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) 

Ten stereotypical gay things that leave me cold

An idea shamelessly mopped from Alfred Soto, this post shall serve as a reminder that I'm gay but, to quote a classic Jim Carrey skit from In Living Color, not to an insane degree. Soto is wrong on 9 to 5 - it is, in fact, awesome and you do, in fact, owe it allegiance. But we share such an indifference to a certain diva that we both placed her at #1 (although Soto will claim, with overstated pride, that his list is not ranked). 

1. Barbra Streisand - Great voice, bad singer. For more, meet me at Julius' for Negronis. 

2. Horror films - Grow up. For more, ditto.

3. Shopping - Crate digging held no romance for me; Napster/Apple Music couldn't be invented quickly enough. That's why I loved record conventions. Unlike dusty stores helmed by scowling proprietors, conventions always had a dude on a microphone asking the entire room if anyone had a copy of that damn second Insect Trust album. But I rarely shop for anything. I know what I want and I know how to get it. From entrance to cashier, it takes me about ten minutes to get groceries (five minutes at Trader Joe's). All other staples come to me via what often seems like osmosis aka a husband who loves shopping. New shoes and toothbrushes appear as reliably as new Jandek product. 

4. Home design - I have no interior decorating gene. Homes are shells for cats and media. But I recognize the benefit to our psyches of an uncluttered living space. 

5. Fashion - I do have an interest in fashion. I just don't know how to dress myself for anything but extreme comfort and maximum sweat eradication. If I had my druthers, I'd wear a muumuu every day.  

6. Incorrect camp classics - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (too arch), Valley of the Dolls (too dull), Death Becomes Her (too half-baked), Auntie Mame (too stilted), etc. 

7.  Coquettishness - Or foppishness perhaps. A playful, non-committal mode that's annoying enough in critics who cannot take a stance or change their stance faster than they change bed sheets. But it has material ramifications when you're trying to make plans. Plane tickets and hotel rooms have been purchased, subways have been taken, and you still cannot commit to a time to meet? Get your shit together. 

8. Disney - Most of the films/series are Not For Me Dot Com. And Fire Island >>> Disney World. Cheaper too.

9. Heartstopper - But really, lots and lots of gay films/series. 

10. Not realizing Madonna's best album is You Can Dance (and that includes Confessions II).  

Ranking 98th Oscars Best Picture Nominees

Here is how I rank the Best Pictures nominees of the 98th Oscars in reverse order:

F1 (Joseph Kosinski) - Graded leniently [sic] because this took Avatar: Fire and Ash's place as the one popcorn movie amongst the nominees, thus freeing me from having to sit through that 197-minute beast or even having to think about it until this very moment (whoa! $1.484 billion at the box office - who knew?). F1 is Top Gun on the race track and every blockbuster beat locks in with such dreary clockwork that it feels like you're watching an architecture diagram for 155 hellassdamn minutes. Its sole ambiguity is whether or not Brad Pitt's abs are AI. C-minus

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Poor Things suggested Lanthimos was ready to join the human race. But I skipped Kinds of Kindness because I had to wash my hair. So I can't claim that his remake of Save the Green Planet! (Jang Joon-hwan, 2003) continues a regression. But it reveals him up to his old nihilistic tricks again. Purely as a thriller, this is aces; my heart was racing throughout. But I could see the twist at the end coming the moment the conspiracy was explained and I'm not bragging. What attracted Lanthimos to Save the Green Planet! was the opportunity to suggest that, hey, some incel conspiracy theorists may actually be right! And boy, aren't I a moron for toiling away at an overdue article that's kept me from blogging while chasing after reputable scholarly sources and actually writing an essay with my real intelligence. I'm such a silly billy. In fact, we're all such silly billies because all humanity gets theirs in the end which one must assume included other incels as well. As usually, where this all leaves Lanthimos is known only to the therapist one assumes he feels he doesn't need. C

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao) - I'm not a gambling man. But I think this will take the statue only because it's the most Oscary, putting the mid in middlebrow. A forgettable evening at The Theatre. If it gets some teenager into Shakespeare as Amadeus did for me and Mozart, then I applaud it. B-minus

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) - A bit too stilted and, well, Oscary for my taste. But a basically honest glimpse into the turmoil filmmakers can inflect on their families. B+

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley) - I'm not sure Denis Johnson's work makes for compelling film adaptations, e.g., Stars at Noon. This Netflix production of his 2011 novella throws in some Malickian nature mysticism but leans a bit too heavily on a "we're all connected" vibe that makes Oscar voters' hearts flutter. B+

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - Reviewed here. B+

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) - Loved it. But it's a de facto remake of Uncut Gems. And Good Time. Maybe even Daddy Longlegs. It's time to branch out. Then again, Benny did just that with The Smashing Machine and came up with about a B+. Apparently, the over-amped intensity of their films is Josh's spiritual burden to bear. My advice is that their next collaboration should be a musical. A-minus

