Yesterday I posted a Jandekplaylist; here are my favorite albums. Only strict favorites allowed–only those I would recommend to a skeptic–or else it would never stop. I’ve heard nothing after 1994′s Glad to Get Away, which Seth Tisuesays is the last good one. Someone should report back to me on The Song of Morgan and its nine nocturnes.
The relative accessibility of Blue Corpse and You Walk Alone makes them no less weird and no less Jandek–it just makes them crisper realizations of Jandek’s peculiar sensibility. If other people are indeed responsible for much of the music on those albums, this too is appropriate, since one reason Jandek fascinates is for leaving intention and provenance a mystery: for the unsettling realization that the authorial hand is absent, and the delight when a new, dynamic interpretive space emerges.
1. Blue Corpse (1987)
Chilly and tremulous, a return to acoustic misery after a number of electric revels, Blue Corpse is a cleansing gesture as shattered and total as David Bowie’s Low. For years Jandek could cough into a microphone and sound like the weirdest musician alive; here he’s writing fractured love songs, which is even weirder. A departed object of desire haunts him. On side two, he performs a spectacular emotional exorcism, with “Harmonica” (compare Bowie’s “Warszawa”) and the expiatory “Only Lover” in which he furiously licks himself clean, trying to scrub the blush from his cheek and the lipstick stains from his guitar.
2. Telegraph Melts (1986)
I’m not comfortable living on the same planet as the man who recorded “Mother’s Day Card”.
3. Modern Dances (1987)
The sequel to Telegraph Melts, in which an electric noize band romps through a rotting basement, attacking furniture. You can smell the mold, hear the dripping pipes, see the unconscious bassist in the back corner, face down in a pool of blood, slowly dying. Jandek barks sadistic commands through a megaphone (“Twelve Seconds Since February 32nd”), while sparring partner Nancy responds in a flat, talky drawl that combines rock wail and church intonation (“Hand for Harry Idle”). The screeching dissonances and random tempo changes move with gangly discombobulation; as my friend Kevin Bozelkaput it, this is music for and perhaps by people who are uncomfortable with their bodies. But the resulting clonk is so clumsy it’s funny, capturing an absurd and delightful spirit of play.
4. You Walk Alone (1988)
Quite randomly, he developed a gift for melody. Jandek and a second guitarist who may or may not also be Jandek embark on long guitar benders in a weirdly tuned major-key mode, so that the emotion repressed on Blue Corpse just pours from this one, like a good cry after bottling everything up for a while. The electric crackle hisses and bleeds melancholy. Nearly every song reprises lyrics from earlier songs with so much more sadness and frustration and terrible beauty, although the effect is disorienting too, since the fragmented, sample-like nature of the repetition undercuts the illusion of expressionism. Did he always feel this way? Does he even really now?
5. Later On (1981)
With his third album, he realized legible absurdity is even scarier than incoherence. His guitar is not out of tune; it’s just tuned to an atonal chord. Is “Your Condition” addressed to someone dead of a heart attack, or someone in love?
6. Chair Beside a Window (1982)
A collection of acoustic blues sketches with zero blues chords–just the thing! Jandek’s atonality reminds me of Sonic Youth’s guitar tunings insofar as both refract tired genres through skewed harmony and make them feel new again, whether rock or acoustic blues. Stark and ugly, quiet and static, early Jandek can sound almost shockingly empty. But the lyrics compute, the chords click despite dissonance, the aesthetic seems too distinct and too austere to have been settled on by accident, and the more I listen the more I wonder why this music, which is in fact extremely mannered, so succeeds at simulating primitivism. It’s not like all music would sound like Chair Beside a Window if stripped down–this album sounds like no music ever save Jandek’s own–but somehow, it creates that impression. Generic singer-songwriter misery sounds like Elliott Smith or Sufjan Stevens; it doesn’t sound like this.
7. Follow Your Footsteps (1986)
Between his two loudest efforts he released this quiet, lovely pastoral daydream, in which he blisses out and stares at the wind rippling through wheat fields. “Jaws of Murmur” would fit nicely on the Feelies’ The Good Earth, released the same year.
8. On the Way (1988)
Side one is almost too rock-conventional–Jandek plays straight blues chords, puffs on the harmonica as if covering “Midnight Rambler”, and sings vaguely Dylanesque narrative verses. The gorgeous acoustic makeout music on side two aches and sweats and bursts into flame.
