pop mainstream. R&B and hip hop were reaching incredible heights that critics took a limited interest in, while alternative rock had gone so soft and sophisticated trying to differentiate itself from nu-metal that it felt like the beginning of the road toward boring wishy washy indie that I spent most of the last ten years running from. A lot of the albums I grudgingly included on the lower reaches of this list were things like The Soft Bulletin and Midnite Vultures or Black On Both Sides that I never wholeheartedly embraced, but at least hold in higher esteem than the depressing final Pavement and Ben Folds Five albums. In fact outside the top 5, barely anybody here released their best album that year, it just feels like a lot of afterglow and preludes to better things. All in all '99 is one of the weakest years of the decade as far as my taste goes -- I won't have to pad out the top 50 with albums I feel conflicted about as much with most of the other years.

There is some great stuff at the top, though. I got Good Morning Spider during a kind of difficult period of my teen years, and obsessed over that record for a good 6 months. Then, I got Emergency & I and obsessed over that for the next 6 months. I was never a big Built To Spill or Sleater-Kinney fan, but those records have stuck with me, and Come Pick Me Up has become one of my favorite Superchunk records, so in a way 1999 is the last gasp of greatness of a few indie rock staples of the period. Plus, it was just an incredible year for Timbaland and so many of his projects.

Top 100 Singles of 1999:

1. Destiny's Child - "Bills, Bills, Bills"
2. The Roots f/ Erykah Badu - "You Got Me"
3. Rage Against The Machine - "Guerrilla Radio"
4. Jay-Z f/ Jaz-O and Amil - "Nigga What, Nigga Who (Originator '99)"
5. KoRn - "Falling Away From Me"
6. Backstreet Boys - "I Want It That Way"
7. 112 f/ Lil' Zane - "Anywhere"
8. Robbie Williams - "Angels"
9. Tal Bachman - "She's So High"
10. Whitney Houston - "It's Not Right But It's Okay"
11. Ginuwine - "What's So Different?"
12. Jordan Knight - "Give It 2 You"
13. Black Star f/ Common - "Respiration"
14. Lil Wayne f/ Juvenile & B.G. - "The Block is Hot"
15. DMX - "What's My Name?"
16. Kelis - "Get Along With You"
17. Raphael Saadiq f/ Q-Tip - "Get Involved"
18. Incubus - "Pardon Me"
19. JT Money - "Who Dat"
20. Metallica - "Whiskey In The Jar"
21. Mystikal and Outkast - "Neck Uv Da Woods"
22. Train - "Meet Virginia"
23. Limp Bizkit - "Rearranged"
24. Nine Inch Nails - "We're In This Together"
25. System Of A Down - "Sugar"
26. Garbage - "When I Grow Up"
27. Counting Crows - "Hanginaround"
28. Kid Rock - "Bawitdaba"
29. Ginuwine - "So Anxious"
30. Britney Spears - "(You Drive Me) Crazy"
31. Q-Tip - "Breathe & Stop"
32. Jay-Z f/ DMX - "Money Cash Hoes"
33. Rah Digga - "Break Fool"
34. No Doubt - "New"
35. LFO - "Summer Girls"
36. Enrique Iglesias - "Bailamos"
37. TLC - "Silly Ho"
38. Sugar Ray - "Someday"
39. Pastor Troy - "We Ready"
40. Blink 182 - "What's My Age Again?"
41. Tear Da Club Up Thugs - "Slob On My Knob"
42. Pharoah Monche - "Simon Says"
43. Lit - "Zip-Lock"
44. Dr. Dre f/ Snoop Dogg - "Still D.R.E."
45. Juvenile f/ Mannie Fresh and Lil Wayne - "Back That Azz Up"
46. Mobb Deep - "Quiet Storm"
47. Eve f/ Drag-On - "Let's Talk About"
48. Will Smith - "Will 2K"
49. Kid Rock - "Cowboy"
50. Third Eye Blind - "Anything"
51. 702 - "Where My Girls At"
52. Mystikal - "That's The Nigga"
53. Jimmie's Chicken Shack - "Do Right"
54. Christina Aguilera - "Genie In A Bottle"
55. The Goo Goo Dolls - "Black Balloon"
56. Dr. Dre f/ Eminem - "Forgot About Dre"
57. Ben Folds Five - "Army"
58. Mos Def - "Ms. Fat Booty"
59. Lauryn Hill - "Everything Is Everything"
60. Juvenile - "U Understand"
61. Staind - "Mudshovel"
62. Monica - "Angel Of Mine"
63. Sammy Hagar - "Mas Tequila"
64. Lamb - "B-Line"
65. 50 Cent - "How To Rob"
66. Lit - "My Own Worst Enemy"
67. Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Around The World"
68. The Beatnuts - "Watch Out Now"
69. Limp Bizkit - "Nookie"
70. Eminem f/ Dr. Dre - "Guilty Conscience"
71. Naughty By Nature f/ Zhane - "Jamboree"
72. "Weird Al" Yankovic - "It's All About The Pentiums"
73. B.G. - "Cash Money Is An Army"
74. Ginuwine - "None Of Ur Friends Business"
75. Backstreet Boys - "Larger Than Life"
76. Jay-Z - "Jigga My Nigga"
77. Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Scar Tissue"
78. Our Lady Peace - "One Man Army"
79. LL Cool J - "Deepest Bluest"
80. Missy Elliott - "She's A Bitch"
81. Snoop Dogg f/ Xzibit and Nate Dogg - "Bitch Please"
82. Eve - "What Ya Want"
83. Eiffel 65 - "Blue (Da Ba Dee)"
84. Moby - "Honey"
85. Drag-On & Juvenile - "Down Bottom"
86. Ricky Martin - "Livin' La Vida Loca"
87. Sleater-Kinney - "Get Up"
88. Pavement - "Spit On A Stranger"
89. Nas - "Nas Is Like"
90. Gang Starr - "Full Clip"
91. Puff Daddy - "P.E. 2000"
92. DMX - "Slippin'"
93. Sugar Ray - "Falls Apart"
94. Eve - "Gotta Man"
95. B.G. f/ The Big Tymers and the Hot Boyz - "Bling Bling"
96. Jay-Z f/ Beanie Sigel - "Do It Again"
97. Chris Cornell - "Can't Change Me"
98. Fiona Apple - "Fast As You Can"
99. KoRn - "Freak On A Leash"
100. "Weird Al" Yankovic - "The Saga Begins"

I kind of knew that my opinion of albums would diverge a lot from the 1999 Pazz & Jop critics poll, but I was surprised just how much I disagree with the singles choices as well -- I couldn't even stand to put any of the top 4 songs from that poll in my top 100, I really just never want to hear "No Scrubs" or "My Name Is" ever again.

