Unbest

In early December 2011, as the great year-end listmaking bonanza began once again to sweep the Internet, we started wondering: What if there was an outlet for writers and fans to celebrate the music that meant the most to them over the course of the previous year, regardless of who made that music or when it was released, without having to worry about lists or rankings or points or quantification? What would that look like? 

Over the next two months, we got our answer: It would look like dozens of folks—professional writers, aspiring professional writers, staunchly self-professed “non-writers”—spilling their guts on a hugely diverse array of artists, waxing honest and gut-wrenching and melancholy and often very funny. It looked like nothing we could have predicted the afternoon we hastily cobbled together our original mission statement and threw together the website before the notion passed us by.

A huge huge thank-you is due to all the writers who submitted (often multiple entries!) and to everyone else who supported the project with links and kind words.

We’ve already been asked if Unbest will return at the end of 2012; we have received at least a few threats of bodily harm if it does not. The answer is, well, it probably will. To keep tabs on us, you can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can also read through the 2011 archives by scrolling below or by perusing the list right here:

• Austin L. Ray on Action Bronson’s Dr. Lecter (2011)
• Lindsay Eanet on Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (from Armageddon - The Album, 1998)
• Evan Minsker on The Gap Band’s Gap Band IV (1982)
• Vicki Mayowski on The Avett Brothers
• Ian Mathers on Subrosa’s No Help For the Mighty Ones (2011)
• Cristina Martin on Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues” (from Helplessness Blues, 2011)
• Meagan Morrow on Wild Flag’s Wild Flag (2011)
• Kasia Galazka on St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy (2011)
• Daniella Joseph on LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” (2011)
• Meghan O’Dea on The Magnetic Fields’ “I Think I Need A New Heart” (from69 Love Songs, 1999)
• Erin M. Routson on “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj (from Pink Friday, 2010)
• Ian Mathers on Jónsi’s Go (2010)
• Gray Chapman on The Kills’ Blood Pressures (2011)
• Lindsay Rhoades on Washed Out, Dirty Beaches, and rejecting the trappings of supposed adulthood
• Erin M. Routson on Sonic Youth
• Brooke Hatfield on her most feelingiest songs of 2011
• Kim Huston on PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) and Let England Shake (2011)
• Julia Askenase on Blood Orange’s Coastal Grooves (2011)
• Themarq on Radiohead’s “Give Up The Ghost” (From The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement, 2011)
• Brian Collins on Bruce Springsteen’s “Candy’s Room” (from Darkness on the Edge of Town, 1978)
• Kolleen Alexandra on The Mountain Goats’ “This Year” (from The Sunset Tree, 2005)
• Ani Vrabel on Kanye West’s “Runaway” (from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, 2010)
• Heather Hansman on Dawes’ “A Little Bit of Everything” (from Nothing is Wrong, 2011)
• Anonymous on Florence & the Machine’s “No Light, No Light” (from Ceremonials, 2011)
• Caroline Klibanoff on Okkervil River’s “Plan D” (from Golden Opportunities 2, 2011)
• Alicia Johnson on LCD Soundsystem
• Brenda Cromb on The Handsome Furs’ “When I Get Back” (from Sound Kapital, 2011)
• Leslie Dunn on Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night” (2011)
• Alvin Diec on his favorite album covers (2011)
• Rachel Bailey on Talking Heads’ “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)” (from Speaking in Tongues, 1983)
• Erin M. Routson on Crime Mob’s “Circles” (from Hated On Mostly, 2007)
• Kim Huston on Morrissey
• Pete Rorabaugh on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Let’s Groove” (1981), The Avett Brothers’ “When I Drink” (2006) and New Order’s “Everything’s Gone Green” (1981)
• Jeremy D. Larson on Third Eye Blind’s “If There Ever Was A Time” (2011)
• Susannah Young on EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)
• Lyndsie Bourgon on The Black Keys’ “Everlasting Light” (from Brothers, 2010)
• Jason Sanderbeck on Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring for My Halo (2011)
• Jill Guccini on Florence & the Machine’s Ceremonials (2011)
• Dylan Kight on Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago (2008)
• Melanie Killingsworth on Arcade Fire’s “Keep the Car Running” (fromNeon Bible, 2007)
• Kim Huston on Drake’s Take Care (2011)
• Marcus Rosentrater on Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (2011)

Austin L. Ray on Action Bronson’s Dr. Lecter (2011)
(iTunes, ActionBronson.com)

“Hop in the whip and call for breakfast
Fried eggs and prime steak that’s straight from out of Texas
Damn, I’m living reckless
Smoking all day just like the brisket
My beard is golden brown just like a biscuit
Every day I’m thinking, ‘Should I risk it?’
Add another number to statistics
Or use the breast milk to eat my Crispix.”
—“The Madness”

Standing behind more sixth graders than I would’ve preferred, the gray, plastic and metal box struck me like some unreachable finish line. Even though that most necessary water fountain was nearly as tall as I was at the time, it felt smaller-than-usual in the way that mountains are diminished when they’re off in the distance, seeming like they’ll never finally be right here, where you need them to be. Sweaty. I was always sweaty. Still am, oftentimes, or at least much more often than seems normal. But it was in this moment of impatience and heat and fatigue and otherwise not-ideal capital-f Feelings that Cindy, a cute, popular girl that normally didn’t give me the time of day, approached with another cute, popular girl whose name has been erased by time. This couldn’t be good. At least I was already sweating.

Cindy and Anonymous Other Cute Girl put my face in front of my face. The one I was looking at was from a few years back. Trading photos was a big deal at my school; getting a cool dude and/or pretty gal’s picture was a show of status, a point of pride. At least, that’s how I remember it. In this case, though, someone possessing my tiny, tradable, two-inch-by-three-inch portrait was not positively affecting my grade-school social life. “You look so different,” Cindy announced, which, frankly, seemed obvious and true to me, but the shit-eating grin spread between her rosy cheeks signaled she was referencing how I’d become, in the ensuing years, what my grandmother and her friends at the retirement community called “a husky boy.” I fucking hated the word “husky,” and I fucking hated Cindy, in all her cute popularity, telling me I looked so different.

