Tiny Mix Tapes

RIP: David Riley, bassist for Big Black

Shane Mack — Wed, 25 Dec 2019 17:17:49 +0000

David Riley, the bassist for Big Black, has died at 59. From David Riley’s partner, Rachel Brown:

Sad news my Chicago friends. My dearest friend and longtime housemate Dave Riley lost his short battle with cancer this morning. In late August he developed a persistent sore throat which wasn’t responsive to antibiotics. Initially dismissed as acid-reflux, further testing showed that he had a large squamous cell carcinoma in his throat which had already spread to several places in his lungs. Since treatment wouldn’t have made any difference, Dave chose to come home to die. His doctor predicted that he had about 6 months left, but sadly the cancer was so aggressive that he didn’t even make it an additional two. […]

Macintosh Plus announces new album, shares 12-minute preview called "Sick & Panic (First Mix)"

Mr P — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 21:55:21 +0000

That’s right. Vektroid just announced a new Macintosh Plus album. And, thankfully, the first preview of it sounds nothing like Floral Shoppe (which, by the way, made it to #6 on our decade list).

It's not what you think.

— Vektroid (@Vektroid) December 20, 2019

The 12-minute glimpse, titled “Sick & Panic (First Mix),” is being released on 12-inch picture disc vinyl. Pre-order it here, and go here for more Macintosh Plus merch.

Meanwhile, Vektroid also just announced limited-edition cassette versions of Sleepline and Sacred Tapestry, which were issued on vinyl last year via Aguire.

Buy all of it.

OK BYE.

Sick & Panic by Macintosh Plus

Feature: 2010s: Favorite 100 Music Releases of the Decade

TMT Staff — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 18:48:57 +0000

“I can hear everything. It’s everything time.”

Here we are, floundering at the tail end of the decade, grasping to make sense of the last 10 years, when that ancient quote (actually from Gang Gang Dance in 2011) had already provided this decade’s temporal framework for what feeling and existing might look like this decade. This quote, this foundational assumption, presaged this decade’s perceptual and material eruptions of sounds, of images, of ideas, of bodies; reducing our grandiose theories into beautiful yet fairytale simulations of purity and vanity — into rain and glitter. It was a statement, but also a warning, heralding — perhaps even willing into existence — what was to come: a decade both explosive and incomprehensible. It was everything time, and we could barely handle it.

Time, this decade, figured as much into our writing as words themselves — even when we didn’t realize it — and the same could be said of its music. Many of our early favorites this decade, from James Ferraro to Ariel Pink to Oneohtrix Point Never, would effectively swap traditional notions of musicality and engage directly with phenomena like nostalgia, cultural memory, and the corresponding junk left behind. No longer just a simple, comprehensible repository for things that happened, the past became part of the exclusive present, because distinguishing between the two increasingly felt like what time eventually does to the differences between 3rd and 4th grade, or what increased distance does to rocks and pebbles. Our past was not just aestheticized for apolitical nostalgia, ironic indulgence, or mindless repetition; the past was restaged, reperceptualized as a disruption in our listening, calling into question our entrenched, vestigial expectations concerning “originality” and taste. The results were sensually provocative and perverse, sometimes even confoundingly rote, but it infected the entire decade, offering dynamic, multilayered ways to not only subvert our temporal orientation, but also explore how affect itself could challenge our assumptions about resistance under capitalism.

And indeed, most of our favorites this decade didn’t hinge on signaling their politics. (Didn’t need them to either. We have plenty of ways to know when we’re getting fucked.) From vaporwave’s radical appropriations and Kanye’s destructive provocations to PC Music’s wild HD pop experimentation and Dean Blunt’s drifting, ephemeral gestures, this decade’s most controversial musics — at least the ones we cared most about here — were not marked by political upheaval or rupture, but by ambivalence and ambiguity, even uncertainty. This decade, it was OK to not know whether you “liked” something or understood what was “meant.” It was OK to not be able to envision a future because our depictions were always-already anachronistically displaced. It was OK to not force yourself to choose between celebration or rejection, because our art’s value was in perpetual oscillation. Music, here, was quickly dematerialized, reterritorialized, and re-coded for algorithmic consumption (18+), collapsing and folding into itself (E+E), stumbling into bizarre juxtapositions (DJ Rashad), calling attention to the medium itself (D/P/I), and vomiting brilliant recombinations (Klein). This restaging of aesthetics happened almost instantaneously (Lil B), sometimes accidentally (Farrah Abraham), and oftentimes originating from and rapidly reproduced by quick-witted, meme-savvy teens who had no reason or incentive to explain themselves.

So, yes, sometimes it was about having faith in the creative output. But other times, it was about having faith in selves. In this decade, it was okay to cry, to embrace our E•MO•TIONS, to vamp on our mercuriality. In this decade, death was real. Representational and symbolic exchange is always subservient to material transformations, and some of our favorites offered quite devastating ways to mourn, from Carrie & Lowell to A Crow Looked At Me. Still others deepened how we relate to our bodies, uncovering new materialities and new compositions (Elysia Crampton), exploding our “normative biopolitical imperatives” (SOPHIE) and “demanding transmutation” (Arca). We witnessed this shift in many of the artists on this list, and some of us underwent (and are currently undergoing) this shift ourselves. And yet we were constantly reminded that our bodies, while forever expressive, were also forever exploited. They were trapped in “corrupted relations that exist between postcodes” (Babyfather), hopelessly tethered to the “elaborate wretchedness of humankind” (Scott Walker). Who-we-are was in conflict with what-we-do, and the ambient technologies that enabled much of our communication this decade provided exactly the kinds of platforms that would encourage not civic participation, but data generation. Before we knew it, “taking a chance” meant adding a new brand of deodorant to our shopping cart. Welcome to the future?

If the correlate of a past that’s endlessly reproduced is a future that never manifests, perhaps imagined futures simply lost their critical role and had become junk themselves. Perhaps they were simply cultural artifacts rendered meaningless through a technological materialism that offered both sensory replenishment and heightened temporal awareness. The future, just as with the past, was not immune to the aestheticization process, as shown in our decade’s obsession with futurity. But sometimes all it is is scope — rocks and pebbles. Because if we zoom out — from the days to the months to the years, to the decade and beyond — what we find in the chase for that elusive wholeness, that unifying element, is that the thing that gets you to the thing has always been another thing. Music, for us, was one of those things. We often framed it with theory, but we felt it as desire, and it dripped from our ears, like nectar. A sweet, sticky, golden everything. While music articulated the complexity of our feelings this decade, changing us from the inside until our insides were inside-out, it also reminded us of a simple yet paralyzing tragedy of personhood: the moment we’re always waiting for is likely a replica of one we’ve already felt — and may never feel again.

This is what time does. It eventually renders even our most obsessive desires moot, as we move from crisis (financial) to crisis (ecological) to crisis (individual). Everything is fleeting. But unlike the first decade of TMT’s existence, in which it was often marked by privileged discernment, “intellectual” curation, and faith in the noisy subversion of capital (look how that turned out), this decade we strove for disunity, telepresence, and multiple perspectives: how our lack of consensus made room for possibility; how we embraced trends and transition in a time of sensory abundance; how fluid identities could emerge through syncretism, hybridization, and bottom-up subacculturation; how we practiced embodiment to tell cute stories about affect, movement, and sensation; how nuance offered passageways to our own materiality; how our music provided counternarratives and problematized notions of truth; how noise was no longer our noise (but was actually our noise all along); how we found in our music semblances of healing and palliative care in response to some exhausting, though not unprecedented, years.

We all know how those later years felt at home, under the covers, anxiety draining our souls, but those very same years felt different while clicking around on the web. Time plays differently here. In virtual worlds like Second Life, time has no immediate aesthetic effect: nothing crumbles, nothing washes away with time. Even if all of the avatars staged a mass exodus, it remains preserved forever in its eerily pristine, uncanny state until intervention, whether it’s a code update, through technological obsolescence, or actual physical disconnection of its servers. In our world, here at Tiny Mix Tapes, time shows itself in our digital ruins, manifesting as technological breakdown and incompatibility: broken images and incorrectly rendered text, conflicting coding languages and unreadable characters, dilapidated streaming embeds and exhausted hyperlinks pointing to a musician who may or may not have ever existed. It’s long since happened to early versions of the site, going back to our Geocities days in 2001, and we can already witness this process happening even in the posts we published this decade. The digital deterioration is real, and it’s both haunting and beautiful: the former because our identities become threatened by a past that eats away at itself, and the latter because the deterioration will eventually create space (physical, emotional, virtual) for something new and different.

This is something to celebrate. This is what we want (even if it’s fake). TMT wasn’t made to be projected into the future, nor was it made to be a forever lasting anything anywhere. That’s what plastic’s for, and there is beauty in letting go. Who knows what the next decade will bring, but as this one comes to its anticlimactic close, bringing us no closer to truly understanding our world but perhaps closer to accepting and embracing our eventual deterioration, the truth is, we don’t even have to think about music anymore. Words are just words that you soon forget (Laurel Halo), and while we all do stuff, sometimes stuff does itself (PC Music). If our most prolific artists (Lil B, Dean Blunt) taught us anything about excess in a supposed age of specialized, niche-driven taste — a marketer’s paradise, by the way — it was that we’re all really just amateurs, winging it. We love theory and criticism, but they alone won’t save us from anything. All we can say with confidence is that, past the cultural explosion and incoherency of this decade, through the blurriness of everything-time and its spectral hold on how we perceive the world, we here at TMT feel overwhelming gratitude: for the time we spent together as a scrappy yet passionate family of “writers,” and for the time we spent sharing with you, “the readers.”

Sincere thanks to all of you out there. We are eternally grateful that anyone anywhere was willing to join us in this experiment in criticism and music writing. <3 –Mr P

To close out the year, we are sharing our Favorite 100 Music Releases of the Decade. It was compiled from individual lists by current writers and some former, with minimal intervention. To prevent every single Dean Blunt release from occupying a spot on the list, we imposed a limit of two releases per moniker. So, yes, this means that many favorites are missing (find some of those here, here, and here). We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

100

John Maus

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

[Ribbon/Upset The Rhythm; 2011]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Find a free text-to-speech. Copy this blurb into it, pick the homie “Charles” (he has the best voice), and press play. Now, close your eyes and listen. Envision a Lazy River that would top a Travel Channel “best of.” Now immerse yourself in it. The water temperature sits in that sweet spot between “little more than lukewarm” and “first step into the shower” — the Maus Zone. Can you feel it? Let the river flow through you in its unique, tantalizing ways — it has an innate fluidity that could both kickstart a party with friends and cause you to cry driving alone on the Florida Turnpike. Now imagine nearby innertubes playing analogue synth and spoken word tapes of Alain Badiou until slightly deflated, and then listen for a piercing guitar lick here and a synth wail there. This is the music of the Maus Zone, and at the turn of the millennium, this completely ecstatic, life-affirming sound expressed itself as We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. It was, and still is, worth every moment. –Monet Maker

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Grafts

[Boomkat Editions; 2017]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

In recorded music, there is always an end. We’re keenly aware of it, and that expectation of a conclusion, of a piece ending, is integral to how we experience music. But on Grafts, Kara Lis-Coverdale used some type of magic that we couldn’t quite explain. Every time we listened, it was as if we had entered a timeless vacuum. There was nothing around, except a moving, glittering display of heavenly lights splayed all around, lapsing over each other like waves. It was like the packaging was gone. Rather than feeling anxiety over its impending end, we felt in control, as if we could stay in “2c,” “Flutter,” and “Moments In Love” forever. But, despite the poignancy of Coverdale’s spell, the music didn’t go on forever. We could always go back and stare at the lights as long as we were around — and we often did — but there was indeed an end. There is always an end. –Sam Tornow

Pusha T

DAYTONA

[G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam; 2018]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Pusha T’s DAYTONA served a perfect course and deserved a star from the tire people. What was not to like? Pusha’s calligraphic, unmistakable flow; a chef with a savory cut in rare supply. Kanye’s taste in suppliers, his attention to detail on every beat. The love for the material, the proportions; it all mattered. Every bite worth taking. Each piece a scrap of soul worth more than its weight in gold. A life told in layers — the tarnish, the beauty, the new material between. Hold still and sense his history. Organic poetry. Hot sauce and tennis balls. Life baked in. Ye rang out. Reduced, condensed. Perfect timing, perfect amount of heat. Stopping just short of too spicy. Haute suite. Look, there’s obviously still gonna be some things that only T gets to know. But it went deeper than that. You can’t teach it, you know? DAYTONA, this little thing. Can I have some more? –Adam Devlin

Deerhunter

Halcyon Digest

[4AD; 2010]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Here we are, nearly a decade down the road from the release of Halcyon Digest, and the album has littered my personal memory databank with traces of its 11 marvelous tracks. Miming along to the saxophone parts on “Coronado” while standing on the lawn of my decrepit college house. Soaking in the isolated stillness of “Sailing” to accompany feeling like my heart had been punted across New England. Closing my eyes in Webster Hall and being lifted to the sky as “Helicopter” folded over itself and exploded in inevitable breathtaking fashion. Honestly, it feels quite fitting, as Halcyon Digest was itself an album of memories, hazy recollections of past lives both real and imaginary. It was pictures and words and designs, cut out of old magazines and rearranged into something new. Cover versions of Golden Oldies that never existed. It was hearing “Desire Lines” for the 60th-odd time and wondering yet again if one day it would be physically possible for humans to live inside of a song. Something fleeting and ephemeral etching itself into permanence. –Jeremy Klein

Bill Orcutt

A History of Every One

[Editions Mego; 2013]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Guitarists will sometimes warm up by hitting their strings a little before starting to play. For composer and interpreter extraordinaire Bill Orcutt, sometimes hitting is playing. Indeed, there were sequences on A History of Every One that were downright barbaric on first listen. As soon as Orcutt’s treatment of the trade union morale-booster “Solidarity Forever” started, it was obvious that we were in for a one-of-a-kind slab of magic. But with traditional spirituals standing next to festive fretworkouts and minstrel and work songs marching alongside two Oscar-winning Disney ditties, there was a different sort of fairytale glitter going on here. A History of Every One was still a lovely piece of lunacy, however, and despite many moments of extreme strain and disorder, the album had a sweeping, strange beauty that has been making our heads swim since its release in 2013. Far from being a time capsule, the album pointed a way forward in free expression, and everything worked. Containing a dozen tours de force, each one indistinguishable from its most common — or most deformed — version, A History of Every One was a let-it-bleed collision of energies that is still one of the more “alive” guitar experiments you’ll likely ever hear. –David Nadelle