In general, though, I feel better about 1999 as a singles year than as an albums year. It was a time when popular music seemed especially faddish, but a lot of the dominant fads of the era -- boy bands, rap metal, latin pop, amonth others -- reached their peak and yielded some of their best songs. A lot of times the first couple years of a decade are said to 'feel' like extensions of the preceding decade, but if anything I feel like '99 is more of a piece with the 2000s, and if I'd included this year in the '00s lists a lot of this stuff would just dominate.

2011-09-16T09:59:00.000-04:00

This week on Radio Hits One, my chart column for the Village Voice's Sound Of The City blog, I look at how Adele's "Someone Like You" is both the first piano-and-vocals-only ballad to ever top the Hot 100, and how few downtempo #1s there have been in the last few years.

2011-09-14T17:55:00.000-04:00

The Use Your Illusion albums by Guns 'N Roses turn 20 years old this Saturday, and in observance of that I wrote a piece on Splice Today counting down the 20 most memorable interjections of spoken word commentary, movie dialogue and obscene outbursts on the albums.

2011-09-13T16:59:00.000-04:00

Lil Wayne is proof positive that rap superstars now enjoy the kind of unstoppable career momentum that classic rockers have been coasting on for decades. Wayne can go to jail for most of a year, release a horrible rock album with no hits and horrid reviews, and generally abandon the things that he built his fanbase on (great, unexpected punchlines and constant mixtapes) and still move a million in a week just like he did three years ago when the quality of his output was still just beginning to nosedive. All it matters is that he's still on dozens of hit songs ever years, not whether those songs would be just as good if you stripped his vocals off of it (really the only song I can think of in the past 3 years that that doesn't apply to is "Every Girl").

That said, Tha Carter IV isn't as bad as I thought it could be, and it's kind of funny that it's finally engendered a mild backlash against Wayne even from the brainwashed stans and critics who gave a pass to shit like No Ceilings. "How To Hate" is the belated arrival of a Wayne/T-Pain collaboration that's actually worth a damn, and songs like and "Abortion" and "Nightmares Of The Bottom" are kind of tastefully bland but effective, much more tolerable than the brooding 'thoughtful' stuff on Carter III.

Still, even the good stuff on Tha Carter IV isn't quite a dead cat bounce up from his low point a couple years ago, just a comfortable plateau of boring but not quite terrible. The Bruno Mars power ballad on the deluxe version is the kind of "Super Bass"-style deluxe-track-turned-pop-hit I'm afraid of being subjected to over the next year. But we'll see if people still care this much by the time Tha Carter V rolls around, or if Drake and Nicki will be just dutifully pulling their mentor along for the ride the way Kanye does with Jay these days.

2011-09-12T15:04:00.000-04:00

I wrote a post about Wye Oak's new video for "Holy Holy" on the Baltimore City Paper's Noise blog.

Monthly Report: August Albums

2011-09-10T19:58:00.000-04:00

1. Butch Walker & The Black Widows - The Spade
Walker's last album, I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart, was my #1 album of 2010, so obviously I was anticipating this big time. But I think that Walker's real gift is for indelible songs that feel so tossed off and effortlessly catchy that there's not much room for high expectations or disappointment. So I don't care if this is not as front to back great as the last one because it's still making me smile more often than not, just a really raucous rock record with a lot of thought and heart put into every song and some really fun, unusual arrangement choices. The second half is where it really starts to click for me, particularly on "Day Drunk" and "Closest Thing To You I'm Gonna Find."

2. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch The Throne
This is better than any album either of these guys have done in a few years, but considering my general feeling about their recent output that's not really high praise (that is to say, it's nowhere near anything they did before 2006). I can take or leave most of it, but there are two songs that make it worthwhile for me. One is "That's My Bitch," which continues Kanye's weird habit of layering Charlie Wilson's vocals over the Bon Iver guy's vocals so that people think the latter is actually a competent R&B singer, which has fooled an amazing number of people. The other is "New Day," which is probably the first time in a long long time that I've really felt like Jay's verse is just totally speaking from the heart in a totally frank and unfiltered way like he used to all the time on his albums. Jay and Beyonce are such a private and in many ways unknowable power couple, but that verse on "New Day" combined with B revealing her pregnancy at the end of perhaps the single greatest live performance of her live were really this exhilarating, beautiful human moment that I thought was just awesome and made me feel really happy for them, as people (perhaps partly because their relationship started around the same time as mine with my wife, and they got married around the same time as we did, and now they're having a kid not long after us).

3. Gucci Mane & Waka Flocka Flame - Ferrari Boyz
Maybe it's because Gucci's manager is Waka's mother, but the affiliation between these guys always seemed like a marriage of convenience that didn't result in much personal or musical chemistry. That said I feel like them kind of meeting each other halfway aesthetically on most of the tracks on this tape works better than I expected it to.

4. Mike Doughty - Yes And Also Yes
I've always been kind of ho hum about Mike Doughty's post-Soul Coughing solo career, which can be a bit drab and overly familiar to a fan of that band. But I enjoyed Golden Delicious enough a few years ago to check this out, and it's not nearly as engaging but has its moments, especially the two "Telegenic Exes" tracks, which make me wish he would do another solo joint as intimate and semi-lo fi as Skittish again.

5. Mike Doughty - Dubious Luxury
When I heard that Doughty had a new album, I went and pulled this up on Spotify and listened to it, not realizing that he actually released two albums in August, and this one was kind of the offbeat teaser for the 'proper' singer/songwriter album Yes And Also Yes. It's interesting to hear Doughty toy extensively with beats and vocal loops on Dubious Luxury, but a lot of said vocal samples are kind of annoying, and since I just listened to El Oso recently it was hard to forget that he was once part of a band that integrated electronic elements into his songs so much more inventively.