Unlike my brother, who excels at first impressions and easily charms perfect strangers, I don’t have a smile-inducing, capsule summary of the moment I started struggling with my weight. (He half-jokes that his was when he discovered computers and Ramen instant noodles.) But I do remember that day, in agonizing detail, 18 years later, so I guess that’s the moment. Kids can be assholes and it shouldn’t be a big deal, but since then, I’ve never been truly happy with my physical appearance, particularly my weight. I’ll be the first to admit that this is a total first-world problem, that in most ways I’m extremely lucky just to wake up in the morning and be me, but there is a special kind of—sometimes very literal—discomfort to obesity, and it manifests itself in all sorts of ways: clothing that never fits quite right, not wanting to go out in public because of this or other reasons, generalized anxiety in conversation, and many other, sometimes-tiny-sometimes-not every day situations I imagine most skinny people take for granted.

“That smoke linger, son, it shine through the curtain
Cracked pepper, motherfucker, I’m a grinder for certain.”
—“Buddy Guy”

I was a huge baseball fan growing up. From the team I rooted for (St. Louis Cardinals for life), to the glove I paid for with winnings from an 8-bit NES tournament (it had one of those fake autographs in the pocket—Jose Canseco), to the baseball cards I collected and obsessively organized in cheap plastic binders my dad bought me at Walmart (there are still 16,000-17,000 cards [I kept a regular count] in my parents’ house in rural Illinois), to the videogames I played (you will not speak ill of the original R.B.I. Baseball in my presence), America’s Pastime was what consumed Grade School Austin’s being (he had yet to truly discover future obsessions like house plants, music or girls).

So perhaps it’s no surprise that Cecil Fielder was the first Big Guy Idol to enter my life. Call it escapism or justification or some kind of weird, one-sided commiseration, but BGIs have peppered my pop-culture consumption ever since that watershed water-fountain moment. At the risk of over-analyzing and self-diagnosing, I think I used these successful overweight dudes as a way of legitimizing my own lifestyle. Sure, it was embarrassing watching Fielder attempt to steal a base—he only stole two in his 13 years/1,400+ games in the MLB—only to get easily gunned down by any catcher that possessed both an arm and a baseball, but it also gave me hope. “This guy weighs a lot [230-250 pounds is the generous weight he gets on baseball cards and stat sites], but he’s hit more than 30 home runs in each of that last consecutive four years!” my dorky, chubby self thought in 1992. I’d be fine eating whatever I want and not exercising.

As the years went by, I continued to struggle with my weight, but I had plenty of BGIs to keep me company. Rappers like Heavy D, Fat Joe and Big Punisher proved that you could be overweight and still shine. Even the descriptor words in their rap names shouted it out like a badge of honor. But even if they hadn’t said it up front, who’s going to doubt that you’ve made it when you have all that money, all those cars, all that whatever you want. Hilarious BGIs like John Belushi, Patton Oswalt, Chris Farley and Zach Galifianakis showed me that you could own your weight further, use it to propel your success, beat people to the joke you’re secretly paralyzed they’re telling in their heads, or worse, might say out loud. Of course, I’ve never had the self-confidence required to crack wise about my fluctuating exterior, and in the case of Belushi and Farley, their overindulgence would lead to their respective demises. But man did those guys live, right? Or so I reasoned. Perhaps the most stunning display of BGI bravado came in the form of the 2003 Roger Ebert/Vincent Gallo feud. After hyperbolically telling a camera crew he thought Gallo’s The Brown Bunny was the worst movie in the history of Cannes, the director retorted by calling Ebert a “fat pig” along with some other choice words. Ebert’s response borrowed and reconstructed a famous Winston Churchill zinger as follows: “Although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr. Gallo will still have been the director of The Brown Bunny.” Sick burn, Roger. Score one for the Big Guys.

“If I had a little motivation, money, and a hot body
I see it now, Bronson the heart-throbby
No more pigging out, binging on the late night
No more sneaking juice in the syringe to get the game tight
No more packing hot dogs on my neck right by the fade right
40 pounds to go and then you hookers getting laid right.”
—“Ronnie Coleman”

Action Bronson, whose stage name was inspired by Chicago gangster William “Action Jackson” (who, weighing in at more than 300 pounds, could qualify as a BGI, depending on your how you feel about loan sharks) and the actor Charles Bronson, and whose real name the internet does not appear to know, is a white, Albanian, Jewish rapper born and raised in the ancient north-central Queens neighborhood, Flushing. He raps in a breathless, projected flow that fans of Ghostface Killah—who gets shown up something fierce on the pair’s lone collaboration so far—will recognize and relate to instantly. But much like a lot of substantive artistic things that appear rip-offish upon first encounter, it’s a rewarding, exhilarating thing with repeated listens. Weighing in at just north of 300 pounds with a copious ginger beard, BamBam Bronson—like many a great rapper, he’s got a stable of nicknames—looks kind of like Yukon Cornelius, the peppermint-craving, “Silver and Gold”-inspiring, pickaxe-tossing prospector from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stop-motion animation television special. Perhaps that’s why blogger Dallas Penn paired Bronson’s “Beautiful Music” with footage of Cornelius doing his prospect-y thing to rather amusing results.

By his own admission, Bronson is a chef first, rapper second. The son of a baker and restaurant owner, he attended—and dropped out of—the New York City Art Institute’s culinary program, and currently spends his days working as the chef of a Pakistani restaurant in Astoria. He’s a ferocious Twitter user, tweeting food references both random and humorous, and pictures of edibles both delicious-looking and ridiculously delicious-looking. This Fader video where he turns his Thanksgiving leftovers into “total fuckery on a plate” is an absolute must-watch for anyone who eats, laughs or listens to rap music. The man likes food, is what I’m saying.

I started listening to his debut full-length, Dr. Lecter, last summer. Initially attracted to his music by the words of a trusted writer, and then further pulled in by his fantastic beats and the abovementioned Ghostface similarity, the motivational stuff didn’t get me until late in the year. The food references did, though. Song titles like “Brunch,” “Shiraz” and “Jerk Chicken” struck me as funny and kind of unique, and lyrics about heirloom tomatoes and extra virgin olive oil led me down the rabbithole into his intriguing, food-obsessed backstory.