Beyoncé

Lemonade

[Parkwood/Columbia; 2016]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Where Beyoncé established Beyoncé as a brand, Lemonade positioned said brand as a mode of performance art. Knowles-Carter had already turned her releases into unannounced audio-visual events with her self-titled 2013 album, but with Lemonade, the pop icon’s not-so-private personal life and changing relationship to American and global media consumption seemed inextricable from the project’s genesis, distribution, and reception. Released exclusively on the artist’s own streaming service, accompanied by a 65-minute film on HBO, the album’s tracks played like 2016’s feminist response to Here, My Dear, preceding the #MeToo movement just as Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance of “Formation” (the album’s lead single turned bonus cut) preceded the NFL’s identity crisis, the latest terms of which are now being negotiated by none other than Beyoncé’s husband. Considered alongside 2017’s 4:44 and 2018’s Everything Is Love, the album also kicked off a trilogy of brilliantly transcendent, if also tellingly misunderstood, sociopolitical treatises from the Knowles-Carter family. Perhaps most importantly, though, Lemonade was the decade’s most ambitious break-up-to-make-up album, one for life partners to argue over and embrace together like no other. Who knows? If C Monster saw it premiere with Savannah, maybe it’d be his favorite Beyoncé album, too. –Samuel Diamond

New Slaves

[The Social Registry; 2010]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

New Slaves hit me hard in the chest and never left. Every song was a law, a sculpture of raw energy, a spectacular commodity. Twisted and beautiful, wrought from astounding performances and inspired studio magic, New Slaves is still revelatory 10 years on. It was in 2010, at my (and Jonathan Dean’s) beloved campus station, when I first heard “Gentleman Amateur,” which instantly hooked me on the group. And it was also in 2010 when Tiny Mix Tapes ruptured itself and gave New Slaves the #1 slot in its year-end rankings, which is also the moment I realized that this site knew what the fuck was up and I needed to write here. But 10 years on, I still can’t adequately explain how amazing this record is. I can barely even explain how it sounds. “Unique chamber music compositions using rock instruments, microtonalities, and extreme textures that never underestimate their audience or compromise on execution.” “Noisy, raw, gorgeous, difficult, caustic, cleansing, numbing; a slowly exploding beautiful art bomb.” Something along those lines, but better. I would want to assign a specific turn of phrase to it, to coin something unique to describe this stunning record’s idiosyncratic noise vision. But the best music is always hard to explain. That’s what makes it so: the impossible things it conveys that can’t be captured in language. The things it fantasizes aloud, the new fantasies it creates in turn. There’s proof of something here, something we haven’t figured out yet, buried deep in the chaos. Some new model for living, adapting, and surviving. With it comes this strange optimism, that the harsh rigors of the reality you find yourself in can be worn, like armor — the proud decorum of a future corpse. –Adam Devlin

Bill Callahan

Apocalypse

[Drag City; 2011]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

I share a space with Bill Callahan. It’s not a small space, it’s a city. We see the same sights over and over again — violet-drenched sunsets, eternal grids of highway chrome, the crystalline owl peering above the Austin skyline. The same grocery stores and gas stations and the DMV. Existing day-to-day in a space like this, the wondrous and the mundane begin melting together, smearing like the mountain landscape of Apocalypse’s cover. Bill Callahan’s masterpiece resides within that smear, coming across as both grounded and unknowable. Our home country, which contains our home city, which contains our home structures (physical, social, interpersonal), is viewed bleary-eyed from Australia, its avatars a legendary talk show host, four legendary country singers, and a small sampling of our atrocities, not legendary but sickeningly real. By the record’s end, Callahan has denounced the life that so consumed him a half hour of album-time prior, settling into a gentle ride and ultimately becoming the road itself. Has he finally become something so ethereal and beyond himself that he exists only as part of the landscape itself? Absolutely not. His final words on Apocalypse: “DC 450.” It’s the album’s catalog number, reminding you that this is an album, a finite work of art that, brilliant as it may be, simply exists. –E. Nagurney

Actress

R.I.P

[Honest Jon’s; 2012]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

In a time when time ran backwards (2012, to be precise), rising soccer star turned archeologist Darren Cunningham excavated fragments of recordings from a time after human extinction. Caked with lime, richly warped and discolored by mold and decay, haunted by chrominance signal ghosting effects as well as actual ghosts, these artifacts had nonetheless survived, on the whole, in an acceptable state of preservation. It was determined they were/will be created by AI military think tanks in a style that exhibited vestiges of 21st-century rap and house and suggested a corollary interest in the by-then obsolete concept of “Dance.” The think tanks were/will be specifically mandated to reverse-engineer and weaponize the concept of “emotion,” and their inability to grasp anything but its surface manifestations, combined with the organic processes of reverse time and reverse soil and a software-driven sense of intellectual longing, created its own unique textural poignancy that found its way into unexplored human neuro-pathways, arousing actual emotion amongst the final generations (in forward time) of homo sapiens to survive on planet Earth. –Water

David Bowie

Blackstar

[Columbia; 2016]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Blackstar was recorded in secret and released two days before David Bowie died from liver cancer. Bowie knew this was going to happen, but we didn’t. I’m interested in those two days. Now, we can’t separate these events from one another, Blackstar and David Bowie’s death, but there were 48 hours where the album was just another new project from an aging rocker. As we look back on Blackstar, there’s a strange way in which Bowie lives beyond his death more than some others who die, because he’s rooted so deeply in this object. He affects us from it, and so he doesn’t seem truly gone. A highlight of the 2010s and one of Bowie’s most powerful records, this album continues to remind us that the things that unfold in this world change the way we see artworks. The dark grooves of the prescient “Lazarus,” the devastating new meaning of “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” the frenetic cadence and the mysterious sci-fi frame of the title track. What were those two days like for people who were listening, before this album became what it is now? –Adam Rothbarth

Jenny Hval

Blood Bitch

[Sacred Bones; 2016]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Jenny Hval spent the first half of the decade putting words under a microscope with lyrics that were at once blunt and razor sharp, where music (or sometimes just sound) grew organically from her confident yet deadpan delivery. While Blood Bitch was a culmination of that process, it was also a turning point. Hval’s self-examination expanded to an exploration of identity stretching time, space, gender, and myth, delivered with a newfound sonic warmth (“Female Vampire”), vocal tenderness (“Period Piece”), and lyrical vulnerability (“Conceptual Romance”). But in a decade where heel-turns to pop music came to feel like a cynically predictable career strategy for experimental artists, few on either end of that spectrum took the kind of risks Hval threw herself into. The gasping, out-of-breath pulse running through “In The Red,” the screamed panic of “The Plague,” the whispered dream diary of “Untamed Region,” and even the candid question “What’s this album about Jenny!?” blurted out right in the middle revealed an artist able to make her music more challenging and spiritually probing than ever, all while embracing pop music on her terms. Blood Bitch was one of the most open-hearted albums of its era, even — or especially — when it was dripping with blood. –Miles Bowe

infinite body

carve out the face of my god

[Post Present Medium; 2010]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

At the turn of the decade, harsh noise expat Kyle Parker sighed ambient tracks of relief more suitable for avoidance than integration, going away than getting along. As the self receded into absence, “Dive’s” slow fade in of granular chordal melds resonated with coarse serenity inside the curved bowl of an empty skull. Moving his carapace through symphonic mandala (“A Fool Persists”), trailing expoflora (“Drive Dreams Away”), and marine life (the title track), Los Angeles-based Parker looped and steered his exhausted orchestra-of-one in an aftermath of fraught nerves. Embedded in the collection of post-escapist sustainments, beacon track “Sunshine” blinked ChipCorder-esque throbs across an overcast outstretch of dull haze and polymeric shimmer. Spatial and substantial, linear and circular, Carve Out The Face Of My God die-cut hollowed-out residue from hallowed music into flatlines that reflected the nihilism in the divine, and vice versa. –Rick Weaver

The Knife

Shaking the Habitual

[Mute; 2013]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Before we get too deep into this, I feel this obvious detail deserves recognition: Shaking the Habitual, as a title, was dead-on. I mean, even beyond its cheeky referencing of Foucault. Sure, Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer were committed to “[shaking] up habitual ways of working and thinking… [of re-evaluating] rules and institutions,” all that good post-structuralist shit, but what really made it resonate like The Concern for Truth never could was how truly SHOOK it left us all. This thing was so fucking monsterous, it famously broke our scoring system. I once listened to it very loudly and in its entirety on a plane; somewhere around “Crake,” I thought there was a real possibility that we were going down (what with all that clanking), but I vividly remember being way too unconcerned about it. Shaking the Habitual’s genius was that it riled you up — about gender stereotypes or fracking or boring sex or whatever — but it never killed your mood. There was a dreadful irony here that music like this could, through its physicality alone, relinquish our grip on our privileges, our violent habits, our possessions, that these sick beats and synth squelches could “end succession” if only more people would hear it. The Knife were bent on “failing more” though, but not before they succeeded in completely dismantling everyone’s expectations. Maybe this is where it starts though: with a flurry of wooden clicks and breathy chirps and rapturous screeches, like cracks in a dam holding back hoarded wealth, like an unshakeable urge in the left foot of a billionaire who’s never danced. In all honesty though, thinking about kicking capitalist habits is hard, but when this shit is on, I’m ready to lose. Bring it on. –Jazz Scott

Amen Dunes

Through Donkey Jaw

[Sacred Bones; 2011]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

For Damon McMahon, the transformation from Mark Tucker to T. Storm Hunter occurred sometime during recording “Jill.” The manic, fragmented psy-fi of its locus: a discombobulating melody that bounced across every surface, sounding like a stalled Bataszew. It was the beginning of a disconnect from D.I.A., but it was also the mutagen that further separated himself from an outsized beginning. McMahon once lamented that he hoped Through Donkey Jaw would be hated, because he thought it wasn’t quite as sincere as his future recording output would be. But here we stand, and Through Donkey Jaw might be McMahon’s most sincere output. The range of emotions were uncontrollable. McMahon ripped his old formula to shreds, disassembling it one song at a time until the record ended in a scrapheap of teary-eyed confessionals. The road McMahon has taken since has been lengthy, but each subsequent release has recalled Through Donkey Jaw’s imitable spirit in some way. And as he’s polished his ride to a fine sheen, he hasn’t buffed out the well-worn scratches or picked at the rust. McMahon has never been able to shake his confessional tune, never abandoning his own version of Tucker’s 1964 Cadillac. In fact, unlike his predecessor, he’s come to own it as the reliable, if beat up, mode of transport is was built to be. –Jspicer

Rich Gang

Tha Tour Pt. 1

[Cash Money; 2014]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Obviously, we don’t accept the term “mumble rap” as a meaningful genre descriptor: Listening to this towering mixtape collaboration between Atlanta innovators Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan does not entail any of the strain implied by perceiving spoken words beneath the friction of mumbling. It’s instead a pure thrill to revisit Young Thug’s exuberant leaps in pitch, his tangled, unpredictable flows, his syllables flung like Jackson Pollock drips. And though less influential, Rich Homie Quan is a gripping stylist, too, his drawl smeared, dipping in volume, marked by inventive dynamics and repetition. The mixtape was a lexicon of ear-worms. Every song was memorable, and yet our ears were able to pinpoint new phrases with each spin. We listened while availing ourselves of the crowdsourced transcriptions on Genius, comparing what we heard with the majority opinion. We listened by firing up old hard drives of leaked MP3s or prying open the browser window of DatPiff. (This mixtape is still not available on major streaming services.) Even though the term “mumble rap” still sucks, listening to Tha Tour Pt. 1 made us reconsider the term as a reminder of the way Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan helped us hear, in all audible language, the eruption of melody out of speech. –Ian Latta

Helen

The Original Faces

[Kranky; 2015]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

There’s a scene early in the 1989 film Weekend at Bernie’s in which star Andrew McCarthy attempts to extract his boom box from an impressive amount of tar built up on a steamy NYC rooftop. This imagery — a boom box encased in muck — is an apt metaphor for the sounds produced on Helen’s 2015 album, The Original Faces. Liz Harris (Grouper, Nivhek) was joined here by pals Jed Bindeman and Scott Simmons (with backing vocals by the mysterious “Helen”) for a 12-song missive of what might be referred to as “surf noise,” if classifying such things is important to you. Beginning with the pleasantly noodling “Ryder” and ending with the short-but-sweet title track, the group burned through 33 minutes’ worth of sonic downer bliss; even the songs lasting south of two minutes left an indelible mark. But despite its relative brevity, the music was catchy and dense enough that you’d find yourself discovering new sounds deep in the mix, like diving through a new cereal box for the prize buried at the bottom. The Original Faces was the type of album that socked you in the stomach for your lunch money then tripped on its way out the door, a roaring yet surprisingly tender addition to Harris’s distinctly overachieving and achingly gorgeous oeuvre. –paulb

D/P/I

Fresh Roses

[CHANCEIMAG.es; 2013]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Microseconds into the opening pitch-shifted warble of “In Dreams” — wait a minute, is that Roy Orbison? — I knew there was something special about Fresh Roses. Alex Gray’s D/P/I project always had a sort of capacity for serrated incision, an ability to recombine the sonic lost & found into a thrumming beat or a collage or an open-source cave painting that pointed 13 different directions at once. But there was something so crystalline about Fresh Roses’s vision. It sprawled from the towering centerpiece of “DEPRESSION SESSION,” a piece wherein we were cast about by the (de)motivation of a TED talk’s angry older brother while hard drives went senescent in the periphery. Country songs melted, beats were cheese-grated: WAKE THE BODY BACK UP! Forgive me, but in the last 10 years, so much that was SUPPOSED TO BE SOFT went hard as rock. What stage of post-irony are we in again? Who’s in charge here? I can’t remember cuz I deleted most of the note on my phone where I was keeping track. All it says now is “Fresh Roses.” –Taylor Peters

