Best Albums and Singles of 1996

This list was occasioned by another Brad Luen poll and I'm not surprised it mirrors the final results given how much of his audience are Robert Christgau fanfolk. Still, despite the fact that my album list is tellement Xgau-influenced, 1996 was when I started to step more surely as a critic. Seasick remains crucial for me in this regard. With no other hype than that it came in the mail, Seasick was one of the first albums I didn't get right away but kept at until I fell in love. It's a subtle puppy too; you have to listen hard to hear how Roddy Bottum & Co. are smiling through gritted teeth, Hershey's Magic Shell surface pulled at by a disturbing undertow. I'll never forget a friend singing the outro of "Butch" to her two-year-old godson and stopping awkwardly as the gently repeating "I like you"s start to become angry shouts, a perfect distillation of the album's itchy power. If you've never heard Seasick, then know it's a tense classic that will come to you with patience, not prudence. 

Even the one outlier album, We Are Puppets, came to me via Xgau's rave for Tiger's 1997 Shining in the Wood EP, their only Stateside release. This is more of the same, a lot more since their songs are so samey. The band got a lot of British press at the time since they were such unlikely rock heroes. They dressed funny, sported mullets, and their lyrics betrayed a past in (can it be?) farming. We'd call them heshers in the American Midwest, a demographic typically attuned to metal or classic rock. Tiger, though, were firmly indie rock with lead singer Dan Laidler coming off as an ebullient Mark E. Smith over a vaguely motorik/charmingly incompetent sound/beat. Beefing up the joy were two (three?) gal singers whose frequent interjections provided relief from Laidler's whine. Their goal seems to have been to have as much fun as possible and they succeeded from the sounds of it. But realizing that fun was not a sustainable way of life, they broke up before the release of their second album Rosaria (Tugboat, 1999). Their incandescent oeuvre deserves a two-disc comp collecting the full-lengths and all the stray tracks that'll sashay into and out of your life like a karaoke Saturday night. 

The first two are still teaching me about the head/record-spinning intersections between race/ethnicity and popular music. Is Endtroducing..... hip-hop at all? From it but not of it? Did Josh Davis (aka DJ Shadow) have the cultural authority to explain "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96," the album's sole faulty moment and, tellingly, one of the tracks proving that was Endtroducing.....was not, contrary to the Guinness Book of World Records' claim, "the first album to be recorded using only sampled sounds"? Sugar and Poison, David Toop's quiet-storm reclamation project, strands Curtis Mayfield, Luther Vandross, and the Isley Brothers in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle where they could be perceived more easily by the demographic who needed no such push to consume Toop's ambient augmentation project Ocean of Sound. Is this a fundamental mishearing of R&B or a world-historic widening of its remit?

(By the way, while waiting many years to find an actual copy of Sugar and Poison, I tried to recreate it via Napster et al. and Loleatta Holloway's "My Way" was toughest to locate. Today, the streamers have neither Dennis Edwards: "Coolin' Out" nor Charles Jackson: "Passionate Breezes." But luxuriate in "My Way" now before the copyright overlords yank it. Note, though, you'll be missing Toop's segues between songs along with his fever-dream liners. But you can read them at Discogs here while you draw back from the uncomfortable cover art.)

My favorite lyric on Call the Doctor remains "Push to the front so I can see/It's what I thought/It's rock and roll." I love that active verb "push" because it gets at the band's hunger to become rock gods while the bored "It's what I thought" gets at their frustration over not being there already. Du calme, young'uns, your chance will come next year with Dig Me Out. My favorite lyric on Diary of a Mod Housewife remains "She makes her bed first thing in the morning/So she won't crawl back in" because, as I told Rigby in an captivating interview at the time, she was the first person ever to offer a good reason for making a bed. She responded by teaching me about strategic cleaning - tidying only the big things in a room (e.g., a bed) so that it looks like you cleaned harder than you did. 

Secrets is here for "There's No Me Without You," my vote for one of the ten most gorgeous ballads ever recorded, especially the de facto coda beginning at 2:58 in the link above, and especially especially the money shot at 3:33 with its shameless descending "no me, no me, no me." Babyface composed it but Braxton lifted it into the ether.  

Make 'Em Mokum Crazy is stoopid. House of Music is smart, scholarly even. And as a long-term agnostic re: live albums, I was stunned by how much Filthy Lucre Live overwhelmed me. It helped listening to it one afternoon with my metal friends who dug it too. It's Never Mind the Bollocks recharged with metal grandeur, a stance the band earned after twenty years as the next rung on that Elvis-Beatles significance ladder.