Movie Diary

2011-09-08T22:23:00.000-04:00

a) Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark
My wife got really upset the first time she saw the ad for this movie with the girl pulling up the sheets of her bed and seeing a monster. So when we got to go out to a movie recently and had someone to watch the baby, she wanted to see this, naturally, because she loves scary movies and she loves Guillermo del Toro. Overall I thought it was pretty well done, more spooky than scary and I actually didn't hate Katie Homes in it. Was not wild about the creature design of the little beasties, though.

b) Catfish
I can see both why this documentary (or faux doc or whatever it really was) generated a fair amount of excitement and why it had its share of detractors. Overall I thought it was compelling and annoying in equal measure, but annoying doesn't ever really mean less compelling, although it was traveling on such well trodden ground that I don't really feel like I got anything out of it that'll stick with me.

c) How Do You Know
The box office for this movie affirms the feeling that I am probably one of the only people in the world who sees that there's a James L. Brooks movie starring Paul Rudd, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson and thinks "sign me up." But really, I did like this, for all its low key charm and somewhat failed designs on being something more than it was. Good cast, everyone got to play to their strengths.

d) The Town
I kind of rolled my eyes at the very existence of this movie, but in practice it wasn't too bad, although Jeremy Renner is one of those guys I just don't really care to see in anything ever.

e) Megamind
Being another 2010 computer animated movie about the redemption of a super villain voiced by a comedy A-lister really makes this feel like the Deep Impact to Despicable Me's Armageddon. And by that token, this fails at capturing Will Ferrell's sense of humor or using his voice well the way Despicable did with Steve Carrell. But it's definitely a pretty different story and is often pretty entertaining, if not especially funny (oddly enough, Guillermo del Toro is credited as a 'creative consultant').

f) Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
I always enjoy seeing Andy Serkis in a normal role (i.e. non-motion capture CGI role a la Gollum), and this movie in particular is just a really great star vehicle for him. I'm generally kind of allergic to rock biopics, but I think a lot of that is because usually I'm too aware of every level on which they fudge the history or the musical accuracy, and in this case my familiarity with Ian Dury is too basic for me to get all pedantic, so I was just able to enjoy the giddy frantic direction and performances for what they are.

g) You Again
The relative dearth of female comedies makes people all the more grateful for occasional hits like Bridesmaids; a movie like You Again, which features Kristen Bell and Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis and Betty White and Kristen Chenoweth, almost all of which billed above any male cast member, should ideally be in the same company. It doesn't quite hit the mark, but it's better than you probably think it is.

h) Machete
There's something adorably sad about Lindsay Lohan already becoming camp fodder along with Steven Seagal and Don Johnson in this Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse trailer-turned-spinoff. This had some fun moments but probably not as many as it was going for.

i) How To Train Your Dragon
This really seems like one of the more well-regarded non-Pixar computer animation flicks of the past few years, and I don't really get it. It was a nice story, and I thought the look of the movie was cute, but yeah, I dunno, felt kind of middle of the road to me.

j) Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
I don't know how I ended up throwing away an afternoon watching this.

k) Group Sex
I know how I ended up throwing away an afternoon watching this, but seriously, as sex comedies go it was neither sexy nor funny.

l) The Break-Up Artist
Another really cheesy low-budget relationship comedy that I rolled the dice on and lost.

m) Flashbacks of a Fool
Kind of a dreary and maudlin Daniel Craig movie where the younger actor who plays character as a teenager gets more screentime that Craig himself. Not bad but just kind of a downer.

n) The Life Before Her Eyes
God I just hated this movie, even though I should have seen the stupid 'twist' coming given the title, I can't believe I watched it all the way to the end, just offensively pointless and stupid.

o) Spiral
A psychodrama starring the guy from Avatar who looks like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, which is exactly as goofy and lightweight as it sounds.

p) Color Me Kubrick
I like seeing Malkovich have a bit of fun and the fact that this was based on a true story makes it all the more creepy and weird and entertaining, but the movie somehow ended up as less than the sum of its parts.

q) School of Life
You know who doesn't get enough good roles? David Paymer. That guy's all class. I'll even watch him opposite Ryan Reynolds in some touchy-feely direct-to-DVD business just to see him co-headline a movie.

r) Layer Cake
The Daniel Craig movie that supposedly got him the Bond job, really pretty great, although perhaps I'm just grateful for any British crime movie that in no way resembles the work of Guy Ritchie.

s) Larger Than Life
If Groundhog Day represents the last great work of Bill Murray's leading man period and Rushmore marks the beginning of his current period as a beloved aging icon, there are about 5 years in between when the world didn't much know what to do with him. And yet he did some good work there, if nothing especially great: fine work in Kingpin, the surprisingly decent The Man Who knew Too Little, amusing small roles in a truly strange trifecta of films (Ed Wood, Space Jam and Wild Things), and I'm guessing at some point I should see Mad Dog And Glory. But one movie I assumed I'd never be compelled to bother with was the one where he inherits an elephant. And then I was recently reading the entertaining book Alphabetter Juice and the author, Roy Blount, Jr., mentioned that he wrote the screenplay and I thought oh, well, maybe I'll give it a shot.

t) Less Than Zero
I always heard this kind of referred to as a bratpack movie, but I guess it's a Bret Easton Ellis adaptation and man does it suck.

2011-09-07T19:55:00.002-04:00

Something else I wrote about 9/11 recently: a few paragraphs about my experiences that day, as part of a collection of remembrances in this week's Baltimore City Paper.

(illustration by Alex Fine)

2011-09-06T15:07:00.000-04:00

I wrote a piece for Splice Today about how 9/11 has become a convenient scapegoat for anyone in show business who had a flop in the fall of 2001.

2011-09-03T17:22:00.000-04:00

My latest Radio Hits One column is about rock bands (kinda) returning to the U.S. top 10 this summer.

2011-09-01T14:00:00.000-04:00

This week in the City Paper, I profiled the two Baltimore-based co-founders of the Riot Folk collective, Ryan Harvey and Mark Gunnery (who also records hip hop under the name Aryeh Gonif).

(photo by Christopher Myers)

2011-08-30T21:55:00.001-04:00

Tayland Promotions is putting on a benefit show at Sonar this Thursday for the family of Baltimore rapper Yuk, and I wrote a post on the City Paper's Noise blog about the show and the unfortunate circumstances of Yuk and his family that the benefit is being held because of. Yuk, Comp, KG and others will be performing at the show, go check it out if you can.