My favorite conceptual artist, sometimes my favorite singer-songwriter. He records a lot. He doesn’t put much effort into his music, preferring to just toss off songs at a breakneck level of productivity. His good songs are more powerful for their apparent inadvertence; it’s impossible to tell how much of any given performance is calculated or improvised, sentient or aleatory, whether he jotted down lyrics on a napkin five minutes before recording or just made them up on the fly. He confounds the illusion of intentionality. He has an unbecoming fondness for blues and Americana. His album covers seem to hide dead bodies just out of frame. He likes hats. Am I describing Jandek or Bob Dylan?
But Dylan is a famous person; his mirror moves are interesting partially for how they tease and gratify an audience, while Jandek signifies as a musician with no audience. Sending music out into the void from his isolation chamber, trying compulsively to express something but knowing neither how nor to whom, he communicates the minimum–no less, sometimes more. In this, he is quintessentially an ‘80s figure, testing how far from the spotlight one can retreat while remaining visible and how far one can advance without revealing oneself. Like Michael Stipe or Bernard Sumner, he is both there and not; he communicates but doesn’t. During a decade when megacelebrity ballooned, so did these weird publicity games.
Is a good Jandek song good, or just good relative to Jandek? That depends–I love everything listed below. His acoustic ballads terrify, while his electric ensemble jams are often hysterically funny. Vice versa too! An artist capable of both “You Painted Your Teeth” and “I’ll Sit Alone And Think A Lot About You” deserves a loving playlist, so here’s mine. I can’t imagine any two fans picking the same material.
Two Detroit boys trade bars with such wobbly energy they forever prove how much calculation goes into nominally offbeat rapping. The beat twists and turns, spiraling ever upwards through a series of ominous key changes. Topics include flexing on Instagram, defrauding your family, and the pleasures of finding the perfect creative partner.
2. Tohji, “Snowboarding”
This is just two minutes of blown-out amplifier noise, while a drunk asshole yells about snowboarding. Tohji’s rhymes are so garbled I can’t even tell if he intends a cocaine metaphor. Brilliant!
3. Ciara, “Thinkin Bout You”
Songs about unrealized desire often fizzle, as anticlimactic as their subject matter; this insomniac’s lament crawls with excruciating tension. Tossing and turning, she wonders who’s keeping you up at night. She breaks a cold sweat at precisely 2:49.
4. Lizzo, “Juice”
No clue why Lizzo needed songs from several years ago to blow up and go pop when this excellent candy-funk confection was right there; maybe “Juice” got lost among the joyless #girlboss anthems that cluttered Cuz I Love You. Rhythm guitar confetti, icy staccato keyboards, and zigzagging horn bursts careen with supremely propulsive energy behind Lizzo’s joyful proclamation of her own magnificence. Of all her songs, “Juice” best realizes her aspirations toward empowermentmusik; it’s easier to accept her confidence as inspirational model when she’s also coaxing you onto the dancefloor.
5. Lil Nas X & Billy Ray Cyrus, “Old Town Road Remix”
Before this was a massive hit and a catalyst for deep thoughts about American history, it was an excellent novelty song, and it remains ridiculous, steeped in Lil Nas X’s delight in fusing contemporary pop’s two most hedonistic genres. Just as country has borrowed from hip-hop throughout the past decade, here Billy Ray Cyrus returns the favor. This belongs on Luke Bryan’s country rock hip-hop mixtape along with T-Pain, Conway Twitty, and Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise Remix” ft. Nelly.
6. Jenny Lewis, “Red Bull and Hennessy”
This polished, demented come-on smolders with a daft assurance missing from rock radio. It’s all in the prim way she overenunciates “Hennessy”; she sounds like an uptight person who has accidentally, through some miracle of repression, gotten supercharged on the eponymous foul brew, or maybe a drunk person trying to sound proper as a defensive compensation. Also, I hear melodic echoes of Fleetwood Mac’s “Isn’t It Midnight” in this–but where?
7. Beabadoobee, “She Plays Bass”
Beabadoobee goes on a quest to find her rock & roll dream girl, searching every corner of outer space, combing the surface of every planet and asteroid, before noticing her impassive presence in this very song. The squirrelly bassline–that’s her!