But as I dug in, I started to hear a side of him I related to even more. Turns out, he’s looking to shed the first letter of his BGI status. On “Ronnie Coleman,” he laments his inability to resist food and get motivated to exercise. He even plays both parts of runner and trainer in the song’s goofy interlude which involves Action Bronson demanding marshmallows from Action Bronson while Action Bronson demands jumping jacks and push-ups from Action Bronson in return. He really does tweet a lot, going into unstoppable rants that I imagine would be really annoying to people who don’t like him. During a recent tirade, he resolved to post photos of healthier food and revealed his weight-loss goal. Unlike other BGIs of my past, I felt like Action and I were going through this together. We can lose weight. We can do better. We are motivated.

Something clicked, and I decided to take charge. Initially running a couple times a week here and there, I eventually queued up Dr. Lecter, and the change was laughable in some kind of cheesy, movie-montage way. Hearing him yell at himself to work out harder makes me second guess myself when I’m considering walking instead of running. The beats give me energy. His words push my feet. I’m well on my way now, working out like I never have in my 28 years. I’m exercising six times a week, without fail, trying to eating better and usually succeeding. I haven’t had fast food in a month and a half. I’m eating salad, but I’m leaving off the croutons, as Bronson spits in “Ronnie Coleman.” It’s a slow grind, and patience with an incremental process isn’t easy, but it also feels phenomenal and triumphant, and I’m only getting started. Who knows? Maybe in six months, I’ll run into an old acquaintance who will remark that I look so different.

Austin L. Ray lives and writes in Atlanta. He loves Twitter.

Lindsay Eanet on Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (from Armageddon - The Album, 1998)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

In the United Kingdom, where I spent most of 2011 mired in academia and damp weather, there are a lot of channels solely dedicated to playing music videos. Some solely do Top 40, others club music, others vintage garage rock. One of these channels, Magic, would play a “Magic at the Movies” series in the wee hours. And like the moon and the tides, we could count on the appearance of “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” in the rotation at always the right moment in the conversation. The chatter would slow and skid to a halt, take a sharp left and drive straight into a Steven Tyler-penned lake of schmaltz and power chords. There was almost a tangible joy about it, especially at the last “I don’t wanna faaaaaaaaaaaall asleeeeeeeeep,” pounded home with our best hair-metal panther-screams. The ritual started as a parody of itself, an experiment in tackiness, but it gradually grew into something else. I don’t know if the love for this ritual was self-aware or embarrassed or borne out of nostalgia and not the song itself, but whatever it was, I think we started to love the song, or at least the act around it, for real. 

“I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” is the perfect song for this purpose, too, because of just how over-the top it is. It diffuses the tension in the room, in your own mind, the anxieties that come with leaving or trying to figure out exactly what to say to everyone in the room before you have to go home and sort your adult life out. You give into silliness. You let go and laugh and give a bravado performance instead of just sitting there dreading the end. You start to love the song more than you’d prefer to admit. 

When we’re done with the last rendition, there are Lambrini bottles all over the floor and everyone is a little bit flushed and my throat feels raw from trying too hard and I look around the room and know in a month I will have to leave Liverpool and whatever this amazing thing is, and we will go through the formalities, wish each other well, promise to visit, to stay in touch, that’s what Facebook and Skype are for. But lives happen, jobs happen, people relocate and get married. Names get shuffled, lost. And sometimes that song will come on some rock radio station and I’ll practice the chorus in the hopes of a next time.

Lindsay Eanet lives and writes in Chicago and sometimes actively participates in karaoke nights, although she prefers the Cranberries and Pat Benatar to Aerosmith. She blogs irregularly here.

Vicki Mayowski on The Avett Brothers
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)

I’ve been an Avett Brothers fan for years. A good friend clued me into their music a few summers ago, taking me to see them play a free concert at a local park. After that show, I was hooked and I saw them every time they came to town. Each year they’d play a bigger venue, but in early 2011 something big happened to the band that elevated them to another level: the Grammys. They performed alongside Bob Dylan and Mumford & Sons that night, and I know I wasn’t the only Avett fan watching with an almost parental pride, all the while wondering how this would change my favorite band.

My answer came quickly: that May, the Avett Brothers played a sold-out show in a 5,000 seat outdoor amphitheatre in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Not even a year earlier, they’d been relegated to playing an old roller rink that might have held 1,000, jokingly introducing their songs with “Now this next one is a couples skate.” The contrast was crazy. I went to the concert with my sister Justine, who I’d accidentally converted to fandom when the eject button on my car’s CD player broke with an Avett Brothers mix stuck inside at the start of a 3-hour road trip. We went straight for the general admission pit and grabbed pretty sweet spots about 3 rows back. As we waited for showtime, we ran into our two favorite ladies we saw at every Avett concert we went to; old enough to be our mothers, they’d told me that following the Avetts on tour was their mid-life crisis cure, and had followed them from Bonnaroo all the way to the Netherlands. But we also met a lot of first-timers, Avett newbies who were amped for the music to start.

When the Avett Brothers took the stage, it was a whirlwind of awesome. The brothers started out with audience sing-a-long “Go to Sleep,” cranking the energy up high and leaving it there as they pounded through a setlist of songs that felt as though it had been written especially for me. Though the crowd was triple the size of their last show, they never seemed nervous or unsure of themselves. When Scott Avett wiped his sweaty face with a rag and threw it into the crowd, Justine caught it, which was simultaneously the best moment ever and completely disgusting. As always, the show went by too fast, and before long we were cheering for an encore. They ended with their most a frenetic stomp-and-holler tune, “Talk on Indolence,” that had the pit jumping in time together. It left us drained but exhilarated, and as we left we watched large group hugs forming, and overheard people say it was best show they’d ever seen.

There’s a somewhat sad nostalgia that comes along with watching your band become everyone else’s. I know I’ll probably never see the Avett Brothers in an intimate setting again. But that night in 2011, there was also a overload of joy, as strangers got way too close to each other and danced to their shared favorite tunes. With a new record on the horizon in the new year, there’ll most likely be even more fans next time around. I’m prepared to brave the crowds, because I’ll be following the Avett Brothers wherever their career takes them.