The 2011 Remix Report Card, Vol. 5

2011-08-28T23:43:00.000-04:00

"Go N Get It (Remix)" by Ace Hood featuring Beanie Sigel, Busta Rhymes, Pusha T & Styles P.
As Noz noted, the lineup for this remix is kind of strangely absent of southerners and generally populated by guys whose careers peaked about a decade ago. Still, I'll take a lineup like this over another remix with Ross and Wayne any day, and I always thought this song was more tolerable than "Hustle Hard." I'm a sucker for doubletime flows and loved Busta's back in the day, but all the fast raps he's been doing since "Look At Me Now" are kind of lame and annoying to me for some reason I can't quite put my finger on. Pusha and Styles are kind of out of place, but Beans is vicious.
Best Verse: Beanie Sigel
Overall Grade: C+

"Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) (Remix)" by Katy Perry featuring Missy Elliott
Recently when Missy did her "Behind The Music" episode and talked about how her health problems kept her off the scene the last few years and how she was ready to hit the charts again, I had this really bittersweet feeling of wanting so much for her to come back and be a huge star again but not seeing any way she'd do that in 2011 that wouldn't be kind of ill-fitting or lame compared to her classic records. And a verse on a Katy Perry remix seems like the perfect example of that, and yet I'm not really mad at this. The way the beat gets chopped up on Missy's verses sounds cool and she ultimately is a good fit for the whole vibe of the song.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B-

"Oh My (Remix)" by DJ Drama featuring Trey Songz, 2 Chainz and Big Sean
One of the interesting things to me about these hits "by" DJs is that they can do remixes with none of the vocalists from the original track -- although DJ Khaled has never actually done this, his remixes generally keep the hook singer from the original (and also usually supplant the de rigeur Rick Ross verse with a new Rick Ross verse). So in a weird way I feel compelled to applaud DJ Drama for actually starting from scratch with this remix and not featuring any of the three artists from the original. It's also a total improvement on the original just by virtue of replacing Roscoe Dash with Trey Songz for a much more tolerable version of the hook and a fairly impressive rap verse. There's also Tity Boi, who I've always been a fan of and have been happy to see his career suddenly on the rise, albeit with a kind of bland name change. And then Big Sean shows up and kind of blows the track's batting average to hell.
Best Verse: 2 Chainz
Overall Grade: B+

"Tony Montana (Remix)" by Future featuring Drake
Drake ruined one of my favorite southern rap hits of last year when he pinched a loaf on Jeezy's "Lose My Mind" remix, and while his appearance here is equally hapless and hilarious, the song is kind of shitty to begin with so I can't begrudge him there. Seriously, though, Drake getting all squeaky and excited and then trying to compensate for it with a strained southern accent is some sad sad shit.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: F

Monthly Report: August Singles

2011-08-26T11:43:00.000-04:00

1. Michelle Branch - "Loud Music"
The first time I heard this song, I was in the car with my wife (on the same day that we drove too fast with Zeppelin on, by complete coincidence), and she rolled her eyes and said something like "this song is really stupid." I nodded in agreement but said "it's really catchy, though." And honestly I have no problem with stupid lyrical conceits if they're propped up by a huge hook.

2. AWOLNATION - "Sail"
It feels like there's a whole little wave of vaguely indie-ish and mostly also vaguely electronic (but definitely not Pitchfork-approved) bands blowing up on mainstream alternative radio these days, headed up by Foster The People. And most of that stuff holds no appeal for me, but this song really grabbed my attention, partly because I had no idea what it could possibly be when I first head it -- I thought maybe it was that Danger Mouse/Jack White song that'd been on the charts, but no. Anyway this is a pretty interesting breakout hit for a new artist, feels kind of ugly and lurching and not very radio-friendly, which is after all what makes it stand out so much.

3. Miguel - "Quickie"
I already kind of summed up why I like this song on Singles Jukebox, but I love that the follow-up to "The Sure Thing" (probably my favorite single of 2011) is such a 180 and yet also awesome.

4. Meek Mill f/ Rick Ross - "Ima Boss"
The fact that Rick Ross is now so established in the pop rap firmament that he has a vanity label with artists under him is just so, so depressing to me, and the fact that he's helping Wale continue to have a career is both offensive and hilarious. But I kinda like this Meek Mill cat, at least based on how relentless he owns this song, to the point that Ross's presence barely registers (whereas "Tupac Back" feels like a Ross song, and not a good one). Rap radio needs more cheap synth horns.

5. Theory Of A Deadman - "Lowlife"
Theory Of A Deadman is kind of the offbrand Nickelback, and generally don't have their more successful buddies' facility for big dumb hooks, but both bands also have a penchant for sleazy jokey songs, and Theory are definitely better at those, between "Bad Girlfriend" and this song, which is maybe a little too melodically sunny but still pretty enjoyable. Donal Logue is also very well cast in the video.

TV Diary

2011-08-23T22:21:00.000-04:00

a) "In The Flow with Affion Crockett"
It's weird to see a "Wild 'N Out" cast member get his own network show, especially since Affion Crocket is just another Aries Spears/Jay Pharoah type black comic who trades in spot-on impressions of a few rappers and black actors and has no other discernible talent or charisma, plus Crockett is just kind of sunken-eyed and unpleasant to look at. But I will give him some credit that his rap-themed sketches are generally pretty spot-on, especially the Drake and Kanye impressions.

b) "Heidi Fleiss: Protitutes To Parrots"
My mind was blown when I saw the title of this show on the cable schedule, but actually watching it for a few minutes was only slightly more absurd or less depressing than watching Fleiss on "Celebrity Rehab." Apparently Mike Tyson had a show about his love of birds too, which makes this part of some bizarre pattern.

c) "Awkward."
It feels like between this and that stupid "Hard Times of RJ Berger" show MTV is getting more into scripted comedy shows that are going for some kind of bawdy teen sex movie niche that is just kind of gross. This one has its moments of entertainment but mostly it's just aggravating watching them trying one-up the moronic slang of Juno into increasingly nonsensical neologisms and obnoxious quips.

d) "State of Georgia"
This is one of those times when people are just going to roll their eyes and worry that my TV addiction has reached a new low when I saw that Raven-Symoné's new show on ABC Family is actually kind of hilarious. She and the other girl on the show have this kind of weird fast zany "I Love Lucy" kind of vibe with their antics, totally surprised me.

e) "Combat Hospital"
This show is pretty well written but it always falls flat when Michelle Borth is at the center of it all, I don't know if she just has a really small voice or if she generally comes across as blank or kind of dumb, but she just really cannot carry a show like this. And it doesn't help that it feels like there's less and less Elias Koteas with each episode.

f) "Wilfred"
So far this show hasn't quite lived up to the giddy thrill of the initial premise's absurdity and some of the huge laughs in the first couple episodes, but I'm still enjoying it a lot, and have been interested to see how far they push the whole ridiculous concept. He may be the straight man but I'm kind of gaining an appreciation for Elijah Wood's comedy chops too.

g) "Suits"
This show has really shaped up to be, if not necessarily more than the usual legal procedural, than at least a really good one that is driven enough by the characters' long term arcs and relationships that it doesn't feel very procedural at all, which I like. Definitely a contender for best summer cable series of 2011.

h) "Franklin & Bash"
This, on the other hand, has turned out to be more of a standard procedural than the kind of wacky sophomoric variation thereof that was initially promised (and somewhat delivered upon).

i) "Platinum Hit"
One of the most amusing things about this show was how over the course of the season it slowly transitioned from being co-hosted by Jewel and Kara DioGuardi to just being hosted by Jewel with DioGuardi occasionally showing up as a judge. In one of the last episodes they mentioned something about her having a new executive position at a label so maybe she actually just was busy with other stuff but I'd like to think the producers just realized she's terrible on-camera and/or hard to work with and gradually minimized her role (while also letting Jewel wear progressively more eye-popping outfits). The show itself ended up being pretty good, some of the competing songwriters actually had some talent and while I wasn't thrilled with the winner, at least it wasn't that fuckin' Nick guy.

j) "Top Gear USA"
I don't watch the UK version all the time but I recognize it as a great show enough that I feel sad that this even exists. Adam Ferrara, that's seriously the best you could do?

k) "Louie"
I've long been one of the few people who's been kind of disappointed in this show -- I love the segments of Louis C.K. doing standup but the narrative stuff often just feels kind of slapdash, when it's not outright pretentious. But it's really clicked and started to become engrossing for me in the last few episodes (specifically the ones with Joan Rivers, Pamela Adlon, Dane Cook and Doug Stanhope). Now I'm like OK, it's living up to the hype, at least some of it.

l) "Donald J. Trump Presents: The Ultimate Merger"
Apparently this started last year as a dating show for guys competing to be with Omorosa, which really doesn't sound very promising at all, but now the celeb is Toccara Jones, who I find much more attractive, so I've tried watching this a little bit, but really she's barely in it and otherwise this is just usual reality show doldrums.

m) "The Big C"
The brother was really the best part of this show in the first season, and it feels like they've really minimized his role and dulled his personality/background this year.

n) "True Blood"
This season has been kind of a mixed bag, Sookie's story being more insufferable than ever but the rest of the show mostly firing on all cylinders. Mostly I'm just happy that there's a lot of Jessica this season.

o) "The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson"
I'm so rarely up late enough to watch this show these days, but when I am I'm still occasionally amazed by how different it is from every other late night show. Recently I tuned in one night and Ferguson was not only doing the show from Paris, but would just walk down the street with two guests at the same time, Eddie Izzard and Kristen Bell, just hanging out and talking together, which was really unexpected and cool.

p) "Entourage"
In a weird way the only impression this season has left on me so far is the storyline about Ari splitting with his wife, the whole thing of him being a dedicated family man always felt like the secret heart of the show to whatever extent the show has a heart, almost kind of a violation to switch that up. Still, he finally banged Constance Zimmer so I'm happy about that at least.

2011-08-21T14:58:00.000-04:00

My latest Radio Hits One column tackles the concept of "YouTube Platinum."

2011-08-18T18:03:00.001-04:00

I wrote a Noise blog post about a song called "Paul Westerberg" from the Baltimore band Alto Verde's forthcoming album Paper Clips.

2011-08-17T17:13:00.000-04:00

My latest scores and blurbs on The Singles Jukebox:

Nicole Scherzinger ft. 50 Cent – Right There [5/3.09]
Lupe Fiasco ft. Trey Songz – Out of My Head [6/5.29]
Lloyd ft. Andre 3000 – Dedication To My Ex (Miss That) [1/5.2]
Enrique Iglesias ft. Usher, Lil Wayne & Nayer – Dirty Dancer [3/3.27]
DJ Drama ft. Fabolous, Wiz Khalifa & Roscoe Dash – Oh My [2/3.56]
Patrick Stump ft. Lupe Fiasco – This City [5/4.93]
Beyonce – Best Thing I Never Had [3/6]
Hot Chelle Rae – Tonight Tonight [0/2.36]
Miguel – Quickie [7/4.8]
Demi Lovato – Skyscraper [4/5.08]
Blink 182 – Up All Night [5/5.64]
Red Hot Chili Peppers – The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie [3/4.33]
The Throne – Otis [3/5.4]

(R.I.P. Martin Skidmore)

2011-08-15T09:59:00.001-04:00

Incubus is an interesting band to me, in that I'm never sure exactly how to define their place in the mainstream rock world. They're '90s rock radio survivors, but they came to prominence late in the decade, a bit later than other mainstays like the Foo Fighters and Weezer (but earlier than '00s franchises like Nickelback and Linkin Park). They came up associated with the nu-metal scene, but skew more alternative than active rock like KoRn or The Disturbed. They're known for their pretty boy lead singer and tuneful power ballads, but they work against that image only in subtle ways, loading up their last few albums with stylistic left turns without straight up trying to alienate their mainstream fanbase with a Radiohead or even Pearl Jam-style career path. The best analogy I can figure is that they've got kind of a Red Hot Chili Peppers arc going on, goofy diverse funksters who gradually mature into an idea of sophisticated experimentation that itself feels a little bit goofy.

