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) 

Big Star: Radio City (Ardent, 1974)

A shorthand for determining which of the three terrific Big Star albums is the masterpiece is to recognize Big Star as a semipopular band. Semipopular is Robert Christgau's coinage "for music that is popular in form but not fact--self-consciously arty music that plays off popular or formerly popular usages but isn't (sup posedly) designed to sell." So 1972's #1 Record errs too much on the popular side of the equation while 1978's Third/Sister Lovers gets lost in the semi wild. Side one of #1 Record laid down the foundations for power pop, a classic on those terms alone. But side two slips into the genericism that afflicts any strain of pop, power most definitely. And Third/Sister Lovers had such a tortured release history that there's no definitive edition of its sere, clanky psychodramas (although Complete Third reportedly collects every drib and drab recorded during the original 1974 sessions).

Yeah no, Radio City is Big Star's masterpiece, one of the ten greatest albums of the 1970s (do I hear five? Sold!). And yet it's difficult to recommend to non-music critics/geeks, especially any potential customers for the advertised pop. Music lovers of a certain age will notice that the very first sound on the album was replicated by Kenny Loggins for the central guitar riff of "Footloose." But opening track "O My Soul" is "Footloose" fed through a wood chipper. Like many of the songs on Radio City, it lurches forward like a gawky teenager trudging through snowbanks on the way to high school. Sometimes this kid manages a sprint. But usually, he loses his footing. One of the guitar lines sounds like a refugee from a Burroughsian cut-up experiment. Another offers some unfunky chicken scratching. A Mellotron pipes in now and then with extraneous (drunken?) commentary. And the entire things lumbers on for nearly six minutes. Heck a way to kick off a "pop" record.

And it doesn't get much easier from there, at least upon initial impact. Contrary to Chuck Berry's dictum on rock and roll music, the band keeps losing the backbeat which makes Radio City a no go for dancing. Its greatest track (see below) moves so slowly that it's difficult to use a BPM counter glacially enough to figure out just how slowly (84 or 42 BPM depending on how you're counting; I say the latter in terms of feel). However assiduously each song was constructed, most of the hooks and sound effects announce themselves as afterthoughts. Radio City is a temple of attention deficit disorder. Even at its most incandescently chartbound ("September Gurls" went to #1 in the minds of actual-pop agnostics the world over), every number is trying to score some Ritalin. To balance off the lengthy opening track with appropriate perversity, the album ends with two fragments totaling barely three minutes (presaged by #1 Record's last cut, the 59-second moan "ST 100/6").

Nonetheless, Radio City remains one of the most welcoming albums ever recorded, crazy porous and with myriad entry points. Resident pop theorist-practitioner Alex Chilton sounded more like a teen here than when he was an actual teen idol fronting the Box Tops with such hits as "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" in the late 1960s. His put-upon whine helps the zany structures go down more easily. Once acclimated, you hear not forbidding avant-gardery but sweet confusion, a confusion that persists for so many of us long past adolescence as indeed it did for Chilton who never got the glory (i.e., money) he deserved. I hear ache and a willingness to connect in its every intricate detail and suspect that eternity is not long enough to extinguish its ability to garner obsessive listening. 

Grade: A+

This is how I'd rank the songs in order of preference. 1 and 2 have long been etched in stone. 9 - 12 too. Any song in between could fluctuate, e.g., I just bumped up "You Get What You Deserve" two notches. 

1. What's Going Ahn
2. September Gurls
3. Life Is White
4. You Get What You Deserve
5. O My Soul
6. Morpha Too
7. Daisy Glaze
8. Back Of A Car
9. Way Out West
10. I'm In Love With A Girl
11. Mod Lang
12. She's A Mover 

Exile on Main St. turns 50!