8. DaBaby, “Bop”
When flute songs became a thing in 2017, their high, piercing cadence suggested a certain jaded quality; Future’s “Mask Off” and Kodak Black’s “Tunnel Vision” are exhausted statements of misery. Now that upbeat minimalist speed-rapping is cool again, DaBaby clears away all that murk and allows the flutes to sparkle cleanly, as tokens of brash confidence. He’s so delighted with his own amused, masculine presence–or as he puts it, “I’m unorthodox than a motherfucker.”
9. Doja Cat, “Say So”
One of those communication dilemma songs that abound in contemporary R&B; she’s trying to flirt, but first she must escape this hall of mirrors. Doja Cat has established herself as the most protean of artists: last year she was a cow, now she’s a singer of softcore pop erotica. Who will she be next?
10. Regard, “Ride It”
Behold the glories of revisionist history: Kosovan DJ Regard speeds up Jay Sean’s aching ballad, adds punchy drums and a totally new and glistening keyboard hook, and thus brings out the swoonworthy potential of a previously lugubrious song. Along with the Jonas Brothers revival, the best 2008 song of 2019.
I am a strong believer in belated music lists. Hindsight! The past year was stressful for me even before COVID-19 broke, and my favorite music was on average noisier and more irritating than usual. I find comfort and excitement in a mischievous sensibility; if music as chaotic and unpleasant as Jpegmafia’s can hold together, maybe there’s hope yet.
1. 100 Gecs, 1000 Gecs
I’m addicted to everything that I see, yeah! Including screamo death growls, Auto-Tuned cackles, comically heavyhanded drops, pop-punk bangers in disguise, secretly tender love confessions, insanely catchy hooks, and flimsy guitar trash. This marvelous album throws every absurd pop trope of the past decade into a kaleidoscopic blender, spitting out a misshapen musical wind-up toy that never stops exploding and recoagulating, falling down a flight of stairs and revealing a new ghastly face with each bounce. Taken as some musical equivalent of shitposting by writers who think irony and sarcasm are the same, it’s a pop mindfuck that computes emotionally, as awkward kids and/or evil spirits of chaos Laura Les and Dylan Brady make their voices big and ugly and demented because that’s how they feel. Anyway, shitposting is its own species of rock & roll.
2. Taylor Swift, Lover
To be straight is for experience to confirm expectations. Taylor Swift has written about the delight of watching fantasies fulfilled (“Today Was a Fairytale”), renewed (“Begin Again”), or constructed (“Wildest Dreams”). Even when putatively rejecting conventional heteromance, she also sneakily reconstructs it by using its same vocabulary (“Speak Now”). Her best songs address not just desire but the stories we tell about desire, the moments when dreams and reality converge. But Lover is the first time she’s written about the delight of watching experience surpass expactations, the moment when fantasies are gleefully, unexpectedly discarded for something better (“I once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden” is a lyric whose emotional force requires no familiarity with her catalogue). It radiates calm, a long exhaled breath after years of drama. She made a monogamous maturity move her queerest album, and the colorful electronic beats sound so pretty in the afterglow.
3. Lana Del Rey, Norman Fucking Rockwell
A quietly hysterical collection of observed Hollywood singer-songwriter fictions, played on the piano by a glamorous lady of the canyon who has just shooed guests out of her shag-carpeted parlor and drawn her nicotine-stained curtains after watching California tumble into the sea. In the same year hating boomers became mainstream, the year’s most critically acclaimed album was also a tribute to the most boomerific of rock critics. Greil Marcus, of course, whose taste has never before been so exquisitely pandered to, and I think that’s beautiful.
4. Blueface, Dirt Bag
Blueface doesn’t rap off beat, it’s the beat that can’t keep up. Or as Blueface himself puts it: “I’m literally talking in this bitch and it’s still knockin!” Or as Greg Tate puts it in “The Persistence of Vision: Storyboard P”: “At moments of revolution in artistic form, innovation frequently involves discarding flashy displays of technique. The reduction of ostentatious moves in favour of subtler ones is often read as laziness or limited ability (Flyboy 2: 86).”