Andy Stott

Luxury Problems

[Modern Love; 2012]

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Andy Stott has had his finger right on the pulse this entire decade, but Luxury Problems in particular continues to hit just as hard as it did in 2012. Shortly before its release, after years of balancing his techno output with a day job at Mercedes, Stott quit the luxury car business. The change deconstructed the rhythm of his life, day bleeding into night and back into day, as if time belonged to another existence. And that was the sound of Luxury Problems — techno that lost all sense of urgency, all sense of compulsion. Techno that techno’d to techno, for no one and nothing. And yet it was so alive, like the beating of some dark, dank heart powering the underworld and, indeed, the one above ground, too. Still, the most we could do was feel its heat; we knew it was there, but we couldn’t know it in itself, separated as it was by an impenetrable and unknowable mass. To get lost in non-time was the ultimate luxury problem, and the record took us right into it, enveloping us in a peculiarly woozy sludge that we willingly got ourselves stuck in. It was a beautiful, even inviting, sludge, thanks to Stott’s old piano teacher Alison Skidmore, whose layered, decaying choral vocals were otherworldly and perfect for Stott’s compositions. The collaboration was fruitful in a way that Stott could not have imagined when he reached out to her. I mean, they hadn’t seen each other in 15 years! Go ahead and call your old piano teacher. Try to make something as good as Luxury Problems. –Reggie MT

EMA

Past Life Martyred Saints

[Souterrain Transmissions; 2011]

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The first song on Past Life Martyred Saints ended with Erika M. Anderson declaring “Great grandmother lived on the prairie/ Nothin and nothin and nothin and nothin/ I got the same feelin inside of me/ Nothin’ and nothing and nothing and nothing.” Was it emptiness that Anderson felt? A lack of agency in a world where her role was sharply delimited by forces outside of her? Or did we detect something productive in this emptiness, something of the pioneer spirit of her ancestor that suggested limitless possibility? The ambiguity that characterized these lines permeated the record as a whole. The imperative “Momma’s in the bedroom, don’t you stop” from “Breakfast” could have been either the breathless command of a young lover or something infinitely darker. Her lament on “Marked” that “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark” could have signified either romantic yearning or a desire for evidence of the damage inflicted upon her. It was from this muddiness, this imprecision, that the album gained its potency. What broke our hearts was Anderson’s willing recognition that you don’t stop loving the things that try to kill you, even when you know you should. –Joe Hemmerling

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib

Piñata

[Madlib Invazion; 2014]

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The recording of Piñata began as an unlikely collaboration between two artists on divergent paths: Madlib had established himself as a producer of such diverse talents that he set himself the task of releasing an album a month throughout 2010 and pulled it off; meanwhile, Freddie Gibbs had garnered hype as a rising rapper, was snatched up by a major label, and just as quickly became a casualty of the game, languishing in relative obscurity during the three years it took to record the album. Gibbs’s situation was so dire that he recorded his vocals while literally living on the streets and fired them back to Madlib, who summoned his crate-digging magic to create an album that weaved thug rap braggadocio with eccentric soul samples. With guest spots from established legends (Raekwon) and artists who would go on to define the decade (Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown), Piñata was a classic as soon as it hit record stores (they were still a thing back in 2014, if you’ll recall). The ultimate proof of the record’s status was the ongoing trajectory of Gibbs and Madlib: by the time they reunited in 2019 for the sequel Bandana, it felt like a victory lap from two legends in their own right. –Marty Slattery

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Graham Lambkin / Jason Lescalleet

Photographs

[Erstwhile; 2013]

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For Photographs, Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet traveled to their childhood homes in Folkestone, England and Worcester, Massachusetts to complete the album trilogy that began with 2008’s The Breadwinner (recorded at Lambkin’s house in NY) and 2010’s Air Supply (recorded at Lescalleet’s in MA). The result was a movie-length examination of the relationship between memory and location, providing an audio verité glimpse into the friends’ encounter with their pasts. As if listening in with a glass to the wall, we overheard discussions about Lescalleet’s tea preferences, Lambkin’s prized banjo, and the olfactory properties of Mexico City as compared to Jacksonville, Florida. In the tradition of Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien, Photographs argued for field recording’s potential to create immersive soundworlds on the premise that the “world itself” is compelling enough to be listened to. Of course, with Lescalleet’s involvement, the field recordings didn’t go wholly untreated. “Danger of Death” featured a disorienting ear-piercing tone, while “The System” provided three minutes of digital noise. But when counterposed against the lovely choir on “Quested to Saint Hilda” or the gorgeous outro of “CT20 1PS/Rinsing Through the Shingles,” such moments only deepened the impression that this album, like a photograph, contained all the beauty and ugliness of the past. –Nom de Plume

Beach House

Teen Dream

[Sub Pop; 2010]

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Would I have arrived without the direction that she indicated by hand. That she folded into a soft edge. Would I have followed her voice around the mirror, into the hum. I knew the sound, even though I could not place it, because it looped and guided me to a wide open field, a hell beneath the stairs. The shape of her mouth deciding whether our bodies would crystallize or recline or bend, depending on the quality of the vowel. You tell me only time can run me. I thought I understood the architecture until something round slipped and rolled into the night. I thought I understood where to coil, where to lounge, where to tear a moment from the days that carry us on forever. Where I might have drawn the curtain and organized the light, I surfaced into a kind of gold that blurred what I could remember about tracing half a circle into thin cotton, ecstatically. Teen Dream made the room warm so that mood could become texture, made the haze, the grain, a ritual. The seam of my dress, the rim of the glass, spiraling. The wing of my eye, the frame, melting into a time I could make glow. –Caroline Rayner

Solange

A Seat at the Table

[Columbia; 2016]

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A Seat at the Table succeeded and grew deeper with each listen, because it was Solange laid bare: a chunk of her humanity, with all the complexities and messy contradictions, assembled with grace and stitched with anger. On “Cranes in the Sky,” the effortless, pure beauty of her vocals wrapped themselves around laments aimed at the emptiness of her depression. It was this juxtaposition that structured the album. Even “Mad” and its message of both holding on to and letting go of emotions slid by with the ease and simplicity of clouds on a calm summer day. Yes, this album was a statement about race in modern America, highlighted as such on tracks like “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “F.U.B.U.” Yes, this album reveled in the fond memories of lessons from the past (hello, Master P) while also looking forward to a world with greater musical possibilities (hello, “Don’t Wish Me Well”). But what made this album special was never just its individual parts. This album was an encapsulation of all that Solange has been, can be, and is, but it never lost sight of the beauty, ugliness, and complexity of what it means for any human to be alive. –Eric Wiltbank

Women

Public Strain

[Jagjaguwar; 2010]

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Women died an unceremonious, explosive death shortly after the release of Public Strain. It seemed to be a fitting end for a band whose genius seemed almost unsustainable, given how fully formed and peerless their final album was. But the death of Christopher Reimer in 2012 brought everything back into perspective. An unfair, untimely, shitty loss for music as a whole, it is fortunate that we have Public Strain to remember him by. The album stands as a perfect summation of his virtuosity, a true guitarist’s record, vast and expansive, grasping at new sounds and eager to explore riffs with cool curiosity. There are few rock records that can unite drone and pop so fruitfully, flitting between bold experimentation and crowd-pleasing melody, but Women straddled that line with stunning ease. Simultaneously warm and frigid, calculated and emotional, Public Strain was simply an indefinable treasure. It now sits in the annals of classic post-punk records, new and experienced listeners alike lucky to uncover its hidden secrets. –Eli Schoop

Chief Keef

Almighty So

[Glory Boyz Entertainment; 2013]

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Chief Keef foils the list-maker like no other. Bang, Part Two signalled a hard left into a genre all his own, and for all the linear, phased creative development he’s undergone since, no two releases fail to resist comparison (to one another, let alone to anything else, to say nothing of the ever-shifting mass of snippets and loosies that comprises seemingly half his body of work). Almighty So isn’t a bad place to start, though. Something like a Rosetta Stone for Keef’s mid-decade output, the mixtape foreshadowed the ear for production that Sosa would soon take into his own hands, the pop predilections that would congeal into the much-delayed but once-contemporaneous Thot Breaker, and the leaned-out sensibilities that would resurface in his present “underwater” period (which, purportedly, will deliver us Almighty So 2 any day now). While the urgency of simply getting familiar with Keef dwarfs the importance of the specific point of entry, why not Almighty? As Sosa fandom has narrowed (somewhat) and deepened (near-religiously) over the course of the decade, no tape’s appellation has proven more prescient. All hail! –Corrigan B

Eli Keszler

Stadium

[Shelter Press; 2018]

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Eli Keszler’s musical career has been built on expanding the vocabulary of percussion, and with Stadium, the experimental drummer and sound artist crystallized his clearest vision yet. From the breakneck pace of opener “Measurement Doesn’t Change the System At All” to the cloaked ambient textures of the provocatively titled “We Live in Pathetic Temporal Urgency” to the synth-led “Fashion of Echo,” Keszler placed tendrils of jazz throughout the entire album. Was the gorgeous drone that kicked off “Was The Singing Bellowing” the work of meticulous field recordings, multiple stompboxes run in series, or a combination of both? How about the genesis of the broken beat that propelled “Simple Act Of Inverting The Episode?” You could take a guess at what the influences were (maybe if Cid Rim got together with Jon Hassell?), but the tunes resonated inside entirely uninhabited territory. Having produced several large-scale art installations outside of his music project, Keszler has understood for years the uncanny spaces that sound traverses, and nowhere was it on better display than on this outstanding record. –Tristan Kneschke

Angel Olsen

Burn Your Fire For No Witness

[Jagjaguwar; 2014]

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Floating our way midway through the decade like some eerie-ass fog off some swampwater, the sophomore effort from Angel Olsen somehow rendered the heaviness of existential dread and the messiness of constant anxiety sheer and weightless. Indeed, just like a gaseous vapor, it felt like a beguilingly uniform affair: no track was a highlight, because no track was a lowlight, either. More significant to its place in history, though, is the fact that, by the time the last of this album’s ambiguous-yet-personal lamentations had ended, Olsen’s quavering, confused-but-confident howl proved we hadn’t heard NOTHIN’ YET. It’s easy to forget it here at the end of the 2010s — now that her songs have fully ascended to the heights of full-on electro-acoustic oratorios — but Burn Your Fire managed to stubbornly exist in that dizzyingly low-oxygen “Goldilocks Zone,” wherein both her vocal range and instrumental palette took ramshackle steps forward from the sparse mumble-folk of her debut but hadn’t yet reached their terrifyingly confident, pop-diva potential. Here on her debut for Jagjaguwar, Angel Olsen didn’t yet know how to tear her way into our hearts with countless elaborate and glimmering hooks. So she did it the old-fashioned way: with 11 rusty fish hooks. –Dan Smart

Panda Bear

Tomboy

[Paw Tracks; 2011]

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Before I was a critic, I was a chorister. Which means that I sound things out instead of pinning them down, and I know that can make me hard to follow. But let’s not pretend that the density of a call across rooms in a home you know fondly doesn’t tell you things its diction can’t. Or that the difference between silence and hush burnished and lucent isn’t a messianism of sorts. Even the imprint of a body on a bed or the contours of the palm on a handmade bowl could adumbrate the forgiving carpentry of a sacristy if the touch is tender enough.

Now I see you again
Now I feel you again
Now I know you again

Tomboy is expanse. The vastness of your uncle’s snug embrace or the last note you heard Thomas sing before you grew apart and he died in his mother’s house a couple weeks before you both were supposed to turn 21. But only one of you did, and time’s profanations elongate your distance to his rude and rapturous colophon. When I slammed my finger in the car door and moved prematurely to the alto section, Mr. Brady told me to hold my horses: I’d miss my head voice soon enough. I can’t sing like Noah Lennox anymore.

I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know
I know I know I know

Conventional wisdom crumbles bitter in the mouth, but artless smiles stay, yawning broad like dad’s shoulders or the hymnal breath shared before a kiss. Everyone knows what they say, but it’s clear now how it’s what they don’t say that counts. Sometimes a voice refracts indefinitely, marking every surface it osculates in its weft of gentle intimacies. Sometimes the louder a voice is the more it amplifies the quiet gossiping of its sonic substrate: the muted bray of the congregation at evensong or the windblown howl of the benfiquistas chanting for Óscar Cardozo in his gangly prime.