Vicki Mayowski: accountant by day, wannabe writer by night. She blogs and tweets.

Evan Minsker on The Gap Band’s Gap Band IV (1982)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

I had a sense of pride when my brother showed interest in owning records. I was collecting vinyl years before he started actively perusing record stores, and today, the man’s collection is awesomely baffling. He’s got some jazz and soul classics, but also, Mr. Mister, Slippery When Wet, and Whitesnake. He’s not huge on hair metal in a non-ironic way, so it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but that shortlist should give what little insight there is for why a copy of Gap Band IV has been on his wishlist.

Let’s just bask in that album title alone for a second: Gap Band IV. IV! You know who else has IV in their album titles? To name a few: Winger, Godsmack, and Led Zeppelin. And ’80s R&B Oklahomans The Gap Band, apparently.

But I get it. It’s the album with “You Dropped a Bomb on Me”—a total party song. I’m sure that’s most of the appeal right there. And whatever, in ‘82, that album was #1 on the Billboard R&B chart, so I have no room to judge. But I never really asked my brother why he wanted it quite as much as he did. His resolve and clear-headedness regarding the album was pretty unswerving, so I never thought to ask. Every time I’d go to a record store with him in the recent past, he’d head straight for the “G” section of the soul racks and face disappointment. People apparently do not resell their copies of Gap Band IV.

His Christmas list last year was short, but included a section called “Music” that I decided to tackle on my own: Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson, If I Could Only Remember My Name by David Crosby, and unsurprisingly, Gap Band IV.

One day after dinner, I walked over to Encore Records in Ann Arbor, which is almost exclusively used records. There’s a good amount of elbow room if you’re looking through the rock records, but in the back, the aisles that hold jazz, soul, blues, hip-hop, classical, comedy, novelty, and country are pretty cramped, which is why if you spend the time, you can find some excellent stuff back there. On this particular night, I started in the comparively open-air rock section and found the Crosby album, no problem. Back in the soul section, I walked past all the Aretha Franklin records, stopped when I hit Isaac Hayes, took a step back, and there, in pristine condition, was Gap Band IV. Actually, there were three pristine copies of Gap Band IV. I was easily too excited about it. I’ve had numerous experiences geeking out over rare or just great records. But I think I was even more excited to find this, a record with probably one good song that would be traveling to Texas within the month.

Smiling notably too much, I took the records to the counter. The gentleman behind the register took the Crosby record, rang it up, and with enthusiastic sincerity said, “This is a great album.” He’s not wrong. It’s also teeming with at-the-time California mainstays (Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Joni Mitchell, Grace Slick, David Geffen), making it a supremely Ann Arbor-y record. He flipped over Gap Band IV, checked the price, and said, with as much fake enthusiasm as he could muster, “Two great albums.” I don’t know why, but I could not stop laughing at the notion that this man thought Gap Band IV was as good of an album as Remember My Name. This man, who was probably stoned in a cooperative in 1971 when he first heard the opening strains of “Music Is Love,” obviously did not have a similar experience with Gap Band IV. I doubt anybody has had that sort of experience with Gap Band IV. The other alternative to his comment: He thought I needed to be reassured about my decision to purchase Gap Band IV. 

On the drive home, still laughing at the idea of that man thinking Gap Band IV was “great,” my girlfriend made it clear that she had never heard “You Dropped a Bomb on Me.” I pulled the song up on Spotify and we listened to it. Actually, I remember that drive pretty vividly—the awful faux-DeBarge dance I was doing in my seat, the rain on the road, looking at the album cover and making fake backstories for each member of the Gap Band, my stomach full of Mexican food. It was probably the most fun I had listening to or thinking about a song in 2011.

Evan Minsker is a writer based in Michigan. He blogs and tweets.

Ian Mathers on Subrosa’s No Help For the Mighty Ones (2011)
(Bandcamp)

I freely admit to not being a huge/devoted metal fan, although when I fall for something I fall hard. And my first listen to Salt Lake City doom rock quintet Subrosa’s newest album was the hardest I’ve fallen for anything in years. I heard “Whippoorwill” via The A.V. Club’s “Loud” column, loved it, downloaded the album super illegally, listened to it on my iPod and just ADORED it start to finish, and now I am going to slip Profound Lore some money for a CD copy as soon as I get paid again. I have been forcing it on as many people as I can manage and will buy a ticket and as much merch as I can manage if they ever make it to Toronto. That’s the way the post-major label era of music is supposed to work, right?

But enough about my perfidy; this was easily my favourite record of 2011, my most-played record of 2011, and the only record I could listen to every day in 2011 without getting sick of it even a little (although I didn’t listen to it quite that often). I like it so much that it’s hard for me to not just babble about it, so let’s stick with some facts: The band is made up of your fairly standard rhythm section and then three female singers, one of whom plays electric guitar and two of whom play electric violin. One of the songs here is a chilling a capella version of the folk ballad “House Carpenter,” but the other seven are all impossibly towering, crushingly heavy and melodic in equal measures, full of rage and defiance of the predominant religious and political systems of control active in North America today. The album is so angry, in fact, that it’s hard to tell whether it’s the vocals or the music that hit harder. And yet, the hooks on this album are so huge that even on the very first listen, from the opening drum salvo and guitar fuzz of “Borrowed Time, Borrowed Eyes,” I was hooked. The violins mostly add a kind of melodic drone to the doomy stomp of the music, and the massed vocals are insanely catchy.

It’s safe to say that even in the metal records I like, there’s nothing else that really sounds like Subrosa, and for whatever reason it’s like this record was specifically engineered to hit the pleasure centers of my brain. If you can listen to all of “Whippoorwill” and not like it at all (even if you’re not already wailing along to “I knowww, there’s nooo, turrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrning back” like I was), I suspect we may want very different things from music.

Ian Mathers is a writer living in Canada.