5. Jpegmafia, All My Heroes Are Cornballs
Jammed up by jerky segues and pauses, constantly shifting to the next random thing in an endless procession of abrasive diversions, this experimental rap clusterbomb fashions a music of dynamic impatience, wrenching ugly harmonic convergence from the splattering of keyboard doodles, industrial crunches, electronic glitches, roaring guitars, death-factory sirens, repressed shrieks, goopy fusion keyboards, smears of electronic color. Jpegmafia’s rhymes compute mainly as yet more barrage, more proper nouns competing for your attention, but there’s a mischievous energy in his voice that adds a crucial smidgen of humanity. If this music seems the product of online information overload, it’s also the sound of working in the gig economy and/or the service industry, where “directed attention fatigue” has become a cautionary buzzword. My headaches feel like “Rap Grow Old & Die x No Child Left Behind”.
6. Otoboke Beaver, Itekoma Hits
Hardcore punk as hardcore comedy. Rage channeled into hyperactivity. Gnarled riffs and howled tantrums played at violent speed. Keening voices letting loose because they can’t hold the noise inside. Tension and release games crammed with sonic jokes. Tempo changes and dynamic jerks that seem tokens of the band’s impatience but in fact work as tension-building devices, with explosive kickback later–or now! Dissonance as byproduct of acceleration. In the playful intricacy of their group shout-singing I hear the Raincoats too. Angry giggles. Boom!
7. Kim Gordon, No Home Record
Lacking the guitars of her former bandmates, she threw a wall of synthesized barbed wire around some of her meanest basslines ever and made something unprecedented, for her and Sonic Youth–electroindustrial, basically, riding a bass rumble so deep it overpowers the music. The spoken pieces here (“Don’t Play It”, “Cookie Butter”) initially recall her willful avant-filler on A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts & Flowers; then you notice how much more brutally these tracks bring the noise.
8. Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990
Billed as ambient but sprightlier than the aesthetic that term suggests to an American audience, this two-hour set captures a moment in Japanese music history when the influence of Erik Satie and John Cage intersected with new ideas about architectural acoustics, inspiring a craze for minimalist electronica designed to peacefully fill a space (as in-store music for Muji, say). Lent contemporary relevance by the influx of chill lo-fi hip-hop beats to study to as well as the vaporwave-derived fascinations with banality and nostalgia, it’s considerably more beautiful than those lineages would imply, as tranquil and friendly as a book of nature poems. These pieces abound with cute tunelets, yet derive their spacious charm from nonmelodic elements–bells, pitched percussion, and the recorded outdoors: running water, chattering birds. Unlike most ambient music, they are not self-contained; when played outside, the synthesizers merge with the sounds of the city.
9. Teejayx6, The Swipe Lessons
By styling himself as an expert scammer, Teejayx6 invents a new internet-era edition of gangsta macho: he’s a master criminal, king of the deep web, fluent in cryptocurrency, relying on his wits to stay ahead of the online piracy brigade. Don’t cross him, lest he steal your grandmother’s social security number. Over darkly stylized beats, his chattering, perpetually surprised flow enters a realm of formal delight accessible to only the most playful. When he hits you with the requisite “All my fans, I really wouldn’t even scam you, I was just playing,” he acknowledges the figurative nature of the game.
10. Clairo, Immunity
A queer adolescent musical diary, tracing the highs and lows of a conflicted relationship that ends ambiguously. Rostam’s production lapses into self-parody exactly once, with the harpsichord flourishes on “Impossible”; otherwise the smoky bedroom-pop shimmer is flawless. “Sofia” exists for inclusion on romantic playlists.
Gross! Here’s the usual disclaimer about punching up. Worse albums are out there, lurking in obscure corners of the internet, but I don’t want to know about it.
Hobo Johnson, The Fall of Hobo Johnson
His flow is original: a hyperactive slam-poetry cadence designed to evoke a guy who can’t help but ramble nervously and go on random tangents because he’s hanging out with the girl he likes and he’s just so excited and really wants to impress her even though he knows she’ll never like him back because he’s such a loser and wait, what were we talking about again? You can tell, without tuning in the lyrics, that this is what he’s doing. The ickiest moments on this slacker-rap manifesto are when a backup chorus of bros materializes to slam home a line’s final word (“It’s called RELIGION!/and this religion causes a bunch of CONFLICT!” etc), but Hobo Johnson’s naked giggle is pungent enough.
Lewis Capaldi, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent
Every song on this apparent pop album is a ballad, hits included. Every single one! Capaldi sings as if chewing oatmeal. I’m sick of charmless everymen.