The very first thing I ever did on the internet was search for lyrics - Wu-Tang Clan, to be precise, and like damn near every such adventure to this day, it did little to deepen my understanding or appreciation of the music. So despite Exile on Main St. occupying various positions (4-6) on my all-time top-10 list over the last thirty-plus years, I've never bothered to google the lyrics. In honor of its fiftieth birthday today, however, I played the Stones' best album while following along on Genius to figure out what one Michael Philip Jagger was on about. Granted, as a largely crowdsourced site with some of the most risible annotations since Cliff Notes, Genius is hardly infallible. And given that the band has never performed a good third of these songs live, it's likely that the only people on the planet who know the lyrics for certain are Rolling Stones Inc.'s lawyers. But reading them at last did indeed justify my love. 

One measure of how accessing lyrics has never been central to the Exile experience lies in the idiotic grin I sported when greeting its first two tracks. Precise wording wasn't going to make "Rocks Off" rock any harder and, as the punkiest blurt in their discography, "Rip This Joint" was always the most immediate track on this notoriously difficult-to-navigate album. But even after that one-two knockout, I still wasn't getting much from the words. The Slim Harpo cover "Shake Your Hips" represents Exile's dynamic-free strain. Along with "Turd on the Run," "I Just Want to See His Face," and, right, "Rip This Joint," "Shake Your Hips" is about maintenance not jouissance (e.g., the "what a beautiful buzz" money shot of "Loving Cup"), of a piece with such later milestones of buzz-brained constancy as The Feelies' Crazy Rhythms, Parquet Courts' "Sunbathing Animal," and acres of narcotic disco. "Casino Boogie" exemplifies the other strain, the one in which potential filler is rescued by the toughest song structures of their career - get-up-and-go codas, verses that slam out of druggy middle eights, Bobby Keys and Jim Price's horns reinforcing rhythmic shapes. Both strains instantiate the horizontal pull through the diseased thicket of the mix, combining to render the album's theme easy to hear rather than read - I get knocked down but I get up again, which is why Greil Marcus is only half correct when he opines in Mystery Train that “[t]he whole record was a breakdown, one long night of fear.” 

But it wasn't until side two that the lyrics began to amplify the theme: the "Sweet Black Angel" who keeps on pushing, the "just as long as the guitar plays" refrain of "Torn and Frayed," even taking just one drink from that "Loving Cup" before falling down drunk. He hasn't fallen down yet, though, available to shed his grace on thee for the penultimate track. As Lester Bangs put it, "Shine a Light" is “a visit to one or every one of the friends you finally know is not gonna pull through.” This is the one song where there may be no coming back from a breakdown. You're covered with so many flies they can't be brushed off. He talks about about angels, even thinks he can hear one sigh for you which might be a lie. But the gesture brings you solace. And hey - if you do pull through, there's always "Soul Survivor," Exile's greatest song which, as the album's last track, it must be. The woozy guitars introduce the song as if waking from a coma. But the music gets up once again. And it keeps getting up. After the last “gonna be the death of me,” the band stops for a moment and launches back into the track for the most kinetic moment in recording history, rocking out until the song fades out, as it must. You're never gonna keep 'em down. 

This is music of gargantuan charity. With the lyrics splayed out before me, I now hear Exile as a quite pop-like achievement - earnest, maybe even a bit corny, adjectives one rarely associates with the Stones. It epitomizes a line of Simon Frith's from Sound Effects I never tire of quoting: “The pop song banalities people pick up on are, in general, not illuminating but encouraging” (38). For Bangs' generation, a generation more than any other who expected their I's to resonate as we's, Exile encouraged the 1960s counterculture to keep on keepin' on in the midst of Nixon, Vietnam, and the inexorable force of capital. But it need not be wedded to that particular moment. In his lifelong crusade against solipsism, Bangs heard Exile as “an intense yearning to merge,” a yearning that will exist long after the early-1970s bummer party, as my fiend Whit Strub calls it, has been swept into the dustbins of history.

Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. (Rolling Stones, 1972): A+

Bangs' quotes taken from “I Only Get My Rocks Off When I’m Dreaming: So You Say You Missed the Stones Too? Cheer Up, We’re a Majority!” written for the January 1973 issue of Creem but anthologized in Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste.