January Top Ten

1. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024). A film maudit was expected and a film maudit was what we got - a loony mess but an endearing one. So for me, someone who hasn't seen a Coppola film since 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula because I've been busy and also, some of the titles didn't strike me, to quote Jiminy Glick, my only question is why does this feel like the work of a high school student? Coppola began conceiving of this in 1977, well past his adolescence. But the allegorical bedrock, the self-importance, the reckless spending all bespeak the habits of the Clearasil set. What happened (or didn't)?

 2.  George Michael: "Father Figure" in Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024). Unlike the Fifty Shades trilogy, there was less time here to lay out the rules of the S/M relationship between Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson (or ignore them altogether as in Some Call It Loving). So despite the bravest performance of Kidman's career, much of this comes off as rushed and underbaked. But every so often, a film will transform a song you think you've got down and that happens when "Father Figure" scores a steamy acquiescence scene. "That's all I wanted," the song starts, signaling not only a post-coital smokiness but a maturity rooted in Michael's openness to appear vulnerable. The skeletal track (mostly Michael on a Roland D-50) leaves no hiding spaces for his breathy vocal and the backup singers (Shirley Lewis and an inaudible-to-me Michael) take the chorus. He's as naked as Kidman in the scene and the amplified theatre sound leaves us too with no hiding spaces. It's an embarrassingly adult song, light years away from (though not necessarily better than!) than the teenpop of Wham! which fizzled out barely a year before. "Father Figure" has him growing up so quickly it forces you to reexamine if Kidman's submission is all that rushed to begin with. 

3. Matthew Restall: Elton John's Blue Moves (33 1/3). Riot. Exile. Forever Changes. Big deal. But when the 33 1/3 series editors chose to publish an entire book on Elton John's dreadful 1976 double album, I perked up. Restall posits several theories as to why Blue Moves "was a success that failed, and yet also a failure that succeeded," i.e., it sold as well as its predecessor (1975's Rock of the Westies) but felt like a turkey - punk, John's coming out as bisexual in Rolling Stone two weeks before its release, music so uncompromising it dashed expectations like Fleetwood Mac's Tusk (no), David Bowie's Tonight (closer), and George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (there we go), John's former publisher Dick James Music flooding the marketplace with reconfigurations of older product (in re-released singles, comps, live albums, K-Tel collections, a box set) and muddying the waters of new material, etc. All reasonable explanations except of the music itself where Restall does not convince - the album remains a bloated, marshmallowy tax on the senses.

4. Illeana Douglas: Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia (Lyons). I thought this coffee-table book by the fine actor (best remembered by me as the art teacher Roberta in Ghost World) would plumb the psychogeography of Connecticut, especially its status as a de facto suburb of New York City. Alas, it's comprised mostly of synopses of films set in the Constitution State. So if you see it in a bookstore, read the photo captions and find the movie/city pairing that jolts you most. As a frequent resident of Stamford, I'm looking forward to taking in Boomerang (Elia Kazan, 1947) and, um, The Horror of Party Beach (Del Tenney, 1964). 

5. Padgett Powell: Edisto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). I'd wanted to read this since 1989 when Spin deemed it one of the Top 10 Coolest Books in an issue that changed my life. Alas, this diffuse portrait of a white boy growing up in a largely Black community in the South gave me the mehs, yet another reminder that popular music will always goose my ass harder than literature. Unsurprisingly, the one line that snapped out at me doubles as a fine piece of music criticism. In a description of the Black voices surrounding him, our protagonist compares them to the Godfather of Soul: "Like these James Brown guitar riffs of five notes that run twenty minutes, then one of the five notes goes sharp and a statement is made. A whole evening hums, and then there's a new note — razor out."