Don’t break ties that hold them
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break
Don’t break

After “You Can Count On Me” unfurled into so many voices, silence, properly speaking, ceased to exist. There is always and there is only chorus. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

Matana Roberts

COIN COIN Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres

[Constellation; 2011]

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It was her saxophone, screaming alone, that shattered the silence. This first gripping sound of Matana Roberts’s 12-chapter COIN COIN project — named after freed-slave-turned-entrepreneur Marie Therese Metoyer — threw us into one of the most conceptually ambitious, sonically captivating, emotionally raw musical odysseys of the decade. The Chicago-born saxophonist and composer, employing graphic scores and practicing a technique she called “panoramic sound quilting,” assembled a 15-piece ensemble for this introductory installment of her multi-part exploration that combines personal ancestral narrative and the broader African-American experience. In a historical moment when dwindling attention spans sparked a billion unread think pieces (and skipped podcast episodes), and the relevance of albums for many declined (once again), and even the celebrated ephemerality of pop songs started feeling like a grueling eternity (because what would the algorithm recommend next?), Roberts went unapologetically, no-fucks-left-to-give LONG. FORM. It was timely and untimely, personal and political, beautiful and violent, all at the same damn time. In 2019, to wrap the decade, Roberts delivered the magnificent COIN COIN Chapter Four: Memphis. At this pace, we can anticipate two more decades of COIN COIN. Twenty more years of inspiring, edifying, and courageously unpredictable music to look forward to. –Elliott Sharp

Frank Ocean

channel ORANGE

[Def Jam; 2012]

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Funny to think about the world when Frank Ocean was just another Odd Future affiliate. Sure, the crooning-over-others’-beats mixtape nostalgia ULTRA showed promise, but Christopher Breux did not truly become Frank Ocean for many of us until channel ORANGE’s second single “Pyramids,” a nine-minute prog’n’B banger with a filthy extended John Mayer guitar solo. Goddamn if those first synth stabs don’t still get me riled the fuck up! What’s stunning is how well channel ORANGE holds up years later, even as it’s been eclipsed by the perfect Blonde, the if-you-blinked-you-missed-it Endless, and a host of non-album singles evidencing Frank Ocean’s brilliance. But this one’s just as important to the story. It’s easy to forget how significantly the sound of R&B has changed from 2010 to now; perhaps nobody carved out the contours of that change more than Frank. Get into your time machine and maybe you can find your way back to the date Frank published his infamous “thank you’s” Tumblr letter — oh wait, thanks internet! — a landmark development in the way we discussed blurred gender and sexual identity in rap and R&B, and truthfully the world. It was also a transformative moment in our collective relationship with Frank. Now, we felt, we knew him. For real. And the music on channel ORANGE became something more, something vital for so many of us, as we explored all of the ups and downs of this crazy life. Because somehow, it seemed, Frank knew us too. So no, Frank… thank YOU. –Reggie MT

Giant Claw

DARK WEB

[Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom; 2014]

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We have no time for anything anymore, so we demand everything all at once. As information from all corners of the corporeal and incorporeal worlds course through the cyberculture at ever-climbing rates, any authentic aesthetic discrimination seems more and more an impossible task. Attention takes its place as the highest commodity, and algorithms work tirelessly and silently to map our psyches according to how we invest (Besetzung). Moreover, as all these signifiers, familiar and unfamiliar, fly past us too quick to catch, maybe too quick to even see, they become alien and incomplete. We have more content than we know what to do with, and it’s killing us. Released at just about halfway through the decade, Giant Claw’s DARK WEB was something of a saturation point — it signified the primacy of a cultural thinking that was too expansive to contain itself. Just look at that sphere on the cover, burst open and oozing, slathering our so-called culture with its vital pulp. However, this spilling out was not some unmoored anarchy of thought and sound, but, as Adam Devlin suggested way back when, it allowed DARK WEB to behave as a restorative for our hypercaffeinated condition, congealing its chopped and aerosolized R&B vox, trap hits, and carnivalesque MIDI pomp into some sweet, strange medicine. What Keith Rankin did here was a working-through and a making-sense of what it means to truly have the world, in all its immense teratical glory, at your fingertips. In that sense, DARK WEB was a true slice of the sublime — encounters with an ineffable internet sliced and rendered down into something we just might be able to eff with. –Cynocephalus

Lolina

Live in Paris

[Self-Released; 2016]

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Monopoly’s first iteration was named The Landlord’s Game, a brainchild of Lizzie Magie who in 1903 set out to create an educational tool to model the ill-effects of wealth consolidation and rent exploitation. Magie lived during the height of the Progressive Era, a reactionary movement that sought to eliminate corruption and address the problems wrought by industrialization. Magie and her peers lobbied for more government regulation and more public ownership of land and other capital. Fast forward a century to the 2010s, a decade in which wealth inequality soared, political corruption and election tampering became the norm, and the world began to enter a state of economic transformation not unlike the early years of Industrialization.

It’s fitting that, over a century after Magie first postulated The Landlord’s Game, Lolina (a.k.a. Inga Copeland) would settle on Monopoly as an aesthetic referent for her politically-charged 2016 performance in Paris for RBMA. Like Magie so long ago, Lolina’s performance subtly explored the ill-effects and dangers of exploitation and wealth consolidation amidst globalization and immigration. The audience was quite literally immersed in Monopoly (projected onto larger-than-life screens), as Lolina soundtracked the board itself with a genre hodgepodge bordering on directionless, with everything from playful melodies to hammered synth loops to random soundbites to cuts from her previous albums. Most of the board’s squares contained London landmarks, but the performance’s implication(s) could have been applied to any number of major cities. As the “game” approached its climax, plastic houses sprouted across the board indiscriminately, suffocating the squares before bursting into flame.

It’s difficult to conclude there were any overt political inscriptions woven into Lolina’s performance, but whether she intended to or not, she provided an important conceptual space for us to contemplate globalization, the 2016 election, Brexit, the 2015 Paris attacks, eco-crises, and all the other seemingly insurmountable political catastrophes that the 2010s bestowed. Lolina inflected her art with ambiguity, seldom a reach for the particular, but rather a vague motioning toward the undetermined. Here, she directed our attention to the delicate precarity of our condition, and she did so with a sigh of calculated simplicity. –Alex Brown

Colin Stetson

New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

[Constellation; 2011]

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I once saw Colin Stetson play solo in a jazz club in Dortmund, Germany. I guess Jazz Time is different from Rock & Roll Time, or the Germans’s reputation for timeliness is correct, because the ticket said 8:00 and by God they started at 8:00. This was unheard of in the American rock bars that I was used to frequenting. So I got there late. Perhaps this was for the best, because the effect of opening the club doors into a wall of sound coming from a solitary man onstage couldn’t have been planned. The audience remained Germanically stoic until the last blast from Stetson’s bass sax faded away and, after a pause, someone in the back of the room said “Wow.” There’s really no other proper reaction to Stetson’s playing, which he perfected for New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges. Stetson placed contact mics strategically on his horn and on himself, which picked up his superhuman performance to create a full band’s worth of noise. For this outing, Stetson invited Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden to perform vocals that describe the terrors of war, just in case he alone wasn’t loud enough to evoke the same. He needn’t have worried. –Nom de Plume

18+

MIXTAP3

[Self-Released; 2013]

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MIXTAP3 was an exoskeleton with the vulnerable innards included. Bright and dark, cold and warm. It was streaks of spit and sour breath on avatar skin. It was ringtones and heels clicking in an alleyway. Chords and notes trailed like lamplight. Boy and Sis moved with wolf smiles and soft hand, their breath percussive through unconsciously relaxed jaws. Eyes shifting. Their words were equal parts dismissive and full of longing, like a fuck-site profile come to life. It was easy to visualize the pair nodding to every beat, slowly twisting thumb rings in a corner. Alone and watched. But physicality isn’t gospel. What MIXTAP3 explored and facilitated so perfectly was the lift and tilt of persona, what could be expressed and unseen. –Bort

Grimes

Visions

[4AD; 2012]

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It’s so easy to forget now. Especially now, when you have a bullshit job where you want to tell the boss to fuck right off and wipe that shit-eating smile off his lackey’s face. It’s easy to forget that once you could feel something with music. Feel a lot more than distraction, or mere admiration. When music was your blood, more than anything else. A good beat, a good voice…that was enough to forget about everything else and remember who you are.

I know you’re faced with something that could consume you completely…

Music has been so much to you. It’s given you life, it’s brought you closer to your friends, your family, the ones you loved. It has given you friends, for fuck’s sake. Have you forgotten that?

You could be a better friend…

But now you remember. You remember what C told you to begin it all: Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Even now, years after you played this, you still feel something greater than you understand. The dynamics have changed, with so many gone and moved on. [So many yielding to despair like it was trendy]. Don’t… no. I know you won’t give in.

I know the way (I don’t know the way…)

That’s right, remember. This. Is. Not. You. –Ze Pequeno

Titus Andronicus

The Monitor

[XL; 2010]

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Like most people of this generation, my first exposure to Titus Andronicus was, of course, when the blogs posted about them performing “A More Perfect Union” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Of course, that led to seeking out The Monitor in full, which led to realizing “A More Perfect Union” was actually a seven-plus minute anthem that opened an exclusively anthemic album, followed by thoughts of “what’s all this about the Civil War now?” and then ultimately culminating in this next thought that is concise yet said with complete confidence after all this time: The Monitor is a masterful album. Set against the backdrop of one of history’s greatest internal struggles, the album dug in on all kinds of personal internal struggles that have come to, in part, define this weird decade. How can we solve any of the world’s problems when we can’t even solve ourselves? Is this still a war we can’t win? After 10,010 years, it’s still us against them, still us against them, still us against them, and they’re winning. The key to surviving, though, is to keep the fight alive, regardless. “You’ll always be a loser and that’s okay.” Scream it until you can’t anymore. Rally around the flag. –Jeremy Klein

Jeremih

Late Nights: The Album

[Def Jam; 2015]

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Sardined centrally in a crush of clubbing bodies; the Uber should be here by now; we couldn’t get out of that summer rain. Listen to me: I’ve been working on a list of situations not improved by Jeremih’s Late Nights: The Album, and the list is short. Jeremih’s salacious R&B was so effusively infectious that every second of it displaced the right now with a pulp of phased-out memory, real and imagined, warmed and cooled by effervescent bisexual lighting. Blame it on the drink, baby. As late, late night blurred into early morning, as drink flowed and intermittent trysts came and went, Late Nights slid from the crystal heights of “Planez,” to the stumbling clatter of “Give No Fuks,” to the woozy womp of “Woosah,” into the next-morning migrained clarity of “Paradise.” Don’t worry what time it is. All your friends are still here: Future, YG, Migos, Big Sean, Jhene Aiko, Juicy J, Twista. No one’s going home; no one’s running behind. On Late Nights, every hi-hat split itself into triplets, every backbeat was the flick of a lighter, and every sinuous inch of melody was so pure that it was hard to imagine a time when it didn’t exist. –Taylor Peters

Charli XCX

Vroom Vroom

[Vroom Vroom; 2015]

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Charlotte Aitchison always had a good ear when it came to diversifying her production. But before Vroom Vroom (and despite her involvement in some absolute classics), she struggled to find a consistent sound that could match her persona. And then along came SOPHIE. While this marriage of pop powerhouses was perhaps inevitable, it was still really cool when it happened. Vroom Vroom looked like a lap dance in latex, smelled like perfume and sweat, tasted like Red Bull and vodka, and felt like grime and chrome. And it sounded like the future. SOPHIE’s production was dynamic and energized, but Charli herself is the reason we’re still talking about this EP. She flowed seamlessly from pleasure-seeker to provocateur, displaying the confidence of a pop diva at the top of her game. With a trunk full of the best beats and hooks of the decade, Vroom Vroom was Charli XCX behind the wheel of a lavender Lamborghini, parked and honking outside your house, as if to ask if you were game enough to come along for the ride. –Jeff Miller

Aaron Dilloway

Modern Jester

[Hanson; 2012]

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Emerging from an immersive, cultural shift, Modern Jester was conceived several years after noise proliferator Aaron Dilloway left his home in the US and spent several months collecting field recordings in Nepal. The way in which that overseas experience directly impacted his approach to production here is unclear, but the very thought of tackling a creative outlet after spending a prolonged period in new environments is exciting at the best of times, let alone when left at the hands of such a staunch and expressive practitioner. Modern Jester came way after Dilloway’s impeccable Sounds of Nepal series, but the frantic and coarse approach to field recordings could be heard all over the latter release, as it drew on musically diverse and abstract themes: automation, repetition, fear, isolation, desperation, and havoc. From the 18-minute cacophony of “Look Over Your Shoulder” to the berserk frenzy of “Tremors,” Modern Jester exemplified the sheer breadth of possibility within creative composition while remaining aligned to a core aesthetic. Every listen conjured a range of emotional responses, which felt as though they were based on direct experience — from Nepal or otherwise — and even now, Dilloway’s berserk masterpiece remains utterly unparalleled in both ambition and audacity. –Birkut

Jessy Lanza

Oh No

[Hyperdub; 2016]

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Jessy Lanza rides a bicycle in the music videos for “Oh No” and “I Talk BB,” released about a year apart. In the former, she emerges from the fluorescent light of an underground parking garage to the dark streets above, where she, her reflective jacket, and the pavement below are lit by the flashing, multicolored lights woven through her shocks. There are signs of life around her — some distant traffic, a customer loading up his car with groceries — but all of the attention is on Lanza and her psychedelic ride. Eventually, her environment begins to distort and fall away, like in the moment at which the viewer becomes one of her wheels, and the world turns into a spinning void. The video for “I Talk BB” has more pathos; from close range, we study people and animals, couples and individuals caught up in their interior worlds, and other engaged in their own forms of commute, all bathed in diffuse sunlight as Lanza passes them by on her bike. We see stock images of smiling families and professionals plastered on shop windows and benches. On Oh No, Lanza’s ecstatic pop takes you on both kinds of ride: it can be chaotic, obscure, and subjective, or it can be bright and empathetic, putting you in touch with something outside yourself. Here, Oh No is not an exclamation of horror or disappointment; it’s giggled with tentative excitement, like a reaction to something thrilling and unfamiliar. –Will Neibergall

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Klein

Tommy

[Hyperdub; 2017]

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Love & hip-hop: Atlanta — that’s, like, a reality TV show, right? Yes, and it’s also electronic artist Klein’s backstory for her debut album on Hyperdub. Beyond providing a title and a source for sound samples, the show’s bad-girl guest Tommie Lee served as an archetype of obstinance: “What would Tommie do,” Klein mused in an interview, “like, she wouldn’t even care.” Likewise, three albums into her own career, Klein showed little interest in playing sweet with the powers that be. Recorded primarily in her bedroom, Tommy was as volatile as its namesake’s reputation: gaseous piano chords looped over fractured beats, blasted by noise, then smeared into opaque drones. Whether crooning or chanting, Klein sang wordless alleluias chapeled in her body, riffing across scales with gospel exuberance. Produced with an ear for entropy, Tommy thrillingly bridged two separate worlds, the musique concrète tactics of Pierre Schaeffer’s avant-garde with the vocal prowess of Billboard R&B divas. But unlike her plaque-chasing peers, Klein has better sense to save her walls for family portraits. Real gold, as Klein well appreciates, can’t be won by committee vote. It doesn’t sparkle so brightly — or so easily. –Todd B. Gruel

Low

Double Negative

[Sub Pop; 2018]

