Albums '00s

[koganbot]

I have made a decision for the remainder of 2009 to listen to no more Albums I Haven't Heard Yet. So, a trifle early, here is my decade's end albums list:

Top Ten Albums Of The '00s

1. Ashlee Simpson Autobiography
2. Montgomery Gentry Carrying On
3. Big & Rich Horse Of A Different Color
4. Britney Spears Blackout
5. t.A.T.u. Dangerous & Moving
6. Various Artists Global Hits 2002
7. Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP
8. Ying Yang Twins Me & My Brother
9. Fannypack See You Next Tuesday
10. Paris Hilton Paris

I wouldn't say that these albums are representative of the decade, or my decade, or my listening, even, and I've also not until this moment given any thought to what they might have in common. So let's try: not counting Global Hits 2002, an anthology of Eurodance that spans the late '90s and early '00s, all but two of these are debut albums or second albums, the Ying Yang's being their third and Britney's being her fifth. And all but the Britney strike me as fundamentally exuberant, though that needs elaboration. Global Hits and Paris are bread-and-butter dance albums, so their exuberance is mundane, eye-level, everyday and every night exuberance, Paris being a nice tour through the loneliness and promise of the dance club. And of course all the others are just as danceable, different dances in different locations. Ashlee's exuberance is shot through with an underlying sadness, Montgomery Gentry's with defensiveness and low self-esteem, Eminem's with anger and weakness - the album could be subtitled "In Which Our Hero Explores His Anger And Weakness" - t.A.T.u.'s with poignance (blatantly cheesy poignance is their shtick, the shtickiness making it more eerily beautiful, not less), Ying Yang Twins' with alcohol, and Fannypack's with even more exuberance. Big & Rich's nonstop two-voice harmonies sound simultaneously full of regret and full of gall. Leaving Britney, who in her hedonistic self-involved dance sounds like she's scratching fiercely and insinuatingly at the world - somehow the angriest thing on the list, closer to punk than even Eminem and Montgomery Gentry are, and they kind of are punks in the pre-musical sense.

The feelings that run contrary to the exuberance kick the exuberance forward. When Ashlee introduces herself (first line of the second verse on the first song of her first album) with "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep," she's speaking of long dreadful loneliness, but the line is total chutzpah, telling us in effect, "NOW I'll show you."

Ying Yangs and Big & Rich clown all over the place ("I got a spaceship, fully equipped; I'm a cowboy Stevie Wonder," which makes me think of when the National Lampoon put Stevie Wonder on the cover of their special 3-D issue, wearing 3-D glasses), but Ashlee's got the most full-scale hilarious song ("Love Me For Me," and while being deliberately funny it's dead serious, a raucous comedy of manners on the subject of Ashlee's intense refusal to be taken for granted or on anything other than her own terms), and Fannypack ("Get off, like a wedding gown!") and Eminem have the funniest lines ("Oh, now he's raping his own mother" and "Dear Mr. I'm Too Good Call Or Write My Fans" still crack me up whenever I hear them, but my favorite is "When I go out, I'mma go out shootin'! [Pause.] I don't mean when I die, I mean when I go out to the club, stupid").

A final thought, though: whatever record I might have picked as my favorite for every other decade (in '69 I'd probably have chosen Beggars Banquet, in '79 it'd have been either Raw Power or Never Mind The Bollocks, in '89 it was Appetite For Destruction*, in '99 Midi, Maxi & Efti, which was Swedish reggae-pop but it was fronted by three immigrants who made a point that they were from an area of civil war), there'd have been the presence of politics - or at least a sense of a social push-and-pull - in the songs. I wouldn't say that the records on this decade's list should have more such push-and-pull than they do (and the country duos, Big & Rich and right-wingers Montgomery Gentry, do reference war and racial politics, and there's the exploitation of identity politics by t.A.T.u., and Eminem is punching every social button in sight), but the fact of wars (the U.S. is fighting two of them) and likely environmental catastrophe, and a decade of fairly blatant class division, isn't the presence it would have been when they occurred in other decades, except from the country guys.** This doesn't mean such songs aren't out there, but - except for the country guys - the people making them weren't the ones who put together the really good albums, at least not the ones that reached me.

I assume Ashlee's politics run pretty close to mine - she supports gay marriage and she's a Green Day fan, is probably liberal left - but this doesn't feed her art.

*Stacey Q's Hard Machine was a near miss as my number one, almost upsetting my generalization. And there's always implied identity politics in everything, but that's a different matter.

**And I'd say the same tends to be true of what made the charts.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

With Ashlee, the politics are largely external -- of everything you mentioned, only Autobiography will actually get you in an active "why did you pick that" conversation with rock critics, though that says far more about rock critics than it does about Ashlee. But still, the oddly inappropriate "lighting rod" quality of Ashlee as a public figure says a lot to me about this decade's politics, even if it doesn't have anything to do with a war or the environment or more obviously political topics. Paris is maybe the cartoon of these tendencies, but the thing is that Paris to some extent invites the various charges against her, despite the fact that they often don't stick. Ashlee, on the other hand, is a "normal girl" thrown completely into the baggage of gossip culture without it being merited in her personal life or in her music. (With Paris, people for the most part simply conflated the two.) I'm tempted to call her a "victim," but won't. (Clearly Britney's Blackout fits somewhere in this -- I like to think of it as the Way Out, a kind of combination eye roll and bird-flip and flirtation that seemed to defuse much of the negativity swirling around her at that time.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

(When I say "of everything you mentioned" I mean "every #1 from previous decades.")

[koganbot]

Well, from the people who knew it and remember it, the Midi, Maxi & Efti might well get a "Why did you pick that?" response too. But you're right: social politics is always there, in the same way it was always there with Elvis. But my general point - to put it in an exaggerated way - is that Ashlee's actual politics, assuming she has them, don't feed her music, and the people for whom those presumably liberal-left politics do feed the music aren't making good music. (I hope that that last statement isn't as true as it could be, and that my saying it is partly a reflection of where I looked for music this decade. But where I looked had something to do with where I seemed to be finding good music.) (Fwiw I do love the Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl" and "Lubbock Or Leave It," if you want to count those as liberal left political. And I'll think of more, except now I need to go compile other lists.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll still go to bat for Randy Newman's latest album (my c. #3-4 of 2008), which has some pretty straightforward liberal-left content on it. But looking back through your list, I don't really see any "political" slant specifically in Guns 'n' Roses or even the Stooges or Sex Pistols -- that stuff, politically speaking, seems more external too, through the way their celebrity was generally understood (love or hate), than "in the music" to me. (I've never really gotten a bead on what's "in" the Sex Pistols politically, though. I'm not sure how to take "Bodies" and "God Save the Queen" and "Anarchy in the UK" etc. and pull a cogent politics out of it.)

Haven't heard Midi, Maxi & Efti and haven't listened to Beggars Banquet any time recently, either, but I don't exactly hear politics in the other ones, more a music that (politically speaking) makes you look to the social forces surrounding it to figure out what the hell is going on.

But I guess I could see a fairly major difference in the fact that Ashlee doesn't really want to point to her surrounding social forces -- they seem more thrust on her, sometimes unfairly and sometimes not, but usually harshly. Where Sex Pistols and Stooges and Rolling Stones and Guns and Roses are out for blood from their audience, with Ashlee it's her audience (or "audience" -- the people who word on the street sez think they know her) that wants blood -- and more often than not in the teen confessional stuff, the singers are kind of after their own blood, too, they have a way of turning the lashing out in on themselves. (Eminem did both at the same time, then imploded.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I also wonder if part of the issue here is how the left has changed (or "liberalness," or something). If the legacy of the 60's is the galvanization of the left and the new conservative movement, the 00's (at least in part) is the (in part online) organization of the left-of-center into a far less radical liberal base and the further extremist leanings of the right -- to be liberal/left, you don't have to identify with a counter-culture in any meaningful way; in a sense, the right has more of a counter-culture than the left does. The "left's" music (and here I'm basically talking about the Stones and their descendants) has been so entrenched in a mainstream for so long that there's nowhere for the left-leaning person to rebel.

[koganbot]

Well, the first line of the Sex Pistols' first single goes "I am an Antichrist, I am an anarchist," which certainly refers to social and political positions. And the first line on Raw Power goes "I'm a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm," which in 1973 immediately says VIETNAM in big letters. That the albums don't make specific political analyses or take specific political positions doesn't mean that stuff like class conflict and Vietnam aren't overwhelmingly present and pointed at. Whereas you're right that in Appetite For Destruction the class and social stuff is more a subtext. But in Autobiography such stuff isn't pointed to at all. (The closest is the line "I've got more than anyone should.") I'm not saying that one can't analyze Autobiography (or Me And My Brother or See You Next Tuesday or Paris etc.) socially and politically, just that the album doesn't do the pointing.

But also, looking more broadly, I'd say that American society isn't behaving as if Iraq and Afghanistan and global warming are a big deal in the way that it was treating civil rights and Vietnam as a big deal in the '60s. For that matter, I'm not behaving as if such things are a big deal in the way that I was in the '60s. And though race, class, gender, immigration etc. are always issues, I wouldn't say that people are consciously engaged with them. Obviously, some people are engaged, like my brother, but not nearly as many as when I was growing up. (People reading this overseas: you have no idea how disengaged from politics most Americans are.)