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro) - I was stunned by how much I loved this, especially given all the pooh-poohing it received. Like the novel, it starts off rickety. But as soon as The Creature (a superb Jacob Elordi) takes over the narrative, I was enormously moved by his more-human-than-human plight. A-minus

Sinners (Ryan Coogler) - Come see me deliver my talk “The Real and the Electric Sh*t: Sinners (2025), Recordings, and Inscriptions of History” at SCMS in Chicago on March 28th! A-minus

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) - Not quite up to the polyphonic density of Licorice Pizza. But a far more subtle film than naysayers are allowing. As for the charge that Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) lacks narrative agency and has been arranged for the white gaze, I can't help but think of the last line of Rita Dove's poem "Canary": If you can’t be free, be a mystery (also the title of Farah Jasmine Griffin's 2001 book on Billie Holiday). For more, check out Kristen Warner's Threads thread here. A

New York Film Festival - Fourth Dispatch

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - Wagner Moura gives an electric performance as a dissident in 1977 Brazil who finds precarious protection amongst a shelter for political refugees before attempting to flee the country. Those who fell for the Oscar-validated I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024) should enjoy this adept thriller skewering the Brazilian military dictatorship of the era. But at 158 minutes, it overstays its welcome. And it betrays a straightforward conventionality unworthy of the dislocations of Filho's Bacurau (2019), one of the finest films of our rapidly aging century. 

Grade: B+ 

Duse (Pietro Marcello) - I first heard of the legendary actress and Sarah Bernhardt rival Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) from All About Eve in Bill's rant to Eve about what The Theatre means (although my preteen, pre-internet mind heard it as "Eleanor Adusa"). Then for forty years, I never gave her another thought until this most welcome biopic. Marcello picks up Duse's story in the last act of her life, past previous glories and desperate to find her way back to audiences scarred by WWI. She even breaks bread with Mussolini over a doomed plan to recreate Athens in Italy. It's the kind of narrative that would have worked well with the anachronisms Marcello sprinkled throughout Martin Eden (2019), another film about a fiery artistic temperament. Like The Secret Agent, unfortunately, there's a safe, Oscary feel to the project that makes one long for the lopsided structure of Martin Eden or the proto-art-film longueurs of the Italian diva film of the 1910s. That it all still works is testament to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's blistering performance as Duse. Out of historical sync, in tears 90% of the time, Tedeschi's Duse exhausts herself trying to find a time and a place for her art. A full century after her death, she feels right at home in 2025. 

Grade: A-minus

New York Film Festival - Third Dispatch

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin) - I'll be blunt. I admired Jenkin's Enys Men (2022) as a perplexing mood piece. But I opted for his latest feature solely because I thought it would allow me to be in the same room with the co-star of the film, George MacKay, the architecturally gorgeous actor who appeared in two of my favorite recent films, The End (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2024) and best-film-of-the-decade-candidate The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 2023). Alas, the beauty was not in attendance. Still, I wasn't aware of his absence until after the screening so I received Jenkin's latest Cornwall puzzle with an open mind if not heart. 

McKay plays Nick, a fisherman from a present-day, rundown Cornish village who goes off with drifter Liam (Callum Turner, perhaps even more gorgeous but lacking the angularity that makes MacKay's face so delectable for filmic compositions) on the titular watercraft for a job. They return to find they are back in 1993 when the village was thriving and each subsequent run on the Rose of Nevada tosses them back and forth between the two eras. Jenkin provides narrative tension through the men's divergent reactions to the time jumps. While Nick is understandably baffled and searches for signs of his wife and family, Liam plays the sexual field and may be engaging in some conceptual incest back in the present. Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound found it "a tale of the fantastic, but rooted in the bleak political realities of 2020s Britain." I found it suffered from the drawbacks of the subgenre - diverting while it plays but easily placed on the shelf with other puzzles and forgotten once it's over, despite its gorgeous 16mm photography and reportedly post-sync sound that make the film look like a lost 1970s folk-horror screamer.

Grade: B+

 

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe) - Since Laxe's latest shifts into shock mode about halfway through, it's best to keep this short. A father, Luis (Sergi López), with his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), descends upon a rave in a Moroccan desert in search of his daughter who has gone missing. A military unit breaks up the rave and lines up a caravan to be arrested. But along with two groups of revelers, Luis speeds away in his van. They're all off to another rave where Luis hopes he might find his daughter. After changing tires, bartering with locals for gas, and avoiding another military convoy, things take a turn for the even worse. 

Sirāt enjoyed a June release in Spain, doing robust box office figures for an art film. It's also divided audiences pretty starkly; check the array of takes on Letterboxd. I didn't know what to do with it once I stepped off the ride. Since the ensemble are all European, Laxe may be suggesting something about colonialism or locating pleasure zones in the midst of regional conflicts. But where Rose of Nevada is a puzzle, Sirāt is a roller coaster. Extremely gripping, even harrowing, it raises your blood pressure but to what end? Wrong answers only.