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On Double Negative, Low had successfully pulled off a feat few recording artists would’ve dared entertain for a 12th album in a 16-year-long career: they’d transposed the essence of what made their music different than anything that come before into a sound both fresh and contemporary. In Low’s case, what that meant was putting the bewitching vocal harmonies of founding members Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker through a metamorphic treatment of heavy digital processing, chopping and twisting and then ultimately placing them against an indescribable, half-instrumental, half-synthesized backdrop that clattered around as if molded from static alone. On the one hand, listening to the album was akin to discovering a decaying Disintegration Loops-like residue of a musical past, which was somewhat cheekily making the self-deprecating point of the datedness of Low’s world; on the other, Double Negative offered a blueprint for veteran artists whose spirit had not gotten old but whose expressions could use a facelift. More than anything, though, the album belonged: to Low’s awe-inspiring legacy, to a post-genre musical landscape, and to a world that increasingly felt like a disintegration loop itself. –Patryk Mrozek

Jam City

Classical Curves

[Night Slugs; 2012]

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Classical Curves was the sound of a new world in the process of creation. Released in 2012, it thought through the emerging aesthetics and politics of the post-recession: a world in which decay was made structural, where collapse was folded into “growth.” It made visible the wreck of neoliberalism, its primal scene, endlessly repeated — buildings with pools and doormen in a state of constant tumescence, accompanied by homeless people round the corner, always kept out of sight. In Jam City’s native south London, Classical Curves sounded like “regeneration,” the flattening of specificity to make way for a verticalized generic. In its jackhammer beats, we heard the demolition of shopping centers, the exile of local communities, their making way for dull flats, lifeless gyms, and bad coffee. These losses wrapped themselves around Classical Curves, making themselves heard in its vocalic synths, their sighs the echoes of lost worlds. No mere exercise in late-capitalist fetishization, then, Classical Curves wanted to move us. It wanted to make us dance, and in so doing, it wanted to make us think. In its elegantly-shaped empty spaces, in the uncanny funk of its mechanized movements, and in its provision of a shape for pop to come, Classical Curves developed a sound that helped us understand where we came from and where we were going. This was how we related to our bodies, our clubs and our cities in the deadened hyperreal zones of the 2010s. –Rafael Lubner

U.S. Girls

Half Free

[4AD; 2015]

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Eight songs and a skit was all it took. Despite its brevity, Half Free felt enormous, genreless, miragelike. Its production hit a pleasingly foggy mid-fi sweet spot, overcast, suggestive, noirish — an appropriate objective correlative to the stories its songs contained, populated by dead soldiers’ widows, familial cruelties, and strained spouses, all told first-person. These were stories, all of them, about women wronged by men, or left behind by men, or contemplating vengeance upon men. The eight songs played around with as many genres, tied together by Meg Remy’s voice and almost country-esque command of sung storytelling. The heart of Half Free, though, wasn’t really a song at all. It was “Telephone Play No. 1,” the minute-long Rorschach blot of an interlude that stopped the album after two tracks. With each listen, it could reveal a new meaning, and yet it was the hardest thing on the album to listen to, the aural equivalent of the very bright light an optometrist shines into your pupil to look at the back wall of your eyeballs. –Austin Gerth

Triad God

黑社會 Triad

[Presto!?; 2019]

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NXB, the full-length start to the partnership between London via China via Vietnam MC Vinh Ngan and experimental electronic pop producer Palmistry, had all the markings of the unique aural aesthetic the two would decide to stamp the name Triad God squarely on. It was 黑社會 Triad, however, following after seven years of near-radio silence from Ngan, that took that aesthetic and turned it into a sublime, unprecedented sound artifact of crushing immediateness and bewildering beauty. On 黑社會 Triad, Palmistry’s minimal synth melodies and deconstructed hip-hop beats dissolved into digitized operatic yowls and towering ambient vistas, while Ngan’s lethargic, mostly-Cantonese rapping became full-on confessional poetry, delivered via fragmented, half-awake monologues. As the album progressed, the two sources of sound and substance became increasingly desynchronized, to the point of their co-existence appearing less like music and more like a field recording of a very real, very painful moment in someone’s life. Listening to vignettes such as “So Pay La” felt like having your friend suddenly pour their heart out to you in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, when you’ve had way too much to drink and can’t wait for the person working the kebab stand to call out your name. You don’t understand half of what your friend is saying, but the gravity of the moment hits you just the same. And then you listen. –Patryk Mrozek

Drake

If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late

[Cash Money/OVO; 2015]

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And, just like that, Napoleon crowned himself. Finally endowed with the heavy airplay (all day / with no chorus); laundry list of famous exes; and, well, bands that a young Aubrey had always flirted and fantasized and fronted about, Drake emerged on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late as an a priori. No longer just my homie over there who think ur cute, the perpetual aspirant already unconvincingly flexing with Nickelus F on Room for Improvement, Drake could finally stop orbiting every possible influence, opportunity, and storyline and let his own tumid gravity constellate his place in the pop/rap cosmos. The self-styled (for how could it be otherwise?) 6 God looked good as a celestial body, his stardom as unassailable (though truly nothing was the same with dude after Sauce Walka ethered him — OOWEE!) as it was inaccessible. None of which is to say that Drake’s hard-won iconicity licensed empty simulation, the stuff of media studies undergrad dreams; if anything, If You’re Reading This demonstrated why Drake’s corpus of pastiche and reference, a seriously jacked body with seriously juiced organs seemingly cobbled together out of logos and other simulacra, commanded such fervent brand loyalty. On display in If You’re Reading This were Drake’s unmatched powers of curation and customer service, his perfectly calibrated sensitivity to the affective life of human capital in a rapidly and rabidly freelancing world pivoting to video. Because who else other than the internet’s busiest simp could demonstrate how performative disavowal is no match for the architectures of desire goading our most egregious and mundane fantasies? Sorry Jenny Holzer, Drake isn’t going to protect you from what you want. He is what you want. Oh, you gotta love it. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

Jason Lescalleet

Songs About Nothing

[Erstwhile; 2012]

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With its cheeky concept and punny track titles, one might be tempted to assign a type of theoretical gravity to Songs About Nothing, casting it as some high-level comedy of deconstruction. One might be impelled to hunt down traces, quaff some pharmakoi, and split the différance. And that’s all well and good. Discourses about appropriation, decontextualized sound as plastic, politics of pastiche and irony, metaphysics of presence, decay and deformation, being and not-being: each potentially generative avenues of exploration into Jason Lescalleet’s monumental work. However, we don’t need to distract ourselves with what is external — Songs About Nothing stood alone populating the void, in defiance even of its own title and network of samples, references, and appropriations. Great buzzing existential meatsaws scourged its 76 minutes and shred all stable signifiers within. Whether it was the Big Black samples stretched and savaged and smote completely; the sounds of birds, trucks, protests, and helicopters; or the low, insinuating tones encrusted with digital manipulation, the corruption, the destruktion, was total. There were no little ditties or ambient soundscapes, just obliviated airs and anti-environments. While, of course, no thing can be about nothing, it was difficult to escape a sense of vacuum here, an inert core around which Lescalleet had constructed his capital — gleaming spires of nullity and broad boulevards of implosion. It was equally difficult to visit that place without at least carrying back the faintest whiff of annihilation. –Cynocephalus

Lorde

Melodrama

[Republic/Lava; 2017]

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What is this tape? The tape was Lorde’s album-long ode to the passion of youth and the beauty of destruction. It was a generational statement. Maybe I was a generation behind, but none of that mattered. I fell in love with this tape — its dazzling synth lines, introspective hooks, and Instagram-ready lyrics. No other pop record from this decade better captured living fast and dying young. Whether it was blowing her brains out on the radio or ending up painted on the road, Lorde (like so many singer-songwriters before her) distilled her experiences into universally relatable moments. This was what it felt like to be a 19-year-old in the 2010s. It felt like staying up late, alone in the dark, writing something. It felt like being the only person on a subway car full of strangers. It felt like something slipped under your tongue, the excitement of telling a friend that that one person texted you back. It felt like you were on fire. And this tape was worth sharing with someone you love so that your fires could feed on one another, burning brighter and fiercer. So what is this tape? This is my favorite tape. –Jeff Miller

Kendrick Lamar

good kid m.A.A.d city

[Top Dawg; 2012]

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Are there any words that have yet to be spilled about the major label debut from one of the most popular rappers working today? Perhaps it’s worth honing in on the fact that good kid was personal and emotional, serving as an entry into a mainstay genre that isn’t frequently known for either of those things. Kendrick wasn’t immune to the characteristic bravado, but while that personality trait permeates among rappers seemingly out of career or cultural necessity, what we had on the album was a retrospective on youthful misguidedness. The machismo reflected on “Backseat Freestyle” isn’t who Kendrick is today, and similarly, the robbery described on the subsequent track, “The Art of Peer Pressure,” isn’t used as a feather in the cap by present-day K-Dot. It was clear as things progressed, and certainly by the end of the album, that the Compton native was more concerned with describing the mindset, commonly errant and adjacent to tragedy, that he had growing up in the 1990s and the 2000s. Clever flow and consistent production helped deliver self-awareness to listeners. Even most TV shows don’t have this level of character development. –Mike Reid

Shabazz Palaces

Black Up

[Sub Pop; 2011]

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It’s difficult for me to address Shabazz Palaces historically, because they initially struck me as an aberration. Overshadowed by a residual “O.G.” politics, their earliest EPs felt just a little too stiff, too needlessly esoteric, for me to fully enjoy, like a pre-Wu Genius close-reading Farrakhan. And aside from pulling the obvious “hipster rap”/backpacker card, calling these guys “old school” was probably the biggest diss you could lob; Ishmael Butler clearly wanted to do something different with his resume. So, hardly rejecting their posture’s awkward inconsistencies, Shabazz Palaces’ 2011 debut album Black Up pretended a subtle homage to the debased currency of youth. And it worked, all because it hinged on risk and diversion. I say risk because who, exactly, was clamoring for this kind of album in 2011? Who, exactly, was Shabazz Palaces for, aside from maybe Butler himself? Despite their continued presence and with the benefit of hindsight, I’m still not sure I know the answers to those questions, and I don’t want to pretend I do. Ultimately, it’s easier to define this album by what it wasn’t, rather than what it was — and it certainly wasn’t Take Care. –S. David

Julia Holter

Loud City Song

[Domino; 2013]

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One of this decade’s great gifts has been the ability to hear the subtle transitions, and stunning transformations, of Julia Holter’s art. From there to here, her work stands as a discrete series of high points. Truthfully, any one of her albums, from Tragedy to Aviary, could be on this list, and no one here would question it. And still, here we are, choosing to recognize it from among the bunch. Why? I think, to begin with the lazy music-critical answer, Loud City Song was the first album of Holter’s that could qualify, if only peripherally, as pop music. People like pop music, and people like conventional narrative development in artists. (Some people even like cities and their loud songs, as well as their apparent signifiers — and how they all work back into pop music, and developmental narratives! Phew.) But listening closer, you’ll find that there is little Loud or City or Song in this album at all. Rather, the album works on its listener through an almost subliminal inversion: the loud is heard only in relation to a deeper, more pervasive quietude; the city is absorbed entirely in private rooms, in private sentences and in their words; and the songs themselves are assumed because the tightly composed drift in which they blow about suggests their shape. It is a marvelous thing to listen to that reveal itself like a secret, anew, nearly every time you listen. That this album can still play its beautiful tricks on us more than justifies its place, here. –Nathan Shaffer

Various Artists

Sounds of Sisso

[Nyege Nyege Tapes; 2017]

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Much of the most innovative music around today emerges from hermetic scenes on the margins of the Global North centers of cultural production, & nobody can convince me otherwise. By definition, these artists are not recycling or mimicking imported tropes so much as rearticulating motifs from their own milieus in ways that elude the pigeonholing nomenclature in which “the outside” operates. What kind of music is singeli? It’s singeli — duh! Trying to communicate the aesthetic in writing (“it’s… uhh… East African gabber”) is precluded by the same futility that makes translations of foreign poems just glorified synopses; “you wouldn’t get it, so here’s the gist.” Fortunately, you don’t have to learn a foreign language to “get” singeli — just give up on that habit of expressing the marginal in terms of the hegemonic: gabber might just be European singeli. Indeed, the Dar Es Salaam scene is so insistent on commanding its own identity & future — not ignorant, but impervious & indifferent to the outside — that its spirit even seems inflected by post-colonialism. Writing from the Global South myself, I’m a sucker for that shit, keeping it on speed-dial ever since the Sounds of Sisso scene manifesto broke ground. While it’s heartening just how much love the singeli crowd has gotten in the past couple of years, we’re the ones who should be thankful; it’s an honor to have them on this list. –Baldr Eldursson

Arca

Mutant

[Mute; 2015]

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Arca’s Mutant soundtracked my walks home from work in the late fall of 2015, my clothes drenched in the smell of a restaurant kitchen as I sauntered down dark sidewalks with aching feet. And for months, plugging in my headphones for the walk home, I would shrug, think “Mutant again,” and bathe in the fleeting euphoria of having finally clocked out. At that time, my life was mostly a lonely rhythm, and a monotonous, directionless one at that: waking up, going to class, going to work, walking home. Had I been more interested in what I was doing, it might have felt melodic, but it was more of a static buzz than anything orchestral. Then, quite refreshingly, Mutant came into my life offering barely any discernible pattern. Even its most serene melodies were cradled within the unpredictable and occasionally the grotesque. Ambience fluttered beneath cinematic non-sounds, unrecognizable flourishes of tonality and inflection. It was less an escape than reassurance that not everything is trapped within form and predictability, and that alternative narratives and histories can emerge quite unexpectedly and at the perfect time. Despite Arca’s fondness of unnerving sonic intensity, Mutant never wholly embraced destruction. Its core edifice seemed more concerned with occupying the space between ugly and pretty, between serenity and violence, a blur of ambiguity smeared onto the walls of whatever dared tried to contain or define it. As such, I found Mutant engrossing, almost literary for its cavernous exploration of feeling and depth, a poetics of the inexplicable. Mutant was never a way out, but a way in, a path toward something I couldn’t quite understand, and never wanted to. –Alex Brown

Playboi Carti

[Interscope; 2017]