Cristina Martin on Fleet Foxes’ “Helplessness Blues” (from Helplessness Blues, 2011)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)

The first time I heard this song, I was on my way back from a very hard visit. Russell, an elderly friend I had made a few years back, was finally coming to the end of his days. It was his birthday, and so a group of us made the trek to visit him at his home tucked away in the woods, about an hour outside the city. Really, I knew I was going because I needed to say goodbye. It was a simple and happy occasion, but my heart trembled when it was time to go and I pulled away from what would be the final hug. The rawness of that last meeting left me mute in the back of a van as the group headed home, the hum of “Helplessness Blues” my only comfort.

Russell had been a chicken farmer, a pastor, a truck driver, a father, a man who knew no stranger. His name would most likely not be scribbled down in recorded history or repeated past a few more generations in his family, but, having known Russell, I have realized that such things are trivial in the scheme of living. He had done life right and it was full of stories, and joy, and a family that surrounded him until the very end. Yes, he had worked, but I could tell that at the end of Russell’s life the career was secondary to his service of others. His passion was people.

I am a 20-something. My generation has been dubbed by some as one of entitlement. We were told we could do anything we wanted, and, without the foresight of an economic downturn, we believed it. But, I think what is more important to note is how being told “You can do anything” also translated into in our brains into “You better do something.” I have never been able to fully answer the question of what I want to do with my life. I thought that once I got into the work force and started down a path that my vocational destination would become clearer, or at least feel more comfortable. Instead, I have found myself engaging in the acceptable occupational hazards of over-extending myself and disregarding my personal need for balance. I have found myself falling into my unmade bed and with an exhausted murmur asking myself, “What am I working for?”

“Helplessness Blues” has become my comfort in those moments—those moments when the only things that I am sure of are that I have no idea what I am doing or where I’m going. I recall my friend Russell and how he lived his life. Though I never flat-out asked him what his end goal was, I am pretty sure he achieved it. He cultivated a family; he took in people whose pasts may have been gruff and scarred. He befriended a girl who had moved away from her family and desperately longed for the comfort of a grandfather. I cannot say if my life will twist and turn in the same fashions that Russell’s did. But I do hope that, just has he did, I will grow steadfast in following my pull of my heart.

If anything, “Helplessness Blues” teaches me time and time again how I must be okay with the question of where my life is going as opposed to trying to find the answer. It’s a song rooted in being true to the self and determining each step taken without always knowing where it will lead. The harmonies alone build on the sense of anticipation of what could be, even though most remains unseen. With every listen, those layered chords and echoed words level me to my most vulnerable. On the hardest of days, “Helplessness Blues” helps me believe that when I come to the end I will have gained the simple accolades that come with a life that was lived well—a life that may never go beyond the acreage that I have created, but still a meaningful life all the same.

Cristina Martin is editor-in-chief of WonderRoot’s Loose Change magazine and hearts Atlanta big time.

Kasia Galazka on St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy (2011)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)

I don’t know whether people are hesitant to accept contemporary musicians as McCartneys and other famouses, but I pretty much idolize Annie Clark in the “I want to pick up an instrument because I like the things you do to yours!” way that I assume teens did in the old days when releases were anticipated and artists less accessible.

I can’t really describe the giant swirl of feelings that takes place in my head when I listen to Strange Mercy. I like it the way I like ice cream. I like watching her fingers flutter in videos for “Surgeon.” And I like the latter half because it’s so gauzy it makes me feel like one of the last people at a party.

People harp on her to “let go,” but to me, her control over her impulses is what makes her so poised and indomitable.

Maybe seeing their roots is what maybe makes great artists seem less like legendary humans, but every time I’ve seen St. Vincent, I’ve felt a tiny yelling fan faint a little in my gut. She’ll be one of the greats I tell my kids about, I’m sure of it.

Kasia Galazka likes pizza and dogs in Halloween costumes.

Daniella Joseph on LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” (2011)
(iTunes, Rd—oh come on, you know this damn song) 

My cousin Pame is a little wild. Her voice is toddler-loud. When I ride the subway with her, I can feel the eyes of other passengers on us, some of them are disapproving, some startled awake, their eyes focused on her wide red mouth, the glint of her gold fillings. Then there’s her accent, which is an over-exaggerated Ricky Ricardo style explosion of S’s. We ssssssay them. They’re spectacular, sunny and a little aggressive; smiling as offense.

We went to a French restaurant and the place, which usually plays light jazz, was banging out dance tracks like they knew she was there. She danced in her chair and I was reminded of how when I was 14, she and her sisters got me into Webster Hall. She wound up fucking some guy behind the red velvet curtains. I asked her gravely if she had used a condom because it seemed like the most mature thing to say and she’d laughed. Here we were, twenty-three years later, grown-ups in a bistro twitching to techno. A song started playing and she crowed I LOVE THIS SONG and waved her arms from side to side. Oh, I didn’t know it was a real song, I thought it was a commercial jingle. The dancing gerbils in hoodies! Robots! Though I don’t get how stoned looking gerbils sell cars. It’s kind of irresponsible. She cackled and kept wiggling in her seat. You’re so crazy is her shorthand for stop talking and dance. This is how it will always be.

On New Year’s Eve, I was in bed. I’d spent the evening with Pame and the rest of my family on the Upper East Side, and slid easily into the role of the youngest; my first role, my greatest. The television glowed at the foot of our bed and a deeply orange Dick Clark soldiered on. Ryan Seacrest popped up, announcing a live performance from LMFAO. These idiots came on and that song started. Ha ha ha ha, that’s who LMFAO is! Are these guys in costume? Are they Latino? I need to know this, so I can gauge how embarrassed I should be. What is happening with those clothes? Where are the gerbils? OMG, they are dancing like the gerbils! J opines that it straight up sucks. I went yesssssssss but no, it’s got that part, that part that saves it. Then I made the sped up keyboard noises. It’s so stupid and simple and perfect for the dance floor. I danced to it again the next day on our way out the door doing a modified running man in my winter wear. That night, I played the video for my friend Jared and he got that special look on his face that he reserves for Coldplay and covers done in tasteful Bossa Nova style.

What? I dig this!

This. Is awful.

It’s disco!

It’s disco diarrhea.

It’s delightful disco diarrhea! What is that hook? A keyboard? I NEED TO KNOW!

It is a pitch shifted, autotuned keyboard.