My singles list is more instinctual and reflects the era during which I began DJing at gay clubs and a few het events. I'm proud to say I broke a lot of these on the dancefloor. S.T.A.B. Paradise: "Fuck Me" was a one-off "Sweet Pussy Pauline" variant from two Italian producers/DJs. I spun the Hypnotic Bass Mix and my floor ate up its crotch-grabbing, lowest-common-denominator house bottom and filthy harangue on top. To paraphrase Lester Bangs on bubblegum, bitch tracks are the bottom line of rock and roll. Stretch 'n' Vern present "Maddog": "I'm Alive" was a peak record which for me meant just before closing; I had only three hours at most to build drama so I chose tracks that went for the jugular every time out. "I'm Alive" repeats a thin slice of "Boogie Wonderland" like an itch it can't scratch, then uses the original's opening horn peal as its climax. Recombinant disco at its most ecstatic. 

I wrote about Livin' Joy: "Don't Stop Movin'" a bit in the lead essay to the Village Voice's 2004 Pazz & Jop but all traces of it online have disappeared. I deemed it "a thrilling articulation that hard work and brains (even genius) may not pay off." Italian disco yet again but this one hit big in Europe. Tameko Star's vocals rush past themselves and the track speeds by at 130 BPM which casts doubt on the "Hang in there, Baby" lyrics, like maybe you can't, you won't fulfill your dreams. It adds complexity to what initially came off as a hyper, overtaxed version of Soul II Soul's "Keep on Movin'." But listening back to both just now, "Don't Stop Movin'" feels like the more inspirational number. It gets your ass off the couch whereas "Keep on Movin'" can't be bothered with its luxurious, even privileged 93 BPM. I've always much preferred "Back to Life" anyway.

Judy Torres: "No Reason To Cry (Glenn Friscia's All Night House Party Remix)" is an astonishing uprage [sic] of the freestyle classic. Like so much of the best dance music, it evokes the sound of a club with electronic noise up in the rafters and a pitiless, thumping bass drum pounding at your soles. The Torres vocal can barely compete with all the chaos even when the chorus gets a brief, echoey moment to shine. I swear I could feel air whooshing out of the club amps and blowing my hair back whenever I spun it. 

"C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)" is religious music. Even the a cappella will make you want to sit atop of pillar for 45 years. "I'd Rather Ride Around With You" hit #2 on the Billboard Country chart with no chorus! Not just a mere song, "Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)" is a natural formation. "Common People" is the best song about class (or class slumming) I know. "Fu-Gee-La" was the last time we could hear Lauryn Hill without the cultural static that became attached to her (or that she attached to herself; her tardiness is now her primary text). "Ironic" isn't. “Pony” took a mighty swig of bicarb. And “It's All Coming Back to Me Now” is the only Celine Dion track I genuinely love. It kills at karaoke where you can inject some camp into the kitsch, if necessary. 

1. DJ Shadow: Endtroducing..... (Mo Wax/FFRR)
2. Sugar and Poison (Virgin import)
3. Sleater-Kinney: Call the Doctor (Chainsaw)
4. Imperial Teen: Seasick (Slash/London)
5. Tiger: We Are Puppets (Island import)
6. Amy Rigby: Diary of a Mod Housewife (Koch)
7. Toni Braxton: Secrets (LaFace)
8. Make 'Em Mokum Crazy (Mokum)
9. Toni Tony Toné: House of Music (Mercury)
10. Sex Pistols: Filthy Lucre Live (Virgin)

1. Quad City DJs: "C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)" (Big Beat, 1996)
2. Reba McEntire: "I'd Rather Ride Around With You" (MCA, 1996)
3. Los Del Rio: "Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)" (RCA, 1996)
4. Stab Paradise: "Fuck Me" (Happy Vibes, 1996)
5. Stretch 'n' Vern present "Maddog": "I'm Alive" (Grandslam, 1996)
6. Livin' Joy: "Don't Stop Movin'" (MCA, 1996)
7. Pulp: "Common People" (Island, 1996)
8. Judy Torres: "No Reason To Cry (Glenn Friscia's All Night House Party Remix)" (QPM, 1996)
9. Fugees: "Fu-Gee-La" (Ruffhouse/Columbia, 1996)
10. Alanis Morissette: "Ironic" (Maverick/Reprise, 1996)
11.  Ginuwine: “Pony” (550 Music/Epic, 1996)
12. Celine Dion: “It's All Coming Back to Me Now” (Columbia/Epic, 1996)