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Drowned in pastels, an amniotic sluice of pillowy synths and subtly intricate drum programming, the production on Playboi Carti not only foresaw the coming decade’s hip-hop new age, but showcased exactly why Carti’s style would play an instrumental role in it. There was a numinous quality to Carti’s raps. It had something to do with the way his verses danced like light playing off a water’s surface. It had something to do with the intrinsic, lambent joy that the Atlantan rapper imparted — the way he could condense the very peak of a vibe or hype moment, stretch it, and then bottle it in song. The result being that, at any point in any given song, Playboi Carti seemed like the most alive person on the planet. Which wouldn’t mean a lot if the feeling weren’t so ridiculously infectious. But, above all else, it definitely had something to do with his deconstructed flow, a delivery that was no doubt one of the decade’s most aesthetically sublime musical objects, which the world came to know in earnest here, his first full-length effort. With a dazzling emphasis on vocal melody and mood, Carti rendered each track little more than a blank canvas for volatile ad lib improvisations. And the mixtape’s very best moments were, essentially, just that: one giant series of ad libs rushing in and out of the mix. The beats here, especially those courtesy Pi’erre Bourne, were precisely arranged to highlight the strange mechanics of Carti’s flow. If Young Thug is really the first “post-text rapper,” then Carti might be the first to transcend bars almost completely. –Jonathan Patrick

Farrah Abraham

My Teenage Dream Ended

[MTV Press; 2012]

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Sometime around late 2014, I banned myself from listening to My Teenage Dream Ended. Something as simple as the filtered breakbeat on “Only Me,” the heartbeat on “Searching for Closure,” and the fade out to Hawaiian lap steel on “The Sunshine State” could easily trigger a devastating, irredeemable breakdown — the kind that leaves you twisted and inconsolable. After the cry hangover, I’d listen again. This happened for two years straight. The semi-rhythmic cadence and chilling treatment of Farrah’s voice became the narrator of these episodes, a stand-in for a permanent nervous breakdown echoing maniacally across the decade. Farrah’s accessible YouTube tutorial presence and reality TV persona would melt away into a Trecartin-esque figure, unhinged into abstraction. Producer Fredrick M. Cuevas’s heinous use of Vengeance™ sample packs — compressed into gnarled, blunt forms — supported Farrah’s haunted messages: the whispers of “don’t tell” on “After Prom,” her proclamations of “FLA Appeal to me!” over a single monophonic synth blast. For the love of American dubstep, for the love of perpetual auto-tune, for the love of all that’s evil in the world, we stanned into oblivion. In that oblivion, to quote Rowan Savage’s review, “the author’s Self itself is irrelevant, because it now encompasses the world, magnified — and in that magnification, reveals the seams.” –Nick James Scavo

Earl Sweatshirt

Some Rap Songs

[Tan Cressida; 2018]

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For an auteur, Earl Sweatshirt seems preoccupied with the understatement. Roughly the length of a Seinfeld episode, the L.A.-based emcee’s most personal work to date seeked to obfuscate itself. Its title was almost impudently self-effacing and the accidental cover art was likely culled from Earl’s camera roll or a Snapchat memories folder. He’s always been known for his reticence — his last record was called I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, after all — but this effort established Earl as a hip-hop analogue to Richard D. James or Burial. Unlike Kanye, who has churned out his own his own string of comparably short releases in recent years, Earl didn’t require frantic rollouts or release parties to contextualize his work. Instead, he was an anti-persona of sorts, revealing himself solely through his verses, save for the occasional winkingly cryptic tweet.

If it were as accessible a medium as streamable album, Some Rap Songs could have conceivably found life as a poetry chapbook, its hacked-up jazz samples swapped out for a Xeroxed photo-collage or some vague film photography. Most tracks clocked in at around a minute and a half, carried by a conversational open-mic-night delivery and unvarnished instrumental loops that growled and undulated like stirring creatures. The production was swampy — beyond lo-fi, even — and it was Earl’s pen that prevented us from drowning in the murk, intentionally sending listeners to the internet to find transcribed lyrics.

On wax, Earl’s writing sounded effortless and casual. On paper, it divulged its poetic complexities. Compressed into dense chunks of meaning, stanzas bulged with subtext and tucked emotional weight into enjambment. Earl gave updates on his life like a human projector reel, eschewing lyrical scene-setting for disjointed slideshows of snapshots: picking out his father’s grave, finding new collaborators in MIKE and Medhane, bad trips. Images passed by as unpredictably (and sometimes as painfully) as calendar dates being retroactively filled in.

“Why’s it so muddy in the creek, poet?”

Earl’s at his best when he just misses the mark, carving out ghostly tableaux with the bluntest edge possible. “Imprecise words,” indeed. –Jude Noel

D’Angelo

Black Messiah

[RCA; 2014]

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“Who will survive in America?” How do we conceive sexual healing when bodies that bend into kisses are subject to hails of police-sanctioned bullets? How do we sing soul when we can’t breathe? Two truths: soul music, the righteous reaffirmation of the revolution as incontrovertibly bodily, is incontrovertibly America. And: the premeditated extermination of brown bodies is also (incontrovertibly) America. This is the world D’Angelo returned to; this is the world D’Angelo left. Over the squelches and heaves of Black Messiah, confusion and outrage emerged, a gospel anger over real fear. Even that falsetto, the one we’ve always quivered for, cannot balm the truth we heard articulated every day of this agonized decade: this world is killing us. And yet alongside that anxiety was a love and a joy so hot and bright we felt opened up and sated in an embrace we’d craved, still crave. Hate and love on two hands. This too, is not a contradiction. The stakes of those poles, the duality and want in D’Angelo’s voice, we heard the struggle of every body seeking the right to be alright. Black Messiah, the fire this and next time, burned like Langston: “O, yes, I say it plain/ America never was America to me/ And yet I swear this oath — America will be!” –Frank Falisi

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti

Before Today

[4AD; 2010]

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Ariel Pink spent most of the 2000s establishing himself as the new golden child of lo-fi music, recording wounded, nightmarish pop songs that carried the same torch as outsider geniuses like Tonetta and Daniel Johnston. At the height of the late-2000s indie boom, however, he leapt to the big leagues by signing with 4AD, taking his act to a new level on par with heavy hitters like Animal Collective, Deerhunter, and other groups who seemed to be proving that notions like “bands” and “albums” were still doing just fine. Then in came Pink with Before Today, a murky, dissociative haze of a pop record that slinked through a nocturnal wasteland of butt-house blondes and menopause men, all held together by yacht-rock hooks and the yelps of a man who sounded as desperate for sex as he was for fame. But there was truth in Pink’s sardonic pleas; unlike his peers, Pink saw the era of rock & roll disappearing into the rearview, dissolving like mush alongside all the tacky pop and TV jingles that we had previously ignored for so long. Before Today honored these forgotten cultural artifacts, elevating them to impressionistic heights with unbearably beautiful songs that cut through all of Pink’s raunchy pranks to capture the dying wish of a washed-up generation of wannabes. It was pop music built from the memories of a time now out of reach, a sound fading further and further into the distance, becoming more distorted and dreamy with each passing streetlight. –Sam Goldner

Fiona Apple

The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

[Epic; 2012]

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For the first three albums of Fiona Apple’s career, Jon Brion was a major factor. He played a slew of instruments on her groundbreaking 1996 debut Tidal, repeated the feat while fully producing 1999’s When the Pawn…, and had produced the original version of 2005’s Extraordinary Machine before Apple decided to re-record most of it instead with Mike Elizondo and Brian Kehew, though the results didn’t end up venturing far from Brion’s Mellotron-esque cinematic big band wheelhouse.Taking a full seven years to concoct her fourth album, 2012’s The Idler Wheel… saw Apple explore a rather minimalist aesthetic. Her lyrics were as fierce, emotional, and poetic as ever, but the sound was dramatically stripped down. Produced with touring drummer Charley Drayton, he and Apple (credited as Seedy and Feedy) played a myriad of eclectic instruments, from autoharp and celesta to bouzouki, kora, and Teisco, yet it always felt like simply hearing two talented musicians jamming in a room. Although the sound still delivered her typical orchestral lushness, the sparse rawness gave space for Apple’s vocals to connect on a visceral, primal level. It hit you right in the feels. –Alan Ranta

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the end of time

[History Always Favours The Winners; 2016-2019]

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Borne of fascination with the haunted hotel ballroom of The Shining, Leyland Kirby’s The Caretaker project had long used manipulated and repeated phrases of early recordings to probe concepts of memory and mortality, but Everywhere at the end of time was a more systematic attempt to auralize the process of decay, disruption, and disintegration associated with a particular neurocognitive disorder, encapsulated in the premise that his Jack Torrance-channeling alter ego was stricken with dementia. Beginning in 2016 and released as 6 albums over the course of the following 3 years, these installments began with slightly altered — slowed down, reverb drenched, but fairly wistful and mellifluous — fragments of lighter-than-air ballroom pop, drifting in and out with a feeling of reverie. Smatterings of record-surface noise accented these songs in ways connoting nostalgia. By the end of the series, though, the signal-to-noise ratio completely tipped, with anything resembling more natural instrumental timbres mostly buried under layers of rumbling and crackling bass that were disorienting and ominous. This was the sonic simulation of the self dissipating into oblivion. The total experience was the deep subjective horror of losing oneself, an encounter with the abject, and the result was one of the most ambitious conceptual sound works of the 2010s. –Dave Gurney

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DJ Rashad

Double Cup

[Teklife; 2013]

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Five years since his death, DJ Rashad’s vision maintains a spiritual grip on the music world. His art and life were marked by an eternal exuberance, with his legacy defined on Double Cup, a coiled spring of hedonistic and architecturally pristine syncopation. DJ Spinn sumarized the Double Cup state of mind on its title track: “Break it down, roll it up, pass that shit, what the fuck spinning Rashad? That double cup/ Teklife we run this shit, pour up a double cup.” Rashad’s innovation was adding a luxurious sheen to his production. Whereas early footwork was militaristic, filleting samples beyond recognition and sauteeing them in a muddy slurry of sub bass, the international-facing Double Cup was undeniably VIP music. Songs like “Drank, Kush, Barz” and “She a Go” could be jammed in a limo or hotel lounge, whereas “Acid Bit” and “I’m Too Hi” drew parallels between house, rave, and the DIY spots where Rashad and Spinn used to mix for footwork crews all night. In just under 10 years since Planet Mu brought the thriving Chicago footwork scene to an international audience, the power and influence of Double Cup has only grown. –Ross Devlin

Death Grips

The Money Store

[Epic; 2012]

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Death Grips’ affiliation with Epic Records was as quick as it was conspicuous, but in retrospect, doesn’t the major label deserve some credit for helping to develop the DG sound? “Naw, fuck that,” MC Ride indirectly responded on the eponymous track. It’s clear looking at the backstory and the releases that happened afterward just how unshakably careening the trio of Ride, Zach Hill, and Andy Morin were from their inception. The Money Store happened despite the institutional support implied by labels clamoring for a signature, and the relatively sample-free (compared to the preceding Exmilitary) brutality therein felt like a natural continuance and an initial show of artistic solipsism. Death Grips highlighted the importance of their “vision” around the time of the album’s release. The album itself left us with a sense that cohesiveness was totally compatible with ambiguously violent lyrics that were certainly more heaved than they were sung or rapped. And, ultimately, the insanely catchy hooks that announced “SYSTEM OVAH” or “double… d-double” had no suited producer to thank. Music world, meet the unstoppable force with no immovable object. –Mike Reid

Tirzah

Devotion

[Domino; 2018]

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Devotion is a gift. The London-based designer and musician Tirzah Mastin took over six years between releasing her debut pair of experimental, bassy EPs on Greco Roman (No Romance, I’m Not Dancing) and her debut album, Devotion. The radical departure from club sounds to bedroom R&B was executed with unbridled vulnerability. The tracks on the two EPs were eclectic, fun, bubbly. Tirzah’s voice lilted like a supermarket announcer, the beats seemingly constructed from shopping mall refuse and household implements. However, slow numbers like “Malfunction” indicated where she would go next: conversational, candid, poetic yet maintaining a claustrophobic intimacy, as if we were witnessing a couple have a domestic on the tube. Few were prepared for the humility that Tirzah demonstrated with Devotion, an album that maintains a strong acuity and deft touch. Despite the sparse production and essentially naked tone of Tirzah’s voice, the album didn’t feel at all unfinished or underdeveloped. She crooned and stumbled on “Do You Know;” was disarmed and uncomfortably candid on “Affection.” The effect was like a twilight confrontation, a lover inches from your face, hot breath against your cheek, daring you to look them in the eyes. –Ross Devlin

SOPHIE

PRODUCT

[Numbers; 2015]

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On Black Friday 2015, SOPHIE’s debut compilation of previously-released and then-new singles, PRODUCT, arrived alongside a flurry of limited-edition conceptual art-cum-cult objects that included a silicone sex toy, a transparent plastic puffer jacket, some branded future-goth sunglasses, and a pair of towering platform party heels. Each, unsurprisingly (and supposedly), sold out in a blink, snatched out of the market by the most on-it fans and collectors, but luckily enough for the rest of us, the songs kept circulating. Of the eight singles, highlights include opener “BIPP” (originally released by Numbers in 2013), which behaved a bit like a sonic cv with imperative lyrics like “I can make you feel better, if you let me.” It was soon followed by the addictively effervescent “LEMONADE” (2014), which infamously achieved the commercial crossover appeal SOPHIE and her PC Music affiliates had been sounding out all along when it was used in a summer 2015 McDonald’s commercial. And lest we forget crowning jewel “HARD” (2014), which to my mind is still one of her strongest tracks. Earlier this year, Numbers reissued PRODUCT in its original format of four vinyl singles as a testament to the way that the songs have stood the test of the latter half of the decade amidst an ever-escalating and well-earned SOPHIE frenzy. –Cookcook

Jlin

Dark Energy

[Planet Mu; 2015]

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This decade upped the clutch minimalism ante considerably. There was Ninos Du Brasil’s Novos Mistérios, Shygirl’s self-titled EP, and Container’s 2015 release, but the latter’s release year and this nearly-done decade belonged to Jlin’s jarring, neck-breaker of a debut. Four years after turning our heads with her track for Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works Vol. 2, Jlin gave us this compact but ferocious opening statement. We got our “Erotic Heat” fix (juiced and reduced here), but not before a punishing sequence cresting with the dizzyingly efficient speed-garroting comprising “Guantanamo.” As much as this album throttled one’s skull, it also caressed the ear with nimble, finely embossed patterns that would make muscles contract, shy of dancing. And her spare (for footwork-based music) use of sampling felt both classic and refreshing in its nakedness. That Black Origami raised the bar Jerrilynn Patton had set here was arguable, but Dark Energy’s tightly-coiled, tension-fueled charm still felt rough and ready-built to last, much like the still-cracking melodrama sampled on its closer. –Willcoma

Beyoncé

[Parkwood/Columbia; 2013]

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Beyoncé is a corporation at this point. Online, Beyoncé is legally www.beyonce.com. Any associated websites, features, content, materials, products, and/or services is owned and/or operated by Parkwood Entertainment, LLC, where Beyoncé Knowles-Carter‎ holds the title CEO. Beyoncé is the climax of Queen Bey’s superpower: algorithmic perpetuation of business.

