The IF I HAVEN’T HEARD IT, IT’S NEW TO ME Awards, 2006

Because music defines life, and critics define music, and street-cred defines critics, and illiterate retards define street-cred. These are the awards for new music that has enthralled me over the past year, whether or not that music was actually introduced in the last year. In actuality, why should it matter? Music stands on its own. It doesn’t require timeliness for greatness, and if it does, then it wasn’t great to begin with. People still buy up Floyd and the Beatles, while critics discuss the production values of the new releases, but Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon were put together on tape.

Maybe it’s just me. I’ve worked in recording studios, and my brother records and mixes for a living, but I’ve never head the ear for it. It’s like the “Magic Eye” paintings from the mid-nineties. I could never see them. All I could ever see were the details, and so I’d pore into the details, trying to discern from them what the picture was supposed to be. With music it’s the opposite. I can’t hear the details, only the overall, probably best described as the mood. The mood hits me immediately, and just as quickly grabs hold of my gut. I’m serious, music dictates my mood and personality probably more than anything else. When I was a kid, and in a sour mood, I’d make myself listen to Aerosmith’s “Amazing” simply because I knew that it would immediately turn me around.

I compile this list not for technical awards, as I don’t get them anyway, but to praise those who’ve altered my outlook the most this year, whether through a simple four chords or wall-of-sound. So here they are, and again, they might not be new, but they’re new to me.

BEST NEW GENRE

J-Pop

It isn’t just about the uber-cute girls acting uber-cutely, or about the lightning precision of fast, fun, ludicrously complicated guitar riffs, or the nonsensical videos, or the simple fact that if I can’t understand the words, I can’t hate them. I mean, it’s all of these things, and the girls play a big part, but mainly it’s the unabashed enthusiasm and energy. In America, music seems divided into the two camps of excited-but-devoid-of-talent (all of pop) and gifted-but-detached (all of indie.) The last U.S. album to really capture the best of both worlds was probably Pinkerton, and it’s been a long time since then. I blame Clearchannel, but then again, I’d blame Clearchannel for the Khmer Rouge if I could find the slightest justification.

Maybe it’s just the result of a culture of manners and demureness, that the youth would seek to rebel by wearing their hearts on their sleeves, and at the same time be so damn chipper about doing so. All I know is that it’s wonderful. I know a lot of people get put off by the high-pitch of the female vocals, but it’s just like when people first heard the distortion in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” You just have to get used to it as another instrument, and you’ll be hooked. People who refuse to get into J-Pop (and even more so, J-Rock) are missing out on something great on account of snobbishness. I can walk down the street now, and there’s a very specific smile I’ll catch every once in a while that clearly expresses, “I’ve just been listening to something from Japan.” If you’d deny yourself that smile, well, it’s your loss.

WORST SONG

Black-Eyed Peas – “My Humps”

This one was easy, as it’s maybe the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s not even laughably bad. I’ll happily listen to “Dominic the Christmas Donkey,” but if you put “My Humps” in the jukebox, I’ll gnaw my own leg off to escape. I’d heard the hype, I’d read the articles, and you know what, there’s a lot of earlier Black-Eyed Peas stuff that I liked, though I was pissed at the watered down “Let’s Get it Started” version of “Let’s Get Retarded.” Hell, I even love “Where is the Love,” particularly for it’s war-protest video, so I downloaded the song (the most-downloaded song in downloading’s auspicious history, even beating Eiffel 99’s “Blue”) expecting the worst, in a laugh-myself-silly kind of way.

I can’t listen to it all the way through. I mean, like, physically. That’s never happened to me before. I can listen to music from Shatner, Pat Boone, and ever Steven Segal, but I can’t listen to this song without finding some way to stop the madness. It’s like a vomiting air-raid siren. It isn’t even the words, which are the stupidest ever put to music for sure. It’s that the music itself is cringe-worthy. I’m going to try to listen to it again right now, just as a test.

…

Okay… I made it. It took effort, but I made it. I turns out the best thing that “My Humps” has to offer is a piano interlude at the end that would make you roll your eyes and groan if you entered a restaurant to hear somebody playing it. Above this is a refrain of “So real,” repeated ad nauseum, which in this song doesn’t take very long. Now, I’ve tried to defend the phrase “keepin’ it real,” before by trying to define what it means in a cultural context. I still think it means acting naturally despite outside (read: white) influences, but this throws it completely outside of my realm of comprehension. Are Fergie’s breasts real? Her ass? I don’t think anyone listening to this song would care, much less someone performing it, so that can’t work. I’m just stymied.