6. Margaret Drabble: The Millstone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984); A Touch of Love (aka Thank You All Very Much) (Waris Hussein, 1969). Drabble's portrait of an unmarried pregnant woman in London who's made up her mind to keep her baby is equal parts harrowing and warm and all the more welcome for it. But it leaves a sour aftertaste, rendering childbirth/rearing an achievement superior to all other pursuits. One sentence toward the very end threatens to tank the entire enterprise. Rosamund, now the mother of baby Octavia, invites George, the gay man who unknowingly sired the child one night in a fit of heterosexuality, back to her flat to meet the infant. George is polite but, understandably, cannot share Rosamund's resolute love for Octavia, prompting Rosamund to opine, "George, I could see, knew nothing with such certainty." How she's gained access to the whole of George's existence Drabble never makes clear. The film version, starring Sandy Dennis as Rosamund, is better because Rosamund's state of mind is left open to interpretation. And Ian McKellen's turn as George opens up even more tantalizing possibilities for living life for oneself without ever becoming selfish. 

7. James McCourt: Mawrdew Czgowchwz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975); Andrew Holleran: Dancer from the Dance (William Morrow & Co., 1978). Two revered, fabulously gay, gorgeously written New York City novels that proved a slog, akin to listening to someone recall their rather characteristic Saturday night. Dancer from the Dance follows gay men boogieing to disco, ingesting drugs, and lusting after sundry Adonises, activities that meet Holleran's disapproval: "They were bound together by a common love for a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn't throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing." This disco scholar who deems Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You," which makes several appearances within, one of the greatest singles of the 1970s says, "Pah!" McCourt's novel is a tougher read but lets in more air by keeping its eye on the millions of people who couldn't care less about the titular opera diva (pronounced Mardew Gorgeous) protected by a phalanx of worshipers with equally wacky names.

8. Gypsy, Majestic Theatre (January 3, 2025). It's simple. Every post-Merman diva who has taken on what may be Broadway's greatest role acts the part of Rose to the detriment of each number's song shape. Dramaturgy trounces melody as is the norm in a post-Method/Sondheim world. So while Audra McDonald acquits herself more than admirably, I kept hearing Ethel Merman in my head. And the event was definitely not worth the $368 I had to choke up to witness it. 

9. Meridian Brothers: Mi Latinoamérica Sufre (Ansonia/Bongo Joe, 2024). The Meridian Brothers was started in 1998 as a solo project by musical polyglot Eblis Álvarez who eventually formed a band to experiment more deeply with various genres -  the music of his homeland Colombia, for sure, but also "the golden era of ’70s Congolese rumba, Ghanian highlife and Nigerian afrobeat" to which this new album is a homage. As per the liners, it's also a concept album about Junior Maximiliano III, a young man of privilege who wants to study the folklore of Latin America but gets sidelined by taking a drug he calls "soma" and harboring criticism of his motivations by the artists in his ethnographic sightline. Even Spanish listeners will glean little of this from the songs; the liners merely clarify the satiric tone, reminiscent of "Common People," of the lyrics which include such translated-by-Google language as "Hey, how does rotten cumbia continue to advance?" and "Yesterday I cried while shitting." Álvarez's guitar lines sound like a kid brother toggling the radio dial just enough to annoy the crap out of you, needling where the African norm is more soothing or euphoric. If you're leery about swallowing such a jagged little pill, then check out the fervid, pulpy cover art by Mateo Rivan. It's a perfect depiction of Junior's bent journey which ends with him encrusted in self-pity and asking the government to subsidize his suffering.

10. Geordie Greep: The New Sound (Rough Trade, 2024). Former singer/multi-instrumentalist of feted London math rockers Black Midi Geordie Greep has such a goofy, onomatopoeic name, looks so much like a cartoon character, sounds so much like Donald Fagen, sambafies his music as satirically as Steely Dan did, plays up his virtuosity just like Steely Dan did, hires a orchestra of virtuosos just like Steely Dan did, and inhabits a cast of sketchy characters just like Steely Dan did that the man had to be grown in rock critic Petri dish. Greep's solo debut is speedier and shoutier than the Dan and you're right to wonder how much distance he's gained from the incels about whom he harangues over 62 minutes. But that's only because he's fashioned such an outrageous, ear-demanding platform for their toxicity.