Reaaaally?!

That’s a horrible hook.

When I ask him if he thinks these dudes are Hispanic, he wavers, then decides no. They’re post-race. I laugh. Of course. You’re so crazy.

Daniella Joseph caters to the whims of Academics by day and grumbles at night. She tumbls about music and memory here.

Meghan O’Dea on The Magnetic Fields’ “I Think I Need A New Heart” (from 69 Love Songs, 1999)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

One warm spring day around last Easter, my boyfriend invited me over for supper before we went out for the evening. I let myself in with the key he had given me only a week or two into our brief courtship and was met with the usual twang from the tinny speakers he kept in the bedroom. I hadn’t yet picked up on the growing distance between us, and I hadn’t yet become aware of the sense of obligation that oozed from him whenever we hung out. It was just another night.

We tucked into dinner, and a male singer’s warm baritone replaced some breezy dream pop, singing, “‘Cause I’ll always say I love you when I mean turn out the light.” At the time the line reminded me of The Princess Bride, and how Westly always says “as you wish” no matter how much Buttercup bosses him around. I couldn’t help picturing my boyfriend and I curled up in bed, him sleepily drawling at me to turn out the light, his voice soft with the depth of his feelings for me.

I asked him what we were listening to. He told me it was the Magnetic Fields.

A month later I was huddled next to my speakers in the throes of that phase of brokenhearted grief where you cry compulsively into whatever alcoholic beverage you happen to be clutching as you try to articulate the enormity of your feelings with other people’s lyrics. It was a total Nick Hornsby/Rob Sheffield moment, one dictated by the strange whims of the iTunes shuffle algorithm. That same Magnetic Fields’ number, “I Think I Need a New Heart,” popped out of the speakers, shocking me back to that night only weeks before when I’d still been so happy. As I actually listened to the rest of the song, I realized I had been as mistaken about its meaning as I had been about the depth of my ex’s feelings.

“I Think I Need a New Heart” opens to the standard jangling, upbeat melodies the Magnetic Fields churn out with a deft, casual ease and consistency. The instruments provide a contrast to the emotional pain of the song’s narrator as he breathlessly describes being dumped. It seems like a standard pop variation on a theme. Then the bridge hits. The jingle jangle drops off. It’s Merritt alone with his acoustic guitar, crooning his confessions. “’Cause I’ll always say ‘I love you’ when I mean ‘turn out the light’, and I’ll say ‘let’s run away’ when I just mean ‘stay the night.”

“How fucked up is that?” I tearfully asked my chardonnay when I heard the whole thing. (A comparable sucker punch is “You Fit Into Me,” by Margaret Atwood: “You fit into me/ like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye.”) After the bridge, the chorus returns with a rich cacophony of incongruously cheerful sounds. Like any good pop song, it starts and ends with the same melody, but The Magnetic Fields put that structure to meaningful use. The chords repeat themselves over and over just as the cycle of dysfunction perpetuates in the characters’ lives. The narrator returns to the titular refrain of needing a new heart. He’s brokenhearted, all right, but not because of this particular dumping—he came out of the box this way.

Part of what makes this song so great is when you recognize that your life is great because you aren’t trapped in that same cyclical melody. In the months after the breakup, I learned not to be blinded by the perpetual fantasy of infatuation. I learned to look at people more objectively, and to kill off the last of my adolescent codependence and naiveté. I also learned to negotiate forgiveness. My ex isn’t a villain or a study in warped psychology, but he’s not a white knight either. He’s a beautiful, faulty person who isn’t the guy for me. Over time this song stopped serving as my salve and became one of my favorite lessons in how to write, something I picked back up in 2011 for the first time in years. “I Think I Need a New Heart” taught me about the poetry of pop. It taught me about the impact of brevity and repetition. It was a lesson in how much character progression you can cram into two and a half minutes. It was my anchor, and now it’s my inspiration.

Meghan O’Dea blogs here and tweets here.

Erin M. Routson on “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj (from Pink Friday, 2010)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)

emrgency:

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. When I was in high school, I was what you’d call “cool.” Or, rather, a uniquely specific brand of cool that only led to admiration from people who thought indie rock shows with less than 25 people in attendance or a burgeoning seven inch collection were qualifiers. As I remember it, though it may be faulty, I never tried to be cool. These were just things I liked; this was the music I felt most connected to, the kind that said what I couldn’t yet find a way to say myself. While I filed my Pavement 7”s and saw Jets to Brazil at a tiny club, though, I dabbled elsewhere. Mariah Carey’s “Heartbreaker” (my nascent love for Jay-Z starts somewhere around here), Britney Spears’ “Crazy” (but only the “Stop! Remix”, still an elitist at heart), and Janet Jackson’s “The Velvet Rope” were all in heavy rotation, but in the world of music that I knew, this side wasn’t a part of it. This was pop music. This was throwaway stuff. This music defined “guilty pleasure.”

So there’s a precedent for what happened to me in 2011, what I would consider the high water mark of my pop music appreciation. It started with “Super Bass”: the teeth-rotting pop side of Nicki Minaj hooked me and I found myself listening to it on repeat in the office. While my brother and friends of mine found this kind of ridiculous (growing up I uttered many regrettable thoughts about others’ taste in music), I didn’t. I embraced it. The refrain of “Super Bass” became a part of the persona I dreamed of having: a carefree, sunglasses-wearing girl cruising down a coastal highway getting tan while belting out its lyrics. While I connected with the isolation and confused feelings tied up in a lot of the indie rock I loved as a teenager, in my late 20s I wanted to be happy, to be laissez-faire, to be swept away by feelings that made me nervous in an excited way, rather than nervous in the way that so often made me anxious.

This tendency wore on as I downloaded Ke$ha’s “Animal” and listened to the whole thing, “Your Love Is My Drug” being the standout. After a stint at home listening to Cleveland radio, Mindless Behavior’s “My Girl” became one of my most played songs in iTunes. By the time I made it to my tenure at Willie Mae Rock Camp as a counselor I knew all of Ke$ha’s back catalogue, as well as plenty of Katy Perry. During our breaks, the other counselors and I would hole up in the lounge reading Bop and J-14, finding out all sorts of useless trivia about Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, and anyone else I’d probably never think twice about outside of those walls. I spent all week dancing and singing with girls of all ages to Beyoncé, Rihanna, Ke$ha and Katy, and it was fun, maybe more fun than any of the “cool” things I did in high school. During the songwriting workshop where we dissected the parts to Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”, I sung out just as loud as the 8 and 9 year olds I was charged with. They felt no guilt, neither did I.

