2011 in Music: Music Writing

This is the fifth in a seven-part series on my favorite music from 2011.

My favorite writing about music from this year.

There’s a lot of Nitsuh Abebe, Eric Harvey, Mark Richardson, and Tom Ewing here. They are my favorite music writers and I make it a point to read everything they put out.

A list, with excerpts and sometimes notes, in rough chronological order:

Tom Ewing – Poptimist (Pitchfork)
Making this list, I realized I’d saved almost every one of Tom Ewing’s Poptimist columns. So rather than list them all, I am linking to the whole column (which ended this year).
Nitsuh Abebe – M.I.A.: Behind the Backlash to the Backlash (New York Magazine)
Simon Reynolds – Leave Chillwave Alone (Village Voice)
On why Altered Zones is Pitchfork’s younger ‘sister site’, and the fundamental difference between music producers and consumers who don’t remember music before the web, never knew it was something you paid for, and aren’t as concerned with the rating of certain music as ‘bad’. I wanted to write something about this article but never got around to it.
Mike Powell – The Sublime Creations of Destroyer (Village Voice)
Marc Hogan – Live Transmission (Pitchfork)
A good overview of LPFM and how the late–2010/early–2011 legislation happened. ‘In early January, President Barack Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which is expected to create hundreds, possibly thousands, of noncommercial FM stations.’
Nell Boeschenstein – A Song for Aretha (The Morning News)
‘For decades, America has taken Aretha Franklin for granted, heard and loved and danced to her music without a second thought. Now’s the time to think again.’
Giles Turnbull – Dogs Like Prog, Pop Is for Humans (The Morning News)
‘During a visit to Peter Gabriel’s recording studios, our writer and his borrowed companion Ella discuss the gap between prog and pop while learning about British bridges.’
Jonathan Garrett – This Is It – Ten Years of the Strokes (Pitchfork)
Tim Quirk – Budweiser Bought My Baby
Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk tells the story of his band’s jingle for Budweiser in the early 90s, and how he feels about bands and advertising then and since.
Nitsuh Abebe – The Party Track About Partying (Pitchfork)
Nitsuh Abebe – Odd Future, Energy, Inclusion, and Energy
Tim Quirk – The Quiet Revolution (Rhapsody)
The story of the Walkman and how it’s ‘changed the way we listen, and what we listen to.’
Mark Richardson – Some Kind of Trip (Pitchfork)
‘But music is in a different place. It’s a time of quantity and newness, and the importance of sound quality in the last 10 years has been inversely proportional to the amount of music being cranked out on a daily basis. “Good enough” has become a mantra, even if only unconsciously. But maybe, in line with other trends, we’ll start see a smaller scale approach to music that becomes less about gorging and more about focusing attention on quality. The movement toward cassettes and limited vinyl addresses part of this problem, in that these objects are meant to re-assert the physicality of music and also serve to slow down its consumption. But there, quality isn’t necessarily part of that equation.’
Steven Hyden – An open letter to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, from one critic to another (AV Club)
‘Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap – a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline – you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.’
Paul Schrodt – The Universe of James Murphy (Esquire)
A good oral history. “I think the thing I’ve really learned from James is a) patience, b) only work with people you love, and c) be very, very, very, very stubborn about everything. Because when you’re capable and able to say no to stuff, when you’re capable of writing your own story and being very adamant about the way that you’re portrayed or the way that your records are made, people respond to it.”
Matthew Perpetua – tUnE-yArDs w h o k i l l Review (Pitchfork)
‘A lot of what makes w h o k i l l and tUnE-yArDs’ excellent live performances so compelling is the degree to which Garbus commits to her ideas and displays a total conviction in her personal, idiosyncratic, high-stakes music. This, in and of itself, is very inspiring and empowering. This unguarded, individualistic expression encourages strong identification in listeners, so don’t be surprised if this record earns Garbus a very earnest and intense cult following.’
Eric Harvey – Tyler, the Creator’s Boy’s Club (Village Voice)
‘The highest points and most infuriating moments on ‘Goblin’ come from the fact that it’s a vérité depiction of the worst aspects of American boy culture. You know, hating girls because they don’t like you because you’re a weirdo, hating any and all authority figures because they try to tell you how not to be such a weirdo. But most importantly (and scarily), there’s the part that involves lashing out about being viewed as a weirdo, and being summarily rewarded – i.e. seen as normal – for doing so. (It probably goes without saying that girls don’t have the same luxury.) Nobody cares about Tyler the Creator being someone’s role model in 2011. Which in a way, is the scariest thing about ‘Goblin’ – too much of his scary fantasizing, for too many boys, is all too normal.’
Jonathan DeeNew Orlean’s Gender-Bending Rap (New York Times Magazine)
On sissy bounce.