I said I wouldn’t talk about technical issues, but hear me out. Somebody had to listen to this song over and over and over and over and over again in order to get it to release. They had to fiddle with every second of it down to the sample rate. If that engineer didn’t kill himself in the quickest way possible, then we should investigate in order to make sure that he’s in the best psychiatric care available. In fact, maybe he did, or just coked himself to the gills and got through the process as quickly as possible. It would go a long way towards explaining why the song sounds as god-awful as it does.

A couple of years ago, when I was back in Oklahoma for some holiday or another, I was entering the mall and a girl of about thirteen offered to go down on me for a cigarette. You feel the bile running up your throat right now? So did I. That’s about the level of “sexiness” that the phrase “my lovely lady lumps” afflicts me with.

I hate this song.

BEST NEW ARTIST

The New Pornographers

I know they’re not new, but that’s never stopped the grammies. When I first really listened to them this year, my main question was, “How are they not the biggest band in the world right now?” My friends responded socratically, “You think teenagers would get into this?”

Good God, I certainly hope so. In my day, we were brought to enjoy the Flaming Lips, Portishead, and everything that Perry Farrell had to offer. Then of course, Clearchannel ruined everything, because they hate music, life, their listeners, and really everything else besides money and themselves. The New Pornographers act like a commune determined to create only the most innovative pop music – organically grown, of course – that Canada can produce. There’s nothing there that a thirteen-year-old couldn’t get down to. Neko Case comes across as a pre-Starship Grace Slick, and every song is like a new idea, perfectly realized. Merlin of 5ives.com mentioned “Slow Descent into Alcoholism” as one of five pop songs he’d love to hear performed by a marching band, and now I can’t hear it any other way.

Their lyrics are deliberately inscrutable, which I think is all the better for the teenagers who should be listening, as they’ll just input whatever their hormones are feeling as the meaning anyway. This works great on “Letter from an Occupant,” particularly when Case goes into the rapture of “When all sensation’s gone!,” but I think there’s still something there. Listen to “Chump Change.” It might just be me, but it seems like nothing so much as the boy in high school watching all of his crushes lose the innocence that made him love them in the first place, while understanding that they have to grow up sometime. It’s peppy, and painful, and simply great.

There’s a plague on/ There’s a rat-tailed ensemble/ burying all of our heads in the sand.

Girl, don’t stay/ Just throw it all away/ There is you, and then there is your body.

BEST HIP-HOP ACT

Atmosphere

I wish I’d had this blog years ago, so I could put 2 Skinnee J’s in this slot, but c’est la vie. I don’t speak the language of Hip-Hop, so I can’t say much, other than that “Trying to Find a Balance” is kick-ass and haunting, especially when you know the back story.

They love the taste of blood/ Now I don’t know what that means, but I know that I mean it/ Maybe they’re as evil as they seem/ or maybe I only look out the window when it’s scenic/ Atmosphere finally made a good record/ Yeah, right, that shit almost sounds convincing/ The last time I felt as sick and contradictive as this is the last time we played a show in Cinci.

At their last Cincinnati show, a girl was beaten and raped while they were on stage. Atmosphere will continue to be haunted by that, and will let us know about it. Big ups, as the kids say.

BEST RE-PURPOSING OF THE BEATLES

JUDY AND MARY – “Brand New Wave Upper Ground”

Everything I said about J-Pop above, but much more Pixies-ish. YUKI, the lead singer (and no, I don’t know why the Japanese choose to spell English sometimes in all caps) is fully capable of punking out at Karen O’s level, but also brings a level of sweetness to the proceedings, even when she has the seven dwarves crawling out from her crotch as in the video for “The End of Shite.” In this, she out does herself with her post chorus “AHHH-Ho” refrain.

Then, it does something none of us were expecting. She takes that wailing and, at the song’s apex, melds it into a call-and-response of “Come together! Right now!” I love the Beatles, but this is even better than when they used it, and sounds much more like a demand to NOT BE IGNORED. Maybe because she’s just a bad-ass Japanese chick who’s live through more than any of us and we just gotta obey.

BEST RE-PURPOSING OF OASIS

Asian Kung-Fu Generation – “E”

At this point, I probably have more AKFG on my iTunes than any other band. Every song hits, which is an improbable achievement considering that they all sound the same. I have three albums, out-of-sequence, lined up in my playlist, and it just sounds like one long song with infinite movements. I swear, I don’t think they even change tempo even once. But I never get sick of it.

Towards the end of my playlist (which is, actually, their first album) I get “E.” Asian Kung-Fu Generation is like fucking in the back of your car, in high school, on a sugar-high, and the end of this song is the simultaneous orgasm. If you’ve listened to my playlist, then you’ve been hearing them for roughly an hour and a half – not a bad performance, young man. And then the ending solo comes… the solo from “Live Forever.”