In 2016, Beyoncé brought on (obvious Illuminati profiteer) Steve Pamon, who was JPMorgan Chase’s head of sports and entertainment marketing. Hiring Pamon was after 4, around the time she announced “I started my own company when I decided to manage myself.” And with almost no promotion and zero announcement, Beyoncé gloriously reimagined Queen Bey, as if announcing herself for the first time, similar to how aspiring pop stars typically named their debut as self-titled (e.g., Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston). Ultimately, sealing the deal (in BLOOD) with Pamon, Beyoncé miraculously materialized her sentiment, “I wanted to follow the footsteps of Madonna and be a powerhouse and have my own empire” — i.e., the algorithmic perpetuation of business.

Larger than any sports star, streaming channel, actor, museum, musician, subscription service, performer, and live event: Beyoncé is an icon. She’s who all of our kids need to discover and become. You too can absolutely be Queen Bey. Feel herself move through your body throughout the entire listening experience of Beyoncé. Once again, the tips of your fingers and follicles of all hair flutter in femininity, flush with Beyoncé. You’ve become her so many times throughout your life that you’re still becoming her. The royal we can be come Beyoncé.

Afterthought: FUCK JAY Z!!! –C Monster

Sufjan Stevens

Carrie & Lowell

[Asthmatic Kitty; 2015]

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Like Sufjan, I don’t know how to begin. I don’t really listen to Carrie & Lowell all that much — it cuts too deep. In the hyperspecificity of its pain — being left at video stores, swimming lessons, hidden cigarettes — Carrie & Lowell got at some more general loss, one that found its form in the frost-bitten hollowness of its ambiences and in the rosy-warmth of its guitar-work. It was an emptiness communicated in the precarity of its melodies, just as likely to reach for the heavens as to fall the fuck apart. How to begin? Or perhaps, how to end? Because really, what was there to be done with an album whose central figure was the spirit (both divine and crushingly banal)? Whose every utterance felt haunted? This was not a hopeful record. Its questions left echoes, but no answers. How, Sufjan asked, could you mourn the losses that made you, whose only presence was their absence? What were you left with, when people depart, apart from yourself? But — and this was crucial — the spectrality of these questions was also the site of the album’s alchemy, because if Sufjan was left with ghosts, we were left with music and lyrics, with the sounds of someone trying to live with their ghosts, to ride with them. And blessedly, sometimes that was enough. Sometimes it was enough to know that Carrie & Lowell, in its despair, in its signs and wonders, in its exquisite embrace of those who leave and those who stay, was there. Whether we could hear it or not. –Rafael Lubner

James Blake

[ATLAS; 2011]

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In 2011, James Blake broke from a devotion to the beat by positing new spaces between the biological and the technological, seeing the digital in all its expressive potential. From the hum of a CPU, Blake sourced tenderness. He derived a vulnerable, capable instrument for communicating depression and trauma from the textured cracking of a quantized, pitch-corrected voice, always barely breaking surface. He brought sweetness with rhythms that escaped the average body, and he brought the warmth of an embrace with harmony, melody, and lyric. James Blake sparked a decade of output doused in melancholy and spoken in a new syntax, where experiments in song and sound could take place, where the tinkerer could produce. This was music that established its own listening context and did so with total clarity of vision and voice. Production experiments became tangible because of the cathartic and affective responses they exposed: the jolting polyrhythms of “Unluck,” the displaced and booming bass in the midst of “Limit to Your Love,” the unsteady pulse of “Lindsfarne II,” the fissuring sidechained synth at the peak of “The Wilhelm Scream,” and the repose found within “Give Me My Mouth,” all of these emotionally mapped, inscribed through sound. His music of the past decade presented us with new soundscapes for brokenness, a troubled machine with a sleek veneer, a soundtrack to the iridescent violet malaise that characterizes plugged-in life even a decade later. –Leah B. Levinson

Danny Brown

XXX

[Fools’ Gold; 2011]

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In a review of Old, Danny Brown’s 2013 follow-up to 2011 breakthrough XXX, we called the earlier release “a record that alternated between manic, mind-numbingly hyped-up, incredibly graphic tales of sexual debauchery and drug use, and reflections on the effects of crime, poverty, and drug abuse on the individual, the family, and society at large.” If that juxtaposition shocked some during the first half of the decade, it might be regarded as old hat today, thanks surely in part to the enduring influence of XXX and Brown himself. In hindsight, we might see XXX as Danny Brown’s Rubber Soul: the dividing line between the Midwest-rooted alternative hip-hop stylings of an equally seminal record like The Hybrid and the stylistically unbound indulgence of a more critically acclaimed record like Atrocity Exhibition. XXX was where the influence of peers like Quelle Chris met the influence of outsiders like Paul White, the contrast informing an entire generation of genre crossover since. On that note, XXX also likely holds a special place in the hearts of many who turned 30 this decade, as the album’s intro and outro both provided anthems to celebrate the occasion. And while not every track has aged as well, the overall impact remains ever present. –Samuel Diamond

Rihanna

ANTI

[Roc Nation; 2016]

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The wordplay is just too enticing: ANTI-capitalist, ANTI-authority, ANTI-thetical. Somehow, Rihanna’s eighth record played us all when it came to each of those things. It was a pop album that poptimist critics couldn’t rationalize. Despite their titular accomplishment, they still seemed out of touch with the realities of streaming-era pop. ANTI was both savvy business move and complete commercial dodge, a too-long and not-long-enough author statement that tasted like the last drag of your last-ever cigarette while sounding like the lighter click before the first time you ever started. Before the everywhere cultural moment of the Black cowboy, Rihanna was a lone desperado, a Marlboro Man staring down the empty plain toward a town of undeserving sinners, uttering a single command: “Work.” Emerging from a world of information overflow and the Babel of internet-pop-politics, ANTI was solitary, inarguable, and unfuckwithable. In other words, yes, ANTI was thetical. You can go right on ahead and reach for that pistol if you want. By the time you’ve grabbed it, you’ll already have a hole where your heart should be. –Lijah Fosl

Destroyer

Kaputt

[Merge; 2011]

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Dan Bejar broke his longest drought between records and kicked off the decade with Kaputt, managing to prove that he was still capable of surprising us. Although initially confounding, the album eventually made perfect sense as unmistakably “Destroyer,” not unlike 2004’s Your Blues. Setting the tone for the rest of his 2010s output, Kaputt took the elements of a Destroyer record and shot them through a prism of neon, velour, and barbiturates. Since its release, Bejar’s voice has rarely exceeded a mumble; the previously garish colors have been stripped from his album covers; and his particular brand of rock arrangements began to lean less on guitars and more on woodwinds. Perhaps no album in his career has so thoroughly set a tone for so much of what was to come. Though his music largely exists out of any specific time or place, Kaputt, oozing as it is with a kind of hazy languor beneath a glossy sheen, does seem to make sense as an intro to this decade, a disorienting mix of maximal stimulation and minimal engagement — “ambient disco,” as Bejar put it, or: it’s got a good beat, and you can lie on a couch to it. –Jay

Elysia Crampton

[Break World; 2018]

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Over the course of the decade, the sound and influence of Latin American music grew to dominate the charts, even going so far as to influence how chart position is calculated to take into account YouTube, where the youth, and artists like Bad Bunny, dominate. Through this narrative of style and influence is a conversation about ownership — the term “latin” seems insufficient, given the diversity and breadth of talent competing for self-definition. Elysia Crampton’s music is insistent in its reference to the Aymaran people of Bolivia and to Crampton’s trans identity. The track “Moscow,” on her self-titled debut, produced after releasing celebrated albums and digital artifacts as E+E, was dedicated to the trans femme mariposa Ofelia, f.k.a. Carlos Espinoza. In addition to the contemporary message, the insistent throb of the songs on EP seemed unconcerned with geometry or the contemporary minimalist ecosystem of flat planes and muted tones. “Orion Song” began with what sounded like a furious alarm clock, and the gradual assemblage of objects and propulsive noise makers gave the song a maximal, euphoric sense of terror. The anarchic clarity of these tones felt both of-the-moment and ahead of it. Terror and euphoria were defining aesthetic modes of the 2010s, observable in the lush panic of popular film studio A24 and the obsessively granular doomer mentality of experimental music. Elysia Crampton’s music in turn weaved a compelling narrative of this decade, one of bodies and identity, revolution and reflection. She thrusted a lance through this war rug of digital noise to reveal sunlight. –Ross Devlin

Kendrick Lamar

To Pimp a Butterfly

[Top Dawg; 2015]

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The gall Kendrick Lamar had to doctor a Tupac soundbite by inserting himself in it, to place himself in conversation with the West Coast hip-hop avatar and discuss the importance of autonomy and perseverance as two men embroiled in a system rigged against them. Lamar chose to end To Pimp a Butterfly with this interaction as a meditation on longevity and the dangers of artistic corruption. The entire “interview” would come off as a gauche stunt if Butterfly hadn’t spent its previous 15 tracks solidifying Lamar’s status as the preeminent mouthpiece of hip-hop today.

Twenty-seven years old when the album was released, Lamar’s greatest fear at the time seemed to be his 30s. This is the decade of resignation, of financial and creative ruin, according to Butterfly. So here we have K-Dot’s masterpiece, a record so clearly created with the intention of establishing the Compton rapper’s genius before he hit that age of no return. Its politics were prominent and thoughtful, yet never overbearing or preachy. Its grooves were impeccable, beaming soul, jazz, and funk through a prism of nostalgia that Lamar was too young to have ever experienced firsthand. The second half of the 2010s saw hip-hop becoming less verbal, stylized as ever but more iterative. In light of To Pimp’s bravura, its self-aware lunge toward greatness, it’s easy to see why the genre retreated backwards in reaction. –Sean Hannah

Kanye West

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

[Def Jam; 2010]

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Embracing your inner asshole shouldn’t lend itself so well to pathos. But on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye’s first opus of the 2010s, all the falsely penitent confessions about dick pics, all the fantasies of porn star matrimony, all the embittered infidelity made Yeezy seem human again. The coldness of Kanye’s synthpop dirge 808s & Heartbreak dissipated upon Ye’s inaugural line in “Dark Fantasy”: “I fantasized ‘bout this back in Chicago.” West was back, emboldened as ever and characteristically prodigal.

Fantasy should have bloated over with star power, as it commissioned both heavyweights and up-and-comers alike from the hip-hop, indie, and R&B universes. It should have choked on its own ambition, vacillating between self-important baroque orchestration and irreverent auto-tune austerity. And yet it succeeds, a monument of gluttony and poise. As Barack Obama attested, Kanye’s a jackass, which we all knew to be true already. Why not let the jackasses have their moment of glory, though? If anyone’s earned it, it’s Kanye. –Sean Hannah

Dean Blunt

The Redeemer

[Hippos in Tanks; 2013]

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The teachings of the Catholic church oppose a set of cardinal sins and virtues. Lust and Chastity, Wrath and Patience, Envy and Gratitude. These tuples represent archetypal conducts and dispositions, behaviors to avoid and pursue. Atonement is the bridge between redemption and sin. One can identify many such sins in Dean Blunt’s The Narcissist II: “XXX,” “And I’ll show u heaven if u let me,” “I just need a bitch to lay…” Were there traces of reparation and penance in The Redeemer? Were those two albums a diptych more than entries in a tetralogy? Did a transparent attempt at psychomachia get mistaken for the heartbroken balladry of a rascal whose latest punt was to wear his heart on his sleeve?