The latest Incubus album If Not Now, When? is similarly hard to exactly put my finger on. It's a very quiet, restrained record, without playing to their commercial strengths with any gentle hooks reminiscent of "Drive" or "Love Hurts." The lead single "Adolescents" felt somewhat offbeat and difficult to process when it debuted on the radio a few months ago, but it's actually the second most uptempo song on the record (after the great but also not exactly blistering "Switchblade"). And it actually sounds kind of towering and huge when it finally arrives in the last ten minutes of the album, which I didn't really expect.

And yet If Not Now, When? isn't really a weird or inaccessible album. If anything the songs are very stripped down and simplified with a lot of thought put into the arrangements and production. This is kind of sacrilegious because I love that album, but it kind of reminds me of Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night, in terms of being this very textured, patient record with a smooth, pretty male voice, a very warm, moody record. There's also kind of an R&B vibe in the way Brandon Boyd is the only singer in alternative rock who routinely addresses the listener as "girl." Only "Isadore" and a couple other songs live up to the greatness of "Adolescents," but overall it's a pretty enjoyable listen.

Reading Diary

2011-08-12T22:20:00.000-04:00

a) Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text by Roy Blount, Jr.
My wife got me this as a Father's Day gift, because she'd heard about it on NPR and the author is a regular on "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" and she'd gleaned that it would appeal to my word nerd tendencies, and she was right. I haven't read the original Alphabet Juice but I assume it's in the same format as this just with different material. Blount has a really infectiously playful approach to breaking down all these interesting matters of meaning and pronunciation and etymology, boiling down a lot of knowledge and research into something too personal and offbeat to be dry. Sometimes his sense of humor is a little over the top for my taste and the thing gets too clever for its own good, but for the most part this is a really fun read.

b) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
It surprised me how much I was able to just enjoy this as a David Foster Wallace book and lose myself in it, without thinking too much about it being the incomplete novel he was working on when he committed suicide. And then it hit me, as I was finishing it recently, that I've pretty much read everything he's published, and after this there's nothing, which made me sad about his death all over again. But really: this book resonated with me. I read a lot of it while on temp jobs doing filing work, which really helped me connect with the book's overarching themes about boredom and tedium and the virtues of deep concentration. The "author's foreword" sections and the whole meta memoir conceit struck me as vaguely distasteful, almost a throwback to the kind of postmodern '90s schtick I'd like to think Wallace was way past, but it didn't really detract from the whole, which held together surprisingly well despite its incomplete nature and the many loosely connected strands of narrative (I especially loved when a 50 page chapter of first person monologue is followed by the revelation that it was being narrated by a long-winded character whose nickname is 'Irrelevant'). There are some things in here that are really going to stick with me, I think, in the same way so much of Infinite Jest has and will always rattle around my brain.

c) Decoded by Jay-Z
As jaded as I can be about Jay's post-'retirement' music, I still have a lot of respect for the guy on an intellectual level, and this book is really just an amazing look into his lyrics, the kind of dense and frank self-analysis people always wish a Bob Dylan or someone would write but never will. The book's editor or co-writer or whoever obviously dresses up Jay's conversational tone into something slightly stiff and formal at times, and is clearly geared to a broad audience that doesn't necessarily appreciate his catalog or rap music in general (which probably can be said for too much of his recent music, sadly), but overall you really get a sense of a guy and a great window into his writing process. I always knew when Jay had mentioned working on a book that it wouldn't be a tell-all memoir, that's just not his style, but I was shocked he actually did write an autobiographical book, and I'm really grateful it took this particular shape.

d) Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James & The Shondells by Tommy James and Martin Fitzpatrick
My friend Andy lent me this book telling me what a great quick read it is, and I really dug it. It was kind of alarming to read this book and realize how huge Tommy James was in his day, which underlines how much some '60s artists have been somewhat forgotten by history, considering that I generally only heard his music growing up in the form of '80s covers of "Mony Mony," "I Think We're Alone Now," "Crimson & Clover" and so on. I thought at first that the mob aspect of the story was a little sensationalized and played up for the title, but it really did end up providing some pretty wild stories.

e) Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton
One of the daunting things about writing this book about Baltimore club music that I'm going to finish and publish one of these days is that I come to it from more of a hip hop background and don't have a really well rounded understanding of dance music history. So I grabbed this book off my friend Mat's bookshelf and it seemed like a good place to start for some kind of overview. It took me a while to get into it and sometimes the tone the writers take is kind of light and fluffy with some heavy-handed editorializing that doesn't quite coalesce into a real sense of personality on the page, but overall they did a great job of structuring a whole lot of divergent eras and scenes into a narrative that really kind of flowed and built upon itself, really learned a lot and got a little more curious about certain genres I've been a little closed minded towards.

2011-08-11T16:05:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks ago I sat down with Beauty Pill while they were recording their new album in public at Artisphere in D.C., and my interview with the band is up on Splice Today now. We really had a great conversation, there are some interesting outtakes from this edit of the interview that I'll really have to share at this point, maybe in another article or blog post whenever the album drops.

Monthly Report: July Albums

2011-08-10T15:33:00.000-04:00

1. Lloyd - King of Hearts
If this album started on track 3 and ended after track 13, it'd be a strong candidate for album of the year. But even with the jarringly horrendous "Dedication to My Ex (Miss That)" and to a lesser extent "World Cry" and that stupid Game intro dragging down the album's batting average, it's still really damn good. Really the meat of the album is pretty much my ideal concept of a Lloyd album produced by Polow Da Don, which is a pleasant surprise given that Polow has never quite lived up to his potential as an album exec producer in the past with Rich Boy and Keri Hilson's albums. And Lloyd, even though he's definitely leaning a little too hard on a 'grown up' persona at times, really reserves his place as one of my favorite voices in R&B -- he doesn't willfully evoke Michael Jackson the way so many of his peers do, but it just comes out so effortlessly in his high register and the kind of naive sweetness in his delivery. At the moment "Jigsaw" and "You II" are particular favorites, but "Naked" and "Shake It For Daddy" and "Cupid" are all so great.