Mxmtoon, The Masquerade
Ukulele + jazz keyboard + scratchy drum machine + Norah Jones + the Bandcamp homemade bedroom pop aesthetic = a harbinger of pop’s ostensibly genreless future, also known as retromania.
NF, The Search
White rappers aren’t by definition irrelevant now: Post Malone and G-Eazy sound plenty comfortable on the pop charts. Technique-flaunting multisyllabic speed rap isn’t dead either: Kendrick Lamar, Noname, and DaBaby tear that shit up. But it’s awkward when white rappers do it–technical fluency as a defensive mechanism–and so hearing NF’s brand of solemn confession on the radio was an unpleasant surprise. Sweaty, heaving conservative men “dropping science” about their anger management issues were last the stuff of pop in 2010, when Eminem’s Recovery made therapy rap a commercial proposition.
Thom Yorke, Anima
This is what you’d expect from a Thom Yorke solo album, i.e. Radiohead’s middlebrow paranoia stripped of musical complexity and instead reduced to ghostly ambience over metronomic percussion, plus the usual lyrics about living in a society (“Show me the money/party with a rich zombie/suck it through a straw,” etc). For a while I’ve wondered whether recent global dystopian events would lend gravitas to Yorke’s Orwellian gestures. Instead, perhaps because he’s never written from a place of empathy, they sound triter than ever.
An important category: pop songs that articulate things no human would or in some cases could say to another. Since a number of friends and acquaintances have turned to the Beatles in our respective isolations, I made a short playlist; I don’t know another boy band with such twisted relationship songs.
Hello from quarantine! In the depths of housebound boredom, I watched Miss Americana. Since I take #Swiftie lore seriously, here are some stray observations:
- Cats! Appearing unheralded in the background, scampering around corners, poking their heads into the frame. Walking across the piano while she plays. Occupying translucent backpacks worn by their owner. Meredith, Olivia, and Benjamin exist in the public eye to humanize her, as substitute children (in one scene, she remarks that she couldn’t have kids given a life where her every day is planned two years in advance). If like me you are easily manipulated by this sort of thing, Miss Americana is worth watching for the cats alone.
- As expected, Kanye West takes up too much space. We should be grateful he wasn’t allotted even more. A charitable watcher might argue that these scenes indict not West but the celebrity gossip industry, which has delighted in pushing the usual buttons and hauling up all the cultural baggage implicit in pitting a black male provocateur against a white girl next door.
- Her self-titled 2006 debut broke more records than I knew: 7x platinum, longest-charting album on the Billboard 200 during the ‘00s (277 weeks), Swift the youngest sole writer and performer of a #1 Hot Country Song with “Our Song”. I sometimes forget about this album: Fearless has the blank, unruffled confidence of a debut. But I played Taylor Swift this morning and was wrecked by “Teardrops On My Guitar,” which only a sixteen-year-old could have written; adults don’t yearn like that, thankfully.
- Another reminder that she started in country: her protracted dilemma over whether or not to express a political opinion, which is no dilemma for artists in any other genre. Leading up to her endorsement of two Democrats in Tennessee’s 2018 midterms, we get scenes where she argues with her family and publicist and reels off Republican Marsha Blackburn’s voting record as if having memorized it five minutes before. The shadow of the Dixie Chicks hangs over her. Since no other megastar of Swift’s stature is shy about such things, this development seems weirdly delayed and tortuous. Doesn’t she know that millionaire pop singers are obliged to become liberal philanthropists? Now that she’s reconciled with Katy Perry, they can attend charity functions together.
- The film’s most moving moment is when she sings an acoustic version of “Call It What You Want” to a Joe Alwyn presumed just off camera. A gorgeous ballad, the key to Reputation, “Call It What You Want” beautifully captures how relationships can work as armor, providing private vindication against a hostile outside world. It doesn’t presume knowledge of her celebrity.
- In the opening scene she remarks: “You know, my entire moral code, as a kid and now, is a need to be thought of as good. It was all I wrote about. It was all I wanted. It was the complete and total belief system that I subscribed to as a kid. Do the right thing. Do the good thing. And obviously, I’m not a perfect person by any stretch, but overall, the main thing that I always tried to be was, like, just, like a ‘good girl’.”