It happened again during a few hours at the laundromat watching the Latino music video station. While I thought the ridiculously catchy “la la la la la”s were indicative of some kind of trashy Euro-pop group I’d never heard of, it turned out to be Cobra Starship’s “You Make Me Feel” featuring Sabi. I listened to it for hours. I listened to it today. I’ve accepted the fact that it will be on my running mix for pretty much all of my life, taking its place next to the other not-even-made-with-instruments jams that characterize what gets me to pound out a good workout.

Maybe this is the year I cultivated myself as a musical Benjamin Button: the 13 year old who appreciated Radiohead records is now the 28 year old who can’t get enough of Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” As much as I enjoyed records that were complex and challenging, I also just wanted to zone out and have that mental picture of the girl listening to “Super Bass” over and over again. I wanted to be young and without stress, I wanted to be an adult but also sing along to perfect hooky melodies and love them for that reason alone. There’s no such thing as a “guilty pleasure” from here on out, only joy derived from whatever music makes me feel it.

Erin M. Routson is a Brooklyn-based writer and designer neck-deep in her masters thesis on the policy and design of public housing. Follow her on Twitter. 

Ian Mathers on Jónsi’s Go (2010)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)

Sometimes when you get into an album a year “late,” it’s because you just missed it at the time; in my case, not paying any attention to Go had more to do with Jónsi’s day job and my sobriety than anything chronological.

It’d be misleading to say that I dislike Sigur Ros, but they’ve always underwhelmed me a little bit, so the idea of an album by their singer didn’t exactly intrigue me. But then I gave “Go Do” a [9] when we covered it over at the Singles Jukebox, and, so of course I downloaded the album. But I think I only listened to it once, cursorily, and dismissed it as pretty but a little anemic compared to the surging “Go Do” before my best friend’s thirtieth birthday party.

Now that was a long night, and after about two hours of sleep I found myself sitting at Union Station in Toronto, waiting for my bus home. I hadn’t eaten in almost 24 hours and I was desperately hungry, but couldn’t quite bring myself to eat. I felt very calm, very light, and very wrung out from all the partying. It was a crisp but cloudy day, cool but not actually cold yet, and for whatever reason I picked Jónsi on my iPod. 

Now, the songs here are very pretty, and especially if you’re a Sigur Ros fan, maybe it’s easy to get caught on that. But when the drums come in on “Go Do” or “Boy Lilikoi” this music soars in ways Jónsi’s more overtly epic main gig can’t really manage, partly because of the beautiful, ornate music, and partly because of Jónsi’s lyrics and vocals. Positivity, directed either outwards or inwards, can be hard to express without becoming either mawkish or banal, but because of the streaks of melancholy running throughout these songs of love and support (again, directed both inwards and outwards) here Jónsi sings movingly about youth, adulthood, maturation, romance, expectations, friendship, and self-image without ever seeming trite or shallow. Near the end of the darker, quieter “Tornado” Jónsi softly sings, as if to himself, the line “I wonder if I’m ever allowed just to be.” Go is ultimately an album about the process and rewards of becoming okay with allowing yourself to just be, with embracing that in yourself and others.

It’s also very pretty.

Ian Mathers is a writer living in Canada.

Gray Chapman on The Kills’ Blood Pressures (2011)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

She is everything I’m not and everything my shaky insecurity yearns to be. She has the lanky, boyish figure; I, the rounded angles of some kind of distorted Baroque painting. Her face is sallow and sunken and worn thin, possibly by a few good years of drug abuse; mine, apricots of freckled cheeks rounded out by hearty meals and a fear of setting foot anywhere near a line of blow. She is all leather and black denim and torn shirt, while I look more at home in a overly precious sun dress (belted at the waist, naturally).

Allison Mosshart is my twisted version of the feminine ideal. And while I could never achieve what she represents, despite my own black denim/leather jacket/halfhearted self-starvation efforts, she has given me something. Something intangible, something dark, a thing I grip tight and close to my chest and can’t let go of.

After recording a handful of albums, mostly with The Kills, all while sultrily dangling a half-smoked cigarette from her lips, Allison Mosshart and her grungy vocal aesthetic has become something of an amulet for me. Keep On Your Mean Side, with anthems “Fuck The People” and “Hitched,” got my blood coursing. No Wow—a bit less devil-may-care, darker and gloomily sexier—gave me feelings I hadn’t experienced since, oh, the first time I watched Cruel Intentions. Midnight Boom picked up the pace with a handful of seemingly superficial dance-y numbers, but despite the departure from broody sultriness, Mosshart’s “U.R.A. Fever” and “Sour Cherry” had me inches away from writhing around on the mattress in ecstasy. Just like all of them do.

I (the nonsmoking, five-foot-tall, rosy-faced and freckled girl that I am) can’t explain what happens in my mind when Mosshart’s force of nature overtakes me. Suddenly, my awkward nature, my biz-casual Ann Taylor Loft a-line skirts, and my fucking cheeks are all stripped away. I’m muscle wrapped tight in blues and leather, dangling that cigarette so expertly out of my lips, with some sort of uncontrollable dark mane in my face and shitkickers on my feet. I’m on my way to work but I’m elsewhere, somewhere dark and thick with smoke. I’m a different person.

The Kills came out with Blood Pressures in 2011. It was an album undoubtedly influenced by Mosshart’s bluesier stint in the Dead Weather. It was also a year of newfound hamster-like routine in all areas of my life. “Future Starts Slow” got kind of popular, further edging the band into the mainstream, much to my inner badass bitch’s chagrin. This music was my secret; my magic bullet. I listened to it when I needed to feel powerful. I listened to it when I wanted to feel in control, out of my body, away from my safe past and safer present, closer toward a cigarette-smoking, bangs-in-my-face, trashy, sinewy sort of hellish seductress.