2. They Might Be Giants - Join Us
I can be very loyal as a fan, once someone is one of my favorite bands for even a while, I will probably check out every new album they make forever and ever. And sometimes that can result in a kind of loyalty fatigue, especially with a band who's released as many albums since the last one I really loved as TMBG have since Factory Showroom. So I kind of checked out this one without any real hopes of it leaving more of an impression than The Else or Mink Car, and suddenly after a few listens, when I started trying it out on headphones, it just clicked for me and somehow has a little bit of the special blend of whimsy and songcraft that I associate with their first few albums. I mostly like the Linnell songs like "Can't Keep Johnny Down" and "Canajoharie" and "When Will You Die" (which feels a little less funny than it probably would have when it was written, now that Osama Bin Laden has died and the song's sentiments have kind of played out on the world's stage without irony), but Flansburgh's sometimes wearying wackiness has been toned down or honed into a more subtle absurdity on his songs, which is really refreshing.

3. Dos - dos y dos
After a six year drought of pretty much no new records from Mike Watt (not counting sidemousing for the Stooges), it's been pretty awesome to have three in the past 12 months alone: the debut of his new group Floored By Four, the solo album hyphenated-man, and now the fourth album by his long-running bass duo with ex-wife Kira Roessler. Dos is not really one of my favorite Watt projects, sometimes the commitment to such a minimal sound, with no percussion or really any treble at all, aside from Roessler's occasional vocals, gets a little limiting and monochromatic, but there are some moments of beauty on this album and it really is kind of a cool idea for a band that leads them to some interesting writing and arranging.

4. Gucci Mane - Writings On The Wall II
Fair weather fan that I am, I only check out Gucci mixtapes now if there seems to be a good amount of buzz around them. And I guess it says something about the frequency of his output or my opinion of it that this is probably my favorite of the last three or four tapes I've heard but still not that great. "Supa Cold" is awesome and "MVP" with Jagged Edge puts every R&B joint on Gucci's major label albums to shame, and the songs with Yelawolf and 50 Cent are cool. But in general the trap talk-heavy slant of this tape is not my favorite lane for Gucci to be in, and "Tragedy" and "Lil Friends" affirm both that I don't like him on Lex Luger beats and that sometimes Gucci's hooks all sound the same in a really half-assed repetitive way.

5. Kelly Rowland - Here I Am
Much like the Lloyd album would be much better with its undesirable bookmarks lopped off, Here I Am is a pretty solid 8-track modern R&B album that happens to have two annoyingly overdriven Eurodance tracks tacked on at the end. Given that Kelly sang on David Guetta's breakthrough U.S. hit and has a good dance diva voice, I don't really begrudge her including that stuff on the album, but the way it's sequenced just makes it stick out even more, and I'm ultimately glad "Motivation" is the big hit that really gave the album its direction. The album really hits a great groove halfway through with the huge hook of "Turn It Up" and the gorgeously intimate "Keep It Between Us," and I never thought I'd like a Runners track that sounds like "Hey Daddy" as much as I like "All Of The Night." This album really features the worst collection of guest rap verses ever on an R&B album, though, by Lil Playy, Big Sean and Rico Love (I still hate Wayne's verse on "Motivation" but those other ones are a whole other class of terrible).

2011-08-08T07:29:00.000-04:00

I have an article in today's Baltimore Sun about listener reactions to the return of WHFS on 97.5 FM last week.

2011-08-05T18:11:00.000-04:00

My latest Radio Hits One column is about aging pop stars using reality shows as a springboard to get back on the charts.

2011-08-03T17:25:00.001-04:00

I saw Steely Dan last night at Merriweather Post Pavilion, and reviewed the show on Noise.

Monthly Report: July Singles

2011-08-01T17:24:00.000-04:00

1. The Joy Formidable - "Whirring"
It took me a few months of occasionally hearing this song and each time being blown away by how great it is (especially the live performance on "Conan") for me to get past my biases against the band's name, against any new rock band from across the Atlantic really, and just realize that this song is really just everything I could want from a rock song, summed up fairly well by the title. And now it's a moderate U.S. rock radio hit, and I hope it gets bigger from here. I still really need to hear their album.

2. Young Jeezy f/ Fabolous and Yo Gotti - "Flexin'"
Although rap albums with protracted, confusing and confused advance singles campaigns are nothing new these days, it's been especially frustrating to watch what's happened with Young Jeezy's Thug Motivation 103 over the past year and change. "Lose My Mind" was a pretty sizable hit, bigger than any 'street single' has a right to be really, but after a couple of other attempts at singles (the ok "All White Everything" and the awesome "Jizzle") stiffed, everything went quiet for a while. Then we got the mediocre Lil Wayne/Lex Luger bandwagon jump "Ballin'" (which is only slightly entertaining if I pretend Jeezy is yelling BLOG in the chorus), and the pretty weak new "Shake Life," which are both doing well enough that the album might actually get released sometime this year. In the meantime, though, this great track from the mixtape The Real Is Back is getting some minor airplay and I'm really pulling for it to pop up as a surprise hit, really catchy track and the chorus is just hilarious.

3. Trey Songz f/ Drake - "Unusual"
These guys are both so stiflingly ubiquitous on the radio these days, mostly with really boring or terrible songs, that I feel like they deserve a gold star for getting together on something actually kind of great (even if Drake does nothing to contribute to the quality of the song).

4. Jennifer Hudson - "No One Gonna Love You"
I'm a sucker for any song with a loping left hand piano groove that reminds me of "Bennie & The Jets," especially stuff in a modern R&B context like "I'm A Flirt." Also good to hear Hudson on the rare occasion her material lives up to her voice, and to be reminded of how good Rich Harrison could be before he kind of fell off the face of the earth.

5. Avril Lavigne - "Smile"
With this and "What The Hell," Avril Lavigne has had a couple of my favorite Max Martin girl pop songs of 2011, but she's been kind of lost in the shuffle among bigger hits by Britney and Katy and Pink. And that's kind of a shame, because as much as Avril's career doesn't really make much sense at this point, these songs are just undeniably catchy.