I wonder how many people even noticed, but I, for one, learned how to play lead based on that solo, and I know it by heart. I can’t reprimand them for ripping it off, though. As they say, good artists borrow, great artists steal outright. AKFG makes such a better use of this beautiful line, bringing it to apotheosis and then some, that I just listen to it over and over, and get the same high from it every time.

BEST BAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – WILLIAMSBURG

NaNuchKa

A 2/3^rd’s Israeli band led by one of the most beautiful women you’ve ever encountered, seemingly unconcerned with whether or not you understand their structures, but fully concerned with kicking your ass until you enjoy it anyway… I’m not describing them very well. They’re like if the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and Yes got mixed up in a train wreck. Like if Coltrane and the White Stripes had a thumping, mutant offspring. The end-of-the-world plus the girl you had a crush on in sixth grade.

All you need to hear is “Mediterranean,” and you’ll know what I’m talking about. A tensely quiet song about the Middle East “ticking like a time-bomb,” erupts into Yula (the beautiful woman) screaming her chorus of LA-LA-LA’s in a sight both gorgeous and horrifying.

BEST BAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – NOT WILLIAMSBURG

Normandy

Okay, so they’re just baaarrreeely Not Williamsburg, but they deserve a place here anyway. Vin Dee (previously of Arbor Day) has pulled a Billy Corgan-style megalomaniacal fiat to make sure that his new project is as perfect and drama-free as it can be, and the results are in. They are, to put it lightly, positive.

Normandy (named after Vin’s father Norman – get it?) sounds essentially like the radio-friendly record that Pavement would have put out after Terror Twilight, with all the rawk that suggests. Her Eyes Don’t Water is indie-rock at it’s most sincere and get-up worthy, and Sweatshop Dance Party is everything that its name implies and more.

BEST SONG FROM THE GUITAR HERO BONUS TRACKS

“Story of my Love” – The Model Sons

Um… Congratulations.

FUNNIEST ACCIDENTAL BRILLIANCE

“How You Remind Me of Someday” – Nickleback

I’ve provided a link. Just listen to it. Each song alone epitomizes everything you hate about rock, but together, they form something that I can’t stop listening to. It’s like two circus geeks wandered alone through the Sahara until they finally found each other and bred this beautiful genius child. Or, at least, a child who wouldn’t flunk Kindergarten and make the other children cry upon seeing its face.

FUNNIEST ACCIDENTAL BRILLIANCE WAITING TO HAPPEN

When somebody does this with Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and The Strokes’ “Last Night,” they’ll be forever my hero.

BEST VIDEO

“When You Were Young” – The Killers

It loses a few points for being taken off of YouTube at behest of the label (and in spite of all the economic reasons to let it stay up there)

(I’m going to put as an aside here that I don’t know anyone who has ever found legitimate use for the “insert” key, and that if it for some reason needs to stay on keboards, then it should at least be relegated to the furthest corner away from everything else. Or to hell. That would work.)

but it’s beautiful and audacious at the same time. “How so audacious?” none of you ask. Well, for one thing, by adding a minute-and-a-half long intro just to show our heroine in the hills of Mexico, and then making the song good enough that we forgive you, The Killers. And beautiful in the moment when the bridge reaches its crescendo and the girl runs out of her house from her cuckolding lover, to visions of them getting marriend on the same street.

Sorry if I’m being sentimental, but that’s just something, right there.

BEST CLASSIC I’D NEVER REALLY LISTENED TO BEFORE NOW

“Gimme Shelter” – The Rolling Stones

It’s my own fault, I know. But it’s great, and I never would have paid it any mind if not for the trailer for The Departed.

BEST SONG

“JOY” – YUKI

You probably have to see the video to fully understand this one. Right around the time of this release, YUKI lost her first child to SIDS. I don’t know what the timeline was, but I like to think that the video came after.

It’s a sparse electronica song, and yet there’s more to it than that. Watch the video. It’s shot in a bare, cavernous grey warehouse of a room, populated by faceless men wear full-body black suits, and yet there’s more to them than that. Watch the video.

It starts off bleak, like the song itself, and yet it’s called “JOY.” I don’t know Japanese, and I can’t hope to understand the lyrics, but I like to think that she’s saying to her child that, even though he’s gone, she has joy for having known him. Or in the case that the child was still alive when she wrote it, just Joy for her newborn son. Either way it’s tragic, but here’s the thing. This song, out of the bleakness and sparcity, creates a powerful emotion. And it isn’t joy.

It’s hope.

