Top Ten, Fall/Winter 2023

1. BBC livestream of The Queue. Snicker all you want that an estimated 250,000 people waited sometimes more than 24 hours to walk past Queen Elizabeth's coffin lying in state; I might join you myself. But the livestream was a classic of durational cinema, four days where Warhol's Empire was a mere eight hours. And unlike Empire, there was plenty to break up the monotony beyond the changing of the guard every twenty minutes [sic!]: celebrity queuers ("Look - it's Joe and Jill!"), fainting guards, the spider on the Queen's coffin, "Oooh, he's hot!," "That's what you wore?," the last person in the queue (Sarah Clarke [at left below], The Lady Usher of the Black Rod in the House of Lords), and a cascade of facts testifying to the enormity of the undertaking. 

2. Bob Stanley, Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop (Faber UK). Where Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop dealt with the popular music of the latter half of the twentieth century, this sequel takes on the first half. Like its predecessor, it conveys no coherent point of view and is most useful as a compendium of songs and artists that you should get to at some point (Earl Bostic! Reginald Foresythe!). But in a chapter on post-war Broadway about three-quarters through, Stanley takes long overdue aim at the oeuvre of Rodgers and Hammerstein although he shields himself by dissing only the lame film adaptations. Trust me, Bob - even in the theatre, Carousel's "storyline drags and the pacing is awful." Elsewhere, the man has wit to spare. On Jack Jones: "He simply existed to fill a gap that was exactly Jack Jones-shaped."

3. Chez Kane, Powerzone (Frontiers Music SRL). The denizens of Expert Witness, the Facebook group dedicated to the glory of Robert Christgau, were going on a bit too long about Taylor Swift's Midnights last October. So to be a brat, I tried to steer the conversation towards this album which I'd never heard. Turns out to be, um, actually kinda good and precisely the kind of trash jolt Midnights could use. A Welsh pop-metaller, Chez (rhymes with Pez) Kane has her Vixen and Benatar steals down pat. Chuck Eddy music if I've ever heard any and Swift could do worse than give her a call. 

4. Jesus Nalgas (@jesus_nalgas on Instagram and @jesusnalgas on TikTok). Nalgas gives the impression that during high school he spent more time observing faculty rather than hanging out with friends. Whatever the case, he's transformed his possible loneliness into a series of hilarious performances as exasperated teachers, office workers, lunch ladies and has since branched out into other professions: TSA workers, DMV meanies, bank tellers, the like. With his airhorn voice and overenunciation of every syllable, he evokes an overworked service provider who prays he won't have to repeat himself yet again but knows damn well he'll have to because people just 👏 won't👏listen.

5. Belle and Sebastian, Late Developers (Matador). Where once Stuart Murdoch, Sarah Martin, and company had alienated childhoods to mine for their absurdly catchy songs, they've now "got kids and dystopia" and it's hell on their sense of specifics. Absurdly catchy the songs remain--any rom-com producer in need of an end-credits sync should look to the title track or "I Don't Know What You See in Me," the gushing first single. But they're either too bored or too blindsided by their late-developing adulthood to call it up with any concreteness. Gone are the proper nouns and local color that made their alienation feel lived-in. Perhaps if their kids prove too uncool to start their own Belle and Sebastian, it will jolt them out of their vagueness long about 2030.

6. Into the Woods, St. James Theatre (October 16). Remember when I said that Broadway musicals don't need second acts? That doesn't apply to Stephen Sondheim. The obsession starts here.

7. Noirvember, Spectacle (November 19). Spectacle is a collectively run microcinema in Brooklyn and Noirvember is their annual all-night film noir festival. Only hints are announced beforehand so "an offbeat and criminally unseen b-film directed by a certain public enemy number one, in his sole directorial effect" turned out to be James Cagney's 1957 Short Cut to Hell while the "special 16mm film noir treat" at midnight (really closer to 1 a.m.) was Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (Norman Foster, 1948). We left as the George Raft vehicle Nocturne (Edward L. Marin, 1946) was playing off a digital file. The sheer unlikeliness that the event attracted a good thirty movie lovers trumped any individual title.

8. Eddie Izzard Performs Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Greenwich House Theatre (January 20). When all modes of narration converge on one person in the theatre, the burden becomes too much to bear. With barely existent stage design and two or three brief musical cues, Izzard compressed Great Expectations into two dreary hours by performing every character and providing chunks of narration. The effect was akin to a speed freak breathlessly recounting his new favorite HBO Max series. I know Izzard is attracted to endurance tests; she completed 32 marathons over the 31 days of January 2021. Would that I experienced this one as an item in the Times too.

9. The return of Creel Pone. The great experimental music reissue label went dark for a while. But they're back with a completist-infuriating vengeance. New titles are pouring out (the latest is CP 281.03 Henry Martin: Concerto Per Un Quadro Di Adami). But there are dozens of "reéditions" adding bonus tracks to previous releases. So those of us who've managed to collect everything up until now have plenty of catching up to do. In a word that mirrors the squelchy sounds in which Creel Pone traffics, ARRRRGH!!! On sale at Alpha State NYC.

10. Lil Yachty: Let's Start Here. (Concrete/Motown/Quality Control, 2023). More than the last frontier in consciousness or an accurate evocation of a drug experience, psychedelia in music is a catalog of sounds that repays obsessive listening. Given how Yachty's discography (if not post-sampledelic hip-hop in general) provides a bedrock for trippy sonics, this plunge into Tame Implala-cured acid rock is far from the radical departure most critics claim. The falsetto Yachty adopts to sing through the three a.m. vapor waves does get wearying. But unlike another late-night tripper, John Cale on his new Mercy, he submerges his voice into the muck often enough to provide some variation. Also unlike Cale, he cedes much of the vocal spotlight to female guest stars Diana Gordon and Fousheé as true collaborators rather than decorations. Start with the last song, "Reach the Sunshine" which bears the same relationship to Let's Start Here. as the title track did to Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure - a methodical stroll launching the entire album into space.