TV Diary

2011-07-29T22:11:00.001-04:00

a) "Famous Food"
This is a new nadir (or zenith) of pointless VH1 reality shows, with Three 6 Mafia, Big Pussy from "The Sopranos" and a bunch of people from other reality shows competing to open a shitty restaurant or something. I watched this for a few minutes and saw DJ Paul yelling at Elliot Spitzer's hooker while the pilot guy from "The Bachelor" referred to him like his first name is "DJ."

b) "Roseanne's Nuts"
"Roseanne" is a classic show and Roseanne is in some ways still kind of a cool old broad, but even that recent New York magazine piece she wrote that was surprisingly level-headed and humble still had these weird off-putting moments of self-aggrandizing and paranoia. So a Roseanne reality show has pretty even odds of being entertaining or terrible, and what little I watched was both dull and obviously staged, much in the same way as that stupid Gene Simmons show.

c) "NTSF:SD:SUV::"
After "Children's Hospital" and "Eagleheart," this is now the third live action Adult Swim show that is basically a broad parody of a hoary genre of primetime TV drama, and making fun of "CSI Miami" is almost as played out as "CSI Miami" at this point. But hey, it works, I laughed, especially when J.K. Simmons showed up.

d) "Web Therapy"
Lisa Kudrow is undeniably funny and has carved out a pretty decent niche as a character actor post-"Friends," but sometimes in starring vehicles like "The Comeback" I feel like she can very easily veer into a kind of default Kudrow brand of funny that's not necessarily very funny, just kind of quirky or uncomfortable. This has some symptoms of that kind of thing, but feels like it has the potential to be something more, partly from the improvised nature of the show and partly because they've set up all these weird little subtle bits of plotting into the arguments that kind of keep you watching and not just waiting for the next laugh.

e) There's Something Wrong With Aunt Diane
Very disturbing and fascinating HBO documentary about this woman who drove the wrong way on a freeway with five kids in the car and had a head-on collision under mysterious circumstances a couple years ago. Being a parent now just makes me more horrified and obsessed with stuff like this.

f) "Alphas"
A new SyFy show that I vaguely want to get into, but the pilot just really didn't hold my attention at all, and it was an hour and a half long.

g) "Necessary Roughness"
Little by little USA is pulling me into their vortex of slight, cute shows -- this year alone I've gotten hooked on "Fairly Legal," "Suits" and now this. I don't like this one as much as the other two, but it's got potential.

h) A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!
My wife has been watching "Fairly OddParents" for years and I've found it an intermittently entertaining but also kind of annoying show. But I felt really bad for the show seeing this awful garish live action movie version, and then really depressed when I found out that Savage Steve Holland of Better Off Dead fame directed this.

i) "Hollywood Treasure"
I thought the idea of a show about selling movie memorabilia could be interesting, but maybe they just haven't had any item I've cared about at all when I've tried to watch this.

j) "Young, Broke & Beautiful"
This show on IFC, basically a travel show about the hip 'underground' culture of every city it visits, isn't such a bad idea in and of itself, but it's really hard to stomach a host who calls himself Broke-Ass Stuart and keeps using "broke-ass" as a prefix for everything he possibly can. I watched this mainly for the Baltimore episode, which featured plenty of people and places I love and plenty I hate, but it was neither embarrassing nor particularly exciting to see, aside from the usual novelty of seeing local spots on TV.

k) "Happily Divorced"
John Michael Higgins is such a talented guy, it's a little sad to see him saddled with a show on TV Land playing second banana to Fran Drescher. But at the same time, Drescher is genuinely pretty funny, he could've done worse.

l) "The Artist Toolbox"
I chanced upon an episode of this show on PBS that was profiling John Legend, and found it really interesting, good relaxed in depth kind of interview show. But then, it looks like few of the episodes of this show are about musicians or even artists I've actually heard of, so I doubt I'll watch much more of this.

m) "Melissa & Joey"
I'm not sure why I'm still watching this show, it does have its moments of being funny, if in a very TGIF way. Also Taylor Spreitler is pretty cute.

n) "Talking To Strangers with Cee-Lo Green"
I loved this show when it premiered last year under the title "Lay It Down" and featured fantastic, casual, in depth interviews with people Cee-Lo had a genuine rapport with like Ludacris, Public Enemy, and Pharrell. This retooled version is much the same, but with a different title, an annoying theme song, a goofy-looking Cee-Lo puppet, and overall much less interesting interviews with less interesting subjects -- seriously, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals? Even when he got a decent guest in Keri Hilson, Cee-Lo mostly wanted to just flirt and make dirty jokes (which, hey, I can't really blame him, Keri looked incredible).

o) "The Marriage Ref"
Another show I enjoyed last year that has recently been retooled in a lot of small but unnecessary and annoying ways -- now there's a winner out of all the winners of arguments at the end of each episode? Just stupid. I'm glad they have the couples actually onstage now, it seemed a tad pointless to have a whole satellite linkup to their house.

p) "The Green Room With Paul Provenza"
I loved this show last year, with all the documentaries and podcasts about comedians discussing their craft out these days, this is easily one of my favorites because it's just so blue and spontaneous. The first new episode had a great lineup with Garry Shandling and Judd Apatow and Marc Maron and Ray Romano, but then they kinda screwed it up by having Bo Burnham there too and actually treating him with totally unwarranted respect and letting him sing one of his awful songs.

q) "Rizzoli & Isles"
Oh Rizzoli, oh Isles, I really enjoy this show more than I should admit. Even the fairly boilerplate dynamic of the tomboy and the girly one is played for laughs really well.

r) "Haven"
I'm way more excited about Stephen McHattie being on this show now that I've seen Pontypool -- still not a totally top notch show but definitely one of SyFy's best, some really nice eerie atmosphere.

s) "Warehouse 13"
Another not great but consistently good SyFy show, I feel like they've gelled into some pretty genuine comedic chemistry with this cast, as opposed to just trying to be lighthearted and funny.

t) "The Colony"
I feel like the neat thing about this show is that you could learn something from it, even if just theoretically what to do in a post-apocalyptic survival scenario, and hey, couldn't hurt to have an idea what to do in that situation if it ever comes up. They're not really good at maximizing the entertainment value of the show.

u) "Breaking Bad"
I binged on the third season of "Breaking Bad" all in one weekend in order to be caught up in time for the new season, and I almost went through it too fast to really be sure what I thought about it, but it didn't piss me off as much as the second season did. I'm not sure where they're going with the new episodes but I kind of hope it stops being these constant out of the frying pan and into the fire scenarios and settles into something a bit less over-the-top along the lines of the first season.

2011-07-26T22:17:00.000-04:00

I wrote a feature on Caddy Da Don in this week's Baltimore City Paper.

(photo by Rarah)