Grade: B+

New York Film Festival 2025 - Second Dispatch

Resurrection (Bi Gan) 

The marketing and wide release in China of Gan's previous feature, Long Day's Journey into Night (2018), hoodwinked the moviegoing masses into thinking it was a romantic comedy instead of a drifty art film. Box office figures plummeted after its New Year's Eve opening night and the hashtag "can't understand Long Day's Journey Into Night" started to trend. We'll have to wait to discover if Resurrection (the Chinese title is different and translates as Savage Age) will meet the same fate when it hits general release. I myself felt snookered by the NYFF blurb promising a film "unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles and genres." As with Long Day's Journey into Night and 2015's Kaili Blues, it dazzles, to be sure. Blessed with a hefty budget, a leisurely production schedule (began in 2023, a workprint barely made it to Cannes this May), and superstars Jackson Yee and Shu Qi, Gan indulges in a feckless extravagance. He takes on the entire history of cinema with Caligari and Nosferatu nods, time jumps, and a climax comprised of yet another of his characteristic long-takes, this one lasting 30 minutes. All of this takes place in some sort of time-space continuum in which, as we are told in periodic titles, dreams either no longer exist or are somehow rendered illegal. A band of rebels called Fantasmers still dream, though, including one Frankenstein monster type (Yee) equipped with a film projector in his torso during an early silent sequence. He then reappears in various guises throughout that array of styles and genres.

As you might suspect, none of the above adds up to much in narrative terms. It sustains on mood and visuals alone. I just wish I got the buffet promised. Most of the vignettes traffic in noirish crime and grit which we have a surfeit of on television and in cinema (and in criticism and in academia and...) so lovers of musicals, melodramas, pornography, and westerns are left to f(l)ap in the wind. I also wish I knew what Gan was trying to tell us about the History of Cinema assuming he had any clear viewpoint throughout the two years it took to bring the film to life. And I rue the forthcoming exegeses that will take the framing device too seriously and "explain" how each historical and generic register makes perfect narrative sense, as if that were the heroic goal of all cinema.

Grade: B

New York Film Festival 2025 - First Dispatch

I don't feel comfortable pronouncing on the 63rd New York Film Festival or what it said about the State of Cinema overall given that I saw only nine of the over 100 titles programmed. All I will attest to is my inability to catch a single masterpiece for the second year in a row, a function of time, money, and sticking to directors/subjects I like best. Perhaps next year I'll be reckless enough to choose something outside of my wheelhouse. Or else stick with experimental films, the jazz of cinema - always there, taken for granted, and capable of dazzling you with its risky changes when you deign to check in again. 

Starting with the most infuriating film, I experienced unwelcome déjà vu with one of Richard Linklater's two biopics screening at the festival - Blue Moon, about the Great American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart (Nouvelle Vague, the other, concerns Godard and the making of Breathless). Taking place almost entirely on March 31, 1943, the evening Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! opened, Blue Moon finds Hart (Ethan Hawke) leaving the show at intermission and hieing to Sardi's where he proceeds to get soused and rue the success of his former writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). For the first half of the film, he holds court in the near-empty bar, swirling vapors of wit and sass around bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and E. B. White (Patrick Kennedy) writing unobtrusively on the sidelines. Then a triumphant Rodgers and his entourage arrive and Hart puts on a pathetic display trying to rekindle the songwriting spark with Rodgers and introducing him to an ingenue with whom he is inexplicably obsessed, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), an apparently real person who remains a nullity by film's end. 

Writer Robert Kaplow based his screenplay on letters Hart and Weiland wrote one another instead of the most recent biography, Gary Marmorstein's A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart (Simon & Schuster, 2012) which imparts a certain documentary value to the undertaking. We ought to embrace such deep dives into the relationships between women and bisexual men (or however we are to ascribe the morass made of sexual identity by the era). But no film is an island and Blue Moon joins De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler, 2004) and the disastrous Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023) as yet another nervous attempt to center the heterosexual relationships of queer composers (Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein in the latter two instances). One need only peep the panicky poster art of each assuring Mr. and Mrs. Popcorn that no deviant sexuality will cross their screens today. Will we not get biopics of Sondheim (who shows up here at 13 years old in a cameo played by Cillian Sullivan), Ebb and Kander, or Ned Rorem because they never married women?

In partial compensation, the performances are uniformly sparkling, especially Hawke who should be a shoo-in for an Oscar nod. And Linklater ventilates his recreation of Sardi's, shot in Dublin, by letting the camera rummage through the bathroom, climb atop the staircase, sneak into the cloak room. The latter location, though, is the setting for a dreary tête-à-tête in which Weiland recounts a recent sexual exploit to Hart with nary a suggestion of how such spaces informed the creation of Hart anti-valentines like "It Never Entered My Mind, "Glad To Be Unhappy," and "Blue Moon" itself. You're better off watching the greatest film of the century instead. 

Grade: B-minus