Nitsuh Abebe – What’s Really Wrong With the Grammys (New York Magazine)
‘The people complaining about the loss of these “non-mainstream” categories aren’t really asking for a fair distribution of categories; they’re asking for patronage. They’re asking for the Recording Academy to act as a booster club and preservation society – to recognize and support these traditions as a special interest. Never mind that this is a kind of support new and fragile musical traditions don’t get. Never mind that people in each of these genres are more than capable of recognizing their own achievements, and probably more effectively than the Academy does.’
Daniel Rosenthal – Why is U2 so popular? (Quora)
‘Imagine you’re a middle-aged, upper-middle-class male. You live in a large metropolitan area. You have a good job. Your wife does Pilates. Your oldest just started kindergarten. Yes, you’re an adult, but you’re still cool! Your jeans cost $125. Sometimes you wear sneakers with a blazer!’
Jessica Hopper – Label maker (The Daily)
‘Still, for the Cool Kids, it comes down to one thing – Mountain Dew provides them with a fair opportunity to usher their music into the world. “Any other label, any other situation … you do all the work and they take all the money. I can’t sleep comfortably with that,” explains Rocks. “I would take Mountain Dew any day of the week over that. Money comes and goes, you spend it stupid and it’s gone. But what we are doing, what we’ve made – no one can take that away from us.”’
Nitsuh Abebe – Amy Winehouse’s Intelligent Soul (New York Magazine)
‘What’s worth remembering about Winehouse is not that she had some tortured inner light, or a tragic mien that made her a member of some insipid “27 Forever” club. It’s that she really could be wickedly good at using her brain and her expertise to create music that really worked. There were sad and dangerous things wrapped up in it – fatalism as a cop-out, the romance of failure and sorrow, masochism posing as bravery. But what you tend to take away is good humor, odd clarity, and flashes of actual bravery. At Winehouse’s best, she seemed more than good enough to convey those things without needing a life of tragedy to match.’
Mat of Coma Cinema – Bowing Out
‘It has been a long time coming, and the band itself has been a labor of misery for 8 years now. That’s almost a decade of non stop work, struggling to record and struggling to book and struggling to promote and struggling to only struggle more and more and more. I’m tired, I’m broke, I’m exhausted and I’m more and more detached from something I used to love so much.’
Eric Harvey – A Defense of John Maus and Bratty Artists
‘My argument: doesn’t someone have to act like this? Like film villains, isn’t it best when those people are over there entertaining us, letting us use them as a dartboard for our own anxieties and antipathies in exchange for our attention and money?’
Hua Hsu – Watch the Throne: Let Them Eat Cake (Grantland)
What makes hip-hop such a durable form is its capacity to scramble fiction and fact; the artifice and the realities that art conceals or amplifies become one. In this way, Watch the Throne feels astonishingly different. It captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them.
Nitsuh Abebe – Watch the Throne: Uneasy Heads Wear Gaudy Crowns (New York Magazine)
‘It’s a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America; what happens when your view of yourself as a suppressed, striving underdog has to give way to the admission that you’ve succeeded about as much as it’s worth bothering with; and how much your victory can really relate to (or feel like it’s on behalf of) your onetime peers who haven’t got a shred of what you’ve won. It’s not a topic that deserves to be scrubbed up, either; there are things about Kanye’s tiresome self-involvement and moody debauchery – the way he sounds like some sullen hip-hop emperor, stalking around the crumbling gilded palace of his own psyche, muttering angrily and getting aggressive with the help – that belong in any such portrait.’
Mark Richardson – Disintegration Loops and Simplesongs (Pitchfork)
On 9–11 and remembrances thereof.
Jamieson Cox – Beyoncé (One Week One Band)
Eric Harvey – R.E.M: America’s Greatest Band (The Atlantic)
‘What other U.S. group was as good for as long?’
Eric Harvey – Steve Jobs (Pitchfork)
‘The reaction to Jobs’ death– his full transformation into one of the era’s most prominent secular deities– reveals that we want more than anything to believe in the benevolent, progressive, and humane powers of technology.’
Steven Hyden – The Monoculture is a Myth (Salon)
‘If we stop looking to the past, we might realize that we’re living in a golden age of music listening and discussion. The Internet has enabled more people to hear more music than at any point in human history. More people are writing about music than ever – on websites, on personal blogs and Facebook pages.’
Ethan Hein – Why is Bach so good? (Quora)
Counterpoint, consistency, and variety.
Alex Pappademas – Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This (New York Times Magazine)
‘A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track.’ That was Waka Flocka Flame’s ‘Hard in da Paint’.
Mark Richardson – Take Pictures of Taking Pictures (Pitchfork)
‘Dirty Beaches, David Lynch, Lana Del Rey, and the Tumblr-ization of indie.’
Nitsuh Abebe – My Mortifying Month
Responding to the minor uproar over his suggestion that Feist and Wilco are our adult contemporary. ‘There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music – the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on – exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.’
Matthew Perpetua – Bradford Cox Talks Nervous Breakdown, New Atlas Sound Album (Rolling Stone)
“I think that the world seems to be in some sort of conservative, cultural, retroactive, retrograde… I don’t know. It’s not that I think being queer is something someone should aspire to. People should just be themselves. I just don’t see a lot of selves, I just see a lot of… I don’t know, I just don’t want to be hateful. I don’t see a lot I can relate to. I’d be real disappointed if I was 17 or 16 or 15 or 12 or 11, you know?”
Arianna Stern – Interview: tUnE-yArDs’ Merrill Garbus (AV Club) “What I found was that I had no other choice but to do this. I had no other choice but to expose myself. I have no other choice but to get rather consumed by the music. In doing that, I lose myself and I lose self-consciousness. I lose that censoring of myself. And with that comes the risk of being judged, and being sliced and diced by the press. I guess I’m saying that I try not to think about it. What I try to think about is just like, ‘Yep, just keep doing what you’re doing,’ because you know, it’s not just for me anymore. It’s for a whole bunch of other people. That gives me strength to keep doing it.”
Brandon Soderberg – Defending Dyson’s Georgetown Jay-Z Class (Spin)
’Jay-Z’s lyrics would work just fine in a literature or poetry class ( Decoded is basically his own Norton Critical Anthology of Jigga), but that’s irrelevant to this discussion because, as nearly everyone who mocked the course seemed to ignore, Dyson is teaching a Sociology course! And Jay-Z’s career is perfectly suited for the study of that discipline.’
Lindsay Zoladz – Not Every Girl Is a Riot Grrrl (Pitchfork)
Tom Ewing – Take Me to the River (Pitchfork)
‘We could try and shift perspective, to think of the stream as a cultural form in its own right – one with its own principles, virtues, thrills, and tensions. A thing we tackle critically, not simply celebrate or damn. In other words, we could stop imagining the stream as a vector for pop and start thinking of it as a kind of pop itself.’
Conrad Armenta – The Gives New Meaning to Guilty Pleasure Award: Beyoncé – Countdown (Cokemachineglow)
‘I’m so torn by this. On the one hand you have one of the most dynamic pop songs of the year. Something that roars with polyphony. One listen through and you feel like you could live in this shit, Matrix-like, deluding yourself in its universe endlessly. And on the other hand you’ve still got Beyoncé‘s mind-numbing conflation of feminist empowerment with consumerism and a conveniently male-approved sexuality.’
Jessica Misener – Florence, The Machine, Faith, and Me (Faith Goes Pop) and Part 2
‘At one point, worship music made me want to believe in religion as evangelicals sell it – and I did. And that’s the question we as listeners ask with this ‘Big Music,’ whether it’s created by Florence or Coldplay or Christian rock bands: “Am I being manipulated or not?” In the context of religion, it obviously has more splenetic implications. But that statement – “music made me want to believe” – is really sort of tautological. We trust and especially value music when it makes us feel and think and feel human. So why should we distrust it just because the ends might lead to something sacred?’
Simon Reynolds – Maximal Nation (Pitchfork)
‘Compared with the analog hardware that underpinned early house and techno, the digital software used by the vast majority of dance producers today has an inherent tendency towards maximalism. In an article for Loops, Matthew Ingram (who records as Woebot) wrote about how digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and FL Studio encourage “interminable layering” and how the graphic interface insidiously inculcates a view of music as “a giant sandwich of vertically arranged elements stacked upon one another.” Meanwhile, the software’s scope for tweaking the parameters of any given sonic event opens up a potential “bad infinity” abyss of fiddly fine-tuning. When digital software meshes with the minimalist aesthetic you get what Ingram calls “audio trickle”: a finicky focus on sound-design, intricate fluctuations in rhythm, and other minutiae that will be awfully familiar to anyone who has followed mnml or post-dubstep during the last decade. But now that same digital technology is getting deployed to opposite purposes: rococo-florid riffs, eruptions of digitally-enhanced virtuosity, skyscraping solos, and other “maxutiae,” all daubed from a palette of fluorescent primary colors. Audio trickle has given way to audio torrent– the frothing extravagance of fountain gardens in the Versailles style.’
Matthew Perpetua – Rihanna vs. Beyoncé: Who Reigns Supreme? (Rolling Stone)
Rachael Maddux – Singles Girls: The Rise of Female Rock Writing (Oxford American)
Excellent reviews of both Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis and Record Collecting for Girls by Courtney E. Smith.
Rhaomi – You shall Hear things, Wonderful to tell (Metafilter)
A thorough, thoroughly annotated look at the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, ten years later.
Sound of the City Roundtable (Village Voice)
The Music Club (Slate)