(As for a cogent politics, you can't get them out of most politicians either.)

By the way, if I did an 11 through 20, Piracy Funds Terrorism might be there.

Stooges and Stones and GN'R are very much out for their own blood too, just as much as Eminem is.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Right now I'm cheating with my end-of-decade stuff and making a separate category for "unofficial" album releases, which includes mixtapes and DJ mixes and compilations and live albums. M.I.A./Diplo tops that one, and A-Trak's Dirty South Dance would be on there, along with maybe Hyphy Hitz, one of the crunk volumes (probably Crunk Classics, largely late-90s stuff but released in the 00's on, IIRC, TVT), the Erlend Oye DJ Kicks mix, maybe a live album or two (I'm not a huge Kraftwerk fan but love their Minimum-Maximum live album for some reason...). Trying to think of mixtapes, but most of the time those hit me in pieces and not as a whole (I couldn't put any Lil Wayne mixtape on there, since I can barely get all the way through any of them without hacking them to pieces).

I guess the politics question is a tough one, and you're right that Ashlee isn't making the gestures, regardless of their coherence, in the way that the others are. But there's something exciting about understanding how Ashlee's album helps to change the (external, though I wish I could find a better word -- contextual?) politics around it. I can't think of another album that comparably changed my own understanding of the entire social context in which it was made (reconfiguring cliches of teenybopper, teens, "intended audience," what makes "this sort of music" special, lots of other stuff...), but that's because my narratives for the Sex Pistols and Stones and Stooges were received -- I didn't initially figure the narrative out for myself, it was handed to me. (I think that this given narrative often misses out on what each group may have actually been doing, but you're not going to find much resistance taking up any of those bands intellectually in the way that you will with Ashlee.)

And given your previous comment, I think Eminem pretty clearly falls into the "political" camp -- I'm not sure if there's a major political event he didn't take up explicitly. (You have to include, e.g., overwrought anti-Bush "Mosh"...)

[koganbot]

Fwiw, my narrative for the Stones only takes in their early years (through '72); but even there, it might be interesting sometime to take the early Stones ('63 through '72) and do a thread on "Stones songs that are outside the story," that don't seem to have much to do with the stories that are told about the band.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Agreed on the others being "out for their own blood," but I guess my bigger point is that these bands are out for everyone's blood, and tend to shed their own (as well), whereas Ashlee (and to some extent Kelly C. and Lindsay and almost-not-quite P!nk) genuinely is not out for anyone's blood but her own -- Marit Larsen (on my list at about #3) goes immediately for her own jugular in a way that Ashlee doesn't, but Ashlee ultimately draws more blood because of her even-handedness -- Marit I almost pity, Ashlee I understand; she's not being harsh on herself, but the picture is still occasionally painful. (It's also more uplifting than Marit's, but that's part of what makes the darkness more convincing. Marit can be pathological.)

[koganbot]

Also, it's interesting that Midi, Maxi & Efti does point to war, since that's not particularly how one thinks of such music - it's definitely within the range of Swedepop, even though it's reggae (Alexander Bard of Army Of Lovers and BWO fame was heavily involved). It's not quite categorizable, actually. But Midi, Maxi & Efti were refugees from the war in the Horn of Africa that culminated in Eritrea breaking away from Ethiopia. Midi and Maxi were Ethiopian. Efti was Eritrean, and according to Wiki was born in a refugee camp.





(Neither of these tracks refers to politics much, though "bad boys" is certainly a socially loaded term.)

By the way, have you heard K'naan? He's in Canada but was born in Somalia.

And the boys from the 'hood are always hard
Let alone in Mogadishu it's a mastered art
If you bring the world 'hood to a seminar
We from the only place worse than Kandahar
And that's kinda hard

[koganbot]

Links for Midi, Maxi & Efti:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMq5dLOjl5A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNHlgdrrxrM

[(Anonymous)]

AKinCLE: Yeah. I think there's another year to the end of the decade...

[koganbot]

David Banner made good music, though he could be quite terrible too, and sociopolitics was all over his music, though it's hard to categorize his politics (or make sense of them); presumably he's voting Democratic, but he uses the word "bitch" a lot, as in "I swear I love you like I birthed you, but I'll kill you bitch."

[koganbot]

By the way, if I were to pick a Best '60s Album now, it might be by the Stones (Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass, most likely), but it wouldn't be Beggars Banquet.

[(Anonymous)]

"blatantly cheesy poignance is their shtick, the shtickiness making it more eerily beautiful, not less"

Think I'll steal this line when explaining my love for t.A.T.u from now on.