This song is the aural equivalent of the end of The Shawshank Redemption, but with no set-up involved. Hope springs eternal. YUKI will continue hoping, so if any of us don’t, then the shame is ours.

BEST ALBUM

The Life Pursuit – Belle and Sebastian

You know, those twee little Scottish pussies who play music for art-school kids to cry to? Turns out we were at least partly wrong. The Life Pursuit finds Metcalf and Co. flexing their rock muscles half the time, and just having fun for the other half.

The more closely I listen to this album, the more I can’t even believe that people could arrange sound like this. The opening track, “Act of the Apostle Part I,” creates one of those soundscapes so perfectly intertwined that I can’t even guess as to what the instruments are half the time. It’s not that it’s dense, but just that everything compliments everything else, in an composition unlike any other song before it, and yet it’s still pop.

“Another Sunny Day” follows, and it’s essentially a country songs, as sung by Scots, with church bells, escalating background vocals and a relentless up-tempo belying a story of a love gone wrong. “White-Collar Boy” is just as bouncy, with lyrical brilliance that just makes you laugh out loud. “You’re a warden’s pet/ she’s a screaming suffragette,” and, “She said, ‘You ain’t ugly, you can kiss me if you like’/ Go ahead and kiss her, you don’t know what you’re missing.” Maybe you just have to hear them.

“The Blues are Still Blue,” is, as the name would imply, a little blues tune, but again up-tempo and almost Beatles-esque. “I left my lady in the launderette/ You can place some money non it, you can place a little bet/ That when I see my lady, the black will be white and the white will be black but the blues are still blue.” “Dress Up in You” marks one of the only down-tempo songs on the record, but it’s heartbreaking in its understatement. All of B&S’s tracks tell a story, and this one is simply of a woman who’s best friend has gone on to stardom and left her behind, with all the jealousy and resentment and lingering love that could entail. “I’ve got a boyfriend/ I’ve got a feeling that he’s seeing someone else/ he always had a thing for you as well.”

Which brings us to the album’s strongest track, which would have been Best Song if I weren’t keeping myself from being redundant: “Sukie in the Graveyard.” There’s something about Belle and Sebastian that just makes it seem like nobody else could have done their songs, and that they could do nobody else’s. “Sukie” is funk-rock, and lives up to the genre, but is about as far removed from the Red Hot Chili Peppers as you can get. This is where they really show that they can bring it, and I don’t know if they were trying to prove something or just thought it’d be fun, but they succeed with valor and gusto to spare.

“We Are the Sleepyheads,” a super-speeded anthem with cascading la-la-la’s is followed up by “Song for the Sunshine” a laid back little funk-ditty. “Funny Little Frog,” the record’s first single, is cute and fun and stands up to everything else, with the added bonus of rhyming “poet” with “thro-at.” “To Be Myself Completely,” I could take or leave, but it fits nicely with everything else.

And then, in “Act of the Apostle Part II,” we get a real taste of the preciousness they’re known for, but in such a powerful way that it still gives me chills. A Hammond organ opens with a neat little riff, before the bass comes in and takes over, in the mildest way possible, continuing the story of our wayward girl from track one. The drums and piano come in so subtly I only notice them because I’m writing this. Then, midway through, the voice trails off to silence, filled by rising synth-strings for a good ten seconds, before the piano rolls into the opening of part I. Except it isn’t. It’s the same song, to be sure, but completely reimagined, and yet it chills because it seems so familiar, and gives me overwhelming feelings of inferiority as to my own musical prowess.

“For the Price of a Cup of Tea” is one of my favorites, but I can’t say too much about it that I haven’t already written. “Mornington Crescent” is the album’s other down-tempo song, and ends things on a dreamy note, not overly optimistic, but sweet and hopeful.

My friend Chris mentioned the other day that this record is the perfect thing to wake up to. I couldn’t agree more. It’s the aural equivalent of waking up in someone else’s bed on a sunny Sunday morning and smelling coffee and sausage cooking from the other room, while you have no reason to get out of your pyjamas for hours. Buy this album. You already love it and just don’t know it yet.

And for those wondering why I’d do this post in October as opposed to, you know, late December or early January, it’s because today is my birthday. I’ve been a legal driver for ten years now, though seven or eight of those have been spent in a city with no use for a car and extortive fees for parking. My mom called to wish me a Happy Birthday this morning (and inadvertently wake me up, while all the time asking why I didn’t sound more excited.) Apparently 26 makes me ineligible for the draft, which is nice. Anyway, this is the start and stop of years for me. So you get the list today. If I keep this up for another year, maybe you’ll get another one then and I can legitimately call it “annual.” But knowing me, I wouldn’t ho