But who am I kidding? I can’t pull off black eyeliner without looking like a child who came upon her mother’s makeup drawer. I don’t even know how to smoke a cigarette. I drink gin like an old man in elbow patches, not straight whiskey like some kind of raconteur. I can practice a menacing glare in the mirror all day long, but I can never shed a sheltered past and a couple decades’ worth of non-skinny-jeans-friendly snacking habits.

Blood Pressures, though, crumples my reality up, makes a Molotov cocktail of it all, and throws it right back in my face. And in some sort of sick, blackened Cinderella story, I’m a visceral force just like her. Stomping around in the dead of night. Never batting a downcast eye at a small-town past, a safe relationship, a nine-to-five kind of lifestyle, a kind of bored contentment in which, more often than not, a few good listens to “DNA” is what I need, what I require, to keep a pulse. Her wailing, her reverb, the earthshaking guitars and pounding percussions is a pill upon which I’ve become reliant. Years of cussing like a fuckin’ sailor and trying to cultivate a razor-sharp edge come to a head. My heart is a beating drum.

Gray Chapman lives in Atlanta.

Lindsay Rhoades on Washed Out, Dirty Beaches, and rejecting the trappings of supposed adulthood
(8tracks) 

For some, 2011 was just a year where seemingly every other girl/gay man in Brooklyn decided to shave a random swath of hair down to the scalp. But for me, it was a collection of moments that have inspired me to whole-heartedly evaluate the way I experience music and actually make something out of my passion.

My meditations on this began out of a repugnance for getting older. I had tickets to see Washed Out with openers Blood Orange and Grimes, but the night of the show, a Monday, everyone bowed out, citing the old “have to be up early for work” excuse. It dawned on me that while I was still serving tacos in a tiny Mexican restaurant, these people, my friends, had careers, and that these careers were so important that they could not waste hours of sleep to see a once-in-a-lifetime lineup play to a packed house, everyone with dancing shoes on. I wrangled a friend who, like myself, had few daytime responsibilities, or at the very least could handle being a bit sleepy the next day. We had a phenomenal time, but even so I was bummed. Was I somehow immature or unaccomplished because I enjoyed this sort of thing? On Thursday, a heart-to-heart with a friend who had bailed resulted in the following conclusion: the two of us were at different places in our lives, and apparently I was not the adult.

The thing is, it didn’t really matter to me. If being an adult meant forgoing unexpected Bastille Day fireworks over the Hudson after a free tUnE-yArDs performance so that I could efficiently alphabetize files in a cubicle for a steady paycheck, then I was content to sling salsa for at least a few more years. I wouldn’t trade losing my shit over those first haunting strains of Dirty Beaches’ “Lord Knows Best” billowing through Glassland’s papery clouds to change a dirty diaper, because Alex Zhang Hungtai is the coolest dude who ever lived, and that night he vowed to “croon the fuck out” which is exactly what happened.

I wouldn’t want to miss the chance to jump on the Music Hall of Williamsburg stage for Star Slinger’s closing cut “Punch Drunk Love” or to witness Phil Elvurum on the altar of the gorgeous St. Cecilia’s church, his soft voice reverberating angelically around the cathedral. Or to have folk hero Michael Gira kiss my hand after the Swans show, which was the loudest, sweatiest, and single most transcendent rock-n-roll experience I’d ever had. Nor would I miss the incredible stage set-up as it virtually came alive to Animal Collective’s Prospect Park set, even as the heat and hallucinogens caused teenagers all around me to pass out. Had I not decided on a whim just a day before the show, I would never have seen Dam-Funk shred a key-tar as we sailed around Manhattan on a ferry, the sun setting against the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty waving her torch over the deck. I braved the pollution of the Gowanus Canal to see a Four Tet DJ in a garden that managed to be verdant despite all the toxins pulsing through the ground.

This was my fourth year at CMJ, and it stands as one of my favorite events because in that moment, you’re right with those fledgling acts, waiting to see a performance that will build their buzz or totally break them. This year, at a Trash Talk performance replete with band members flinging themselves from balconies, a friend of mine well into her twenties found herself in a circle pit for the very first time. Later that week, I watched Pat Grossi of Active Child strum a person-sized harp, its strings practically glowing as they vibrated against his fingertips.

Fiercely loving music is one thing that doesn’t get boring for me. As I age, it doesn’t get old. Seeing a Party of Helicopters reunion performance at Death By Audio in February proved that. I used to see them religiously when I lived in Ohio. In my veins was the same blood that was present when I was twenty, and every muscle, every cell, remembered what to do – I damn near gave myself whiplash, working myself into a frenzy.

And despite spending hours researching obscure bands for music supervision projects I freelance, I still discover bands just by attending shows. While dancing my ass off at the 100% Silk Showcase at Shea Stadium, I discovered a whole label’s worth of material harkening back to club jams of the nineties, and the Amanda Brown vs. Bethany Cosentino debate was forever settled in my mind in favor of the LA Vampires frontwoman; Brown is a visionary while Cosentino is just cute.

In roughly fifteen years of attending rock concerts, I’d say I had the best one yet. I’ve decided that since growing up is not worth the trade-off of giving up live music, or changing the way I experience the music that I love, that I will have to marry the two. While this trajectory began years ago, this is the first time I’ve felt any sort of mission behind the fandom. I am the person people call and ask “are there any good shows going on tonight?”, the person with extra tickets who drags friends along to see bands they haven’t heard of, the person who brings a huge group of old friends together for a show, the person who barring all that will go to a show alone and still have a blast. I am one of the thousands of people who log on to Ticketmaster at 9:55am for Radiohead tickets and still won’t get any. I’m the person at the front of the crowd, snapping a few quick pictures for those who couldn’t make it, and then dancing like a thing possessed for the rest of the set. For me, it’s dedication. It’s all part of being someone who was there.

Lindsey Rhoades is from Ohio and lives in Brooklyn. As a music supervisor she has worked on projects for Ikea, 3rd Ward, Pepsi, MTV, and RADAR/WBPLabs. She blogs at and tweets.