Starting with the praying hands that adorned the cover, the signs were all there. “The Walls of Jericho,” “Seven Seals of Affirmation,” the Meridian Demon, “God forsake us now”… The clarity in the forms, a rupture with the lo-fi fuzziness of Hype Williams, also signified the opposition. Yet, not even the centrality of the longing for a lost love was new. Behold Dante traversing the circles of Hell to meet with Beatrice. Songs like “Need to let u go” or “Papi” seemed to frame a lover who understood he fucked up, as he praised what was inevitably lost. So much is clear. Tellingly, acoustic guitars and warm synths wrap the appearance of the female voice in the album. Blunt invited two female collaborators: one from the past to sing about the need to wake up and let go, as if calling from the netherworld; the other, present in Blunt’s successive work, who appeared rooted in immediacy, to talk about minutes and a very material home. Indeed, from the get-go, The Redeemer was billed as a “relationship study.” Was that the perverse rug-pulling? An allegory so blunt and evident by design? Maybe. Such is the paradox of an album that invites tropological interpretation while grinning from behind a fogged crystal. –jrodriguez6

Laurel Halo

Quarantine

[Hyperdub; 2012]

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It’s difficult to choose which Laurel Halo release from the decade is her strongest work, from 2013’s deconstructed house EP Behind The Green Door to 2018’s dancefloor-ready DJ-Kicks installment to 2015’s ambient masterpiece In Situ. But it was 2012’s Quarantine, her debut album on Hyperdub, that was etched into music history for its provocative reinterpretation of what it meant to make a vocal album and, dare we say it, pop (gasp!) album this decade. Laurel Halo used her simultaneously processed and raw vocals to create a new kind of intimacy for the listener, sung as if you were the only receiver of these messages. The melodies were both infectious like a pop song and entirely unexpected, as though Halo were simply meandering through various thoughts, feeling her way through the music. Combined with ambience, obsessive repetitions, synths diffused through cheesecloths, 70s sci-fi atmospheres, and even more layers of voice, Halo created a subterranean cave filled with nothing short of an infinite sonic universe. We come back to its title, Quarantine, and it makes total sense. –Ariel Zetina

Lolina

The Smoke

[Self-Released; 2018]

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When I reviewed The Smoke, I tried to understand it in geographic terms. I heard in it the way that Inga Copeland’s Lolina gets in and around the city, tossing evidence into the river as she escapes from one place to another, running and exercising her “right to be forgotten.” My critical conceit was in assuming that, for all of her attempts to get lost, Lolina is a character who can be found. I understand now that the reason Lolina tosses her Oyster card into the Thames is because her escape is not a spatial one, but a spectral one. Lolina is a projection of Copeland; a “fake;” a ghost; an empty, vaporous presence. In retrospect, I should never have reviewed The Smoke. It is, as Lolina points out, an error typical of the critic, in their hubris, to “try to judge a girl by how she fakes.” –Will Neibergall

Future

DS2

[Epic; 2015]

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Who else could sound as at home crooning alongside Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran as they do weaving ballistic balladry on “Stick Talk”? Who else could conflate their lavish spending habits with ruminations on their deceased grandfather in such earnest?

Future Hendrix’s near-ubiquity in the 2010s is a testament to his effortlessly consistent output and his insular yet expansive universe. Establishing a hazy and highly melodic framework for nearly every trap-rapper to postdate his rise, he’s made a career out of straddling each end of his own dichotomy. Future is a crooner and a lyricist; an impassioned lover and a world-weary fighter; pop star and a monster — an artist whose confessional, often contradictory songcraft unfurls like a frantically-composed tweet thread.

Although any of Future’s mixtapes could have earned a spot on this list, DS2 stood out as our most lucid look into Future’s world to date. Produced almost exclusively by Metro Boomin and Southside, the tape was built on a brutalist foundation of bass, its thundering 808s and sirens boring deep into horror flick-inspired soundscapes. It was between elegant pads and industrial percussion that Future truly shined, his bars an uninterrupted torrent of moans, snarls, and introspective whispers.

In a decade defined by social media charades and songs designed to be TikTok dances or punchlines, DS2 best demonstrated Future’s painstaking attention to the details of his albums. A lesser artist could’ve built an image on his quotable (and strangely lovable) toxicity and strained “slob on me knobs.” In the case of Future’s oeuvre, though, the internet’s a mere distraction — nothing more than a vehicle for new tapes to drop. Bump “Where Ya At,” “Slave Master,” or “Kno the Meaning” and you’ll bear witness to the real spectacle: a filterless artist bent on exorcising all his demons in excruciating detail. Like its alchemical cover art, DS2 was amorphous, but always alluring — a lava lamp filled with cathartic spillage. –Jude Noel

Mount Eerie

A Crow Looked At Me

[P.W. Elverum & Sun; 2017]

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Death
When my father died, my mother was essentially destroyed by it, in many ways consumed by it. There wasn’t a day for months she wasn’t crying. Even when the tears dried, there was something shattered about her. It’s been almost 15 years since, and the fighter I knew growing up is gone, my father’s death replacing her with someone overwhelmed, remorseful, and anguished. I barely recognize her now. She maintains airs of independence, but deep down something was irreplaceably lost that September morning.

Is
What am I to know about death? My father passed away when we were only beginning to mend fences. Family members who have died seemed all too distant. My friends and family, what few I have, they’re still alive, only one facing the specter of death (though I’m not sure it’s real). All I know is that, like love, people change with death. Maybe I too have changed. But I don’t know. I can’t know. Nobody is willing to say so. In place of answers… a sad disquiet.

Real
I’m sorry for what you’re dealing with. I know, I know, it’s not final. But…it’s inevitable, isn’t it? Fuck, I can’t imagine even the slightest what pain and anguish you’re facing now. Knowing that chasm awaits you. But then, I’m not sure I’ll ever know. All I can say is I’m sorry, even if it’s so damn meaningless. Because I feel your hurt, even if I cannot so much as utter a coherent word of it. And I will feel it when that day comes. I can’t help it, you know. –Ze Pequeno

Lil B

White Flame

[Self-Released; 2012]

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A hundred feet of conduit banded up with deeply colored red tape, tossed in the back of a short-bed truck to be delivered at 8 AM. Gotta get electricity. I mean, Lil B helped create ALL of this. Shit: bruh. He’s reeeeal itchy. Ad libs got tossed off like grass clippings. Always promoting new projects, all of it rare too LOL. So much was covered on White Flame! It’s such a trip! Complicated, beautiful, contradictory, dull, transcendental, hilarious, DOPE, forgettable, soulful, sad, etc. Also, quick shoutout to all of the crazy shit he says, just in general. Oh, and another quick shoutout to the multiple musical styles/genres White Flame covered. He was all over the place on this one. The beats were so far off in the background that it at times felt like BASEDGOD was rapping over-top of his phone. I love him. #TYBG –Bort

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Scott Walker

Bish Bosch

[4AD; 2012]

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Although Scott Walker was reclusive and disinclined to give interviews, those that are available to us showed a genial, good-humored human. Nonetheless, Bish Bosch, 2006’s The Drift, and 1995’s Tilt have cast a remarkable pal over their respective decades. They stood apart from other significant works of their time both by design and by their innate refusal to wed their eloquence to mere elucidation. These albums reported on alienation so profound, so far flung they felt like urgent, immaculate, yet hopelessly tangled transmissions from purgatory. One can repeatedly look up the words “macaronic,” “mahout,” and “mascon” and still find no illumination. Every line a shining, austere forgone conclusion, all the more dazzling for its elusiveness. He may’ve been light and jocular with Jarvis Cocker, but the work showed a stridency and obsessiveness that screamed to the listener. Not for help, but just to have someone to scream to. Like the bizarrely hilarious, churning “Epizootics!,” abject isolation has a terrible momentum to it. It’s perhaps safe to say that if Walker didn’t find a place for this momentum, he’d have been lost to us like Syd Barrett after that first dandied blush.

But we didn’t know the man 2019 took from us. One can recognize the liability of seeing and interpreting without interacting. The acute sensory realm of this trilogy notwithstanding, the music could take on this draggy sort of weight. And yet you gotta hate it when people say “it’s called depression” in a dismissive way. Besides it being simply reductive, it slams shut the doors of lateral moves (a.k.a. creativity), which save us from fully succumbing to despair. These albums represent the pinnacle of this creativity at its most relentless. And the remnants of the crooner’s former teen idol self became hardest to grasp on Bish Bosch. The soul, or pained lamenting, of that previous life gradually gave way to glib, sneering pronouncements over a cluttered dissection table. In both phases, there seemed a tactical emotional detachment, but this was only a means for Walker to better get to something more genuine.

Just as the 1960s and 70s showed Scott Walker to be a willing, ambitious pop interlocutor, these albums showed us a sizable void of endless relief on the other side of fame’s dogged obligations. While not strictly fear-exploiting, these albums were only pop in the sense that a horror film is. And Scott coolly escorted us through these nauseating, dispiriting, and alarming scenes, nowhere more Crypt Keeper-esque than on this album (unless one counts the 2014 Sunn O))) collaboration Soused, which can’t help but feel a bit like an addendum). There was a dry giddiness that both buoyed and ballasted the audience’s sinking feelings. It may’ve elicited some uncomfortable laughter, but a choking vast crush of space soon followed. And it wasn’t hard to see those pitted glaring eyes of his in those moments. You knew that he was a vessel in those moments, that “elegant” is transitory while “explicit” is definitive. The rubberneck field notes were laid out, and authorial distance didn’t soften them (even on the gorgeous, desiccated closing ballad, “Conducator”). The crude, evergreen armchair dismissal of what gets called “provocative” as “rubbing one’s nose in shit” seemed a relative phenomenon to Bish Bosch. Having provoked this sort of defensive counter-provocation among disillusioned fans of his early work, Walker only seemed to restrict his Id less, wringing purple spits of off-puttingly tactile verbiage into his drone and clatter.

Scott Walker prized the text first and foremost, and the urgency of having words matter puts him (plus the seriousness of much of the subjects he writes about) much in line with equally vital neo-conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. In times of shrinking attention spans, abstracted, pithy language became less an obfuscation than a lunge away from glazed, transactional impatience (since we all have glowing rectangles behind our eyelids, Holzer often infuses her text pieces with LED lights). Walker obviously adored language, and his exuberant fetishization of it was contagious. Reclusive though he might have been, he managed to be quite the boon to other brave souls who endeavored to meet him half way and listen. These last four albums may serve as poetic testaments to the elaborate wretchedness of humankind, but it was delivered in a way that felt more hale and hearty than usual for this sort of thing. A more comprehensive consciousness of the physical and temporal world around one may have a mighty sag to it, but Walker heaved a glad shoulder and found a mesmerizing gait. Bish Bosch fleshed out our latent existential woes, but once through, he flushed them out as well. Both a purgative and arresting (his voice remained elocution personified) experience, this album was nonetheless probably the least replayed favorite of many (this writer included). But as in previous decades, Walker had a way of cutting through the drowsy haze of moodiness or casual preference and right to a never-convenient, always-essential absolute. –Willcoma

Oneohtrix Point Never

Replica

[Mexican Summer/Software; 2011]

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Change is the inevitable failure to repeat the past. We are so bad at repeating the past, at replicating the same thing again and again, so as to create a reassuringly familiar simulation of our past lives and selves. We always fail, we always make mistakes, but in the process we create the future.

This is the temporal drama Oneohtrix Point Never played out in 2011 on Replica. The producer’s fifth album, its most distinctive feature was an almost anal repetition of the same set of micro-samples, drawn largely from television commercials of the 1980s and 90s. Most of its 10 tracks stuttered, skipped, or stammered with the sounds of fragmented keys, incidental noise, beats, and vocals. Virtually all of its samples were rendered unrecognizable and uncanny by their truncated lengths. But more importantly, while each replicated mini-phrase was usually identical with its predecessor in purely sonic terms, each repetition created a new context, thereby altering each sample’s resonance and meaning, separating it incrementally from itself.

This process of separation was enhanced by Daniel Lopatin’s increasingly mature and sophisticated production. Washed-out, floating synthesizers were superimposed and wafted over the juddering samples, inflecting them with a profound sense of mourning and loss, highlighting their failure to retain the same significance, illuminating their passage from the same to the different. Lopatin talked in interviews about the idea of the replica as a way of coping with the decline of human knowledge, but the music on Replica spoke to much more. It was the sound of culture changing in the failure to reproduce itself, of society changing, of individual identities changing, of DNA changing.

Replica, then, was an album about the impossibility of replicas. Yet this impossibility was a necessary precondition for the evolution of life and for history, which is why the album was and still is as beautiful as it is fatalistic. Tracks like “Andro” and “Submersible” drifted nebulously, pregnant with creation and an irrepressible suspicion of possibility, each additional sample or chord always invoking something much bigger than itself. Other tracks, such as “Power of Persuasion” and “Nassau,” accumulated poignancy and weight with each stubborn loop, unfolding new sensations despite the ostensible duplication of source material. And, at all times, the mortal failure to reproduce an identical copy of what came before could just as easily be heard as a victory, as a liberation from codes, conventions, and precedents.

Yet despite its conceptual depth, Replica was as much a stylistic and aesthetic triumph for Daniel Lopatin as anything else. Pushing him away from the synth-heavy coldness of Returnal and previous albums, it took the chopped & screwed blueprint laid down by his 2010 Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 mixtape and transformed it into a deeply coherent and unified artistic statement. It may have been arguably non-musical in its obsessive repetition of sub-second samples, but it created in the process an incredibly unique way of finding significance in sound, as well as significance in our all-too human inability to preserve the past inviolate. –Simon Chandler

Young Thug

Barter 6

[300; 2015]

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What remains to be said about Young Thug? Sonically, his style has become something like a joke that loses its magic through over-explanation (I imagine Lyor Cohen can type the phrase “voice as an instrument” through predictive text alone); in terms of cultural impact, capturing the Young Thug phenomenon through the lens of a single release may well be futile (akin to flattening a decade in music into a list of albums). This much is clear, though: with each Elton John collaboration or appearance on the set of Uncut Gems, we now celebrate not the actual result thereof, but the absurd, inexorable march of the man behind “Extacy Pill” toward the cultural stature he has long deserved.

The cost, of course, has been paid by the art itself. Hundreds of leaks and a farmers’ almanac worth of Slime Seasons later, the Barter-era Young Thug exists primarily as an echo. His Billboard ubiquity, overdue even if over-corrective, rides on the Burberry coattails of his signees and direct stylistic descendants. His albums, now unambiguously official and uncharacteristically true to their release dates, serve primarily to underline the finer points of their predecessors in the catalog rather than attempting to build upon them.

And yet, there exists one perfectly-preserved document of the era. At first glance, it could be easily misread as a capitulation; features from Boosie and Young Dolph and the endlessly-handwringable dust-up with Lil Wayne were, if not wholly out of place, certainly intentional steps outside of Thug’s Atlanta creative haven. The mere presence of someone in his ear fretting about the distinction between an album and the newly-invented “commercial mixtape” concept did not bode well.

It didn’t matter. Thug’s most vital output has rarely featured (or required) clear, intentional sequencing, yet “Constantly Hating” and “Just Might Be” simply could not exist except at this album’s opening and close. They enclose some 50 minutes of direct exposure to the mind of Jeffery Lamar Williams, a considered exhibition of the entire spectrum of rap performance that can just as easily scan as a stream of consciousness. Four years on, if not from the very moment of release, Barter 6 is a clear coronation: an inflection point between deifying and defining a genre, a record so true to Young Thug’s trademark mercuriality that it’s a wonder it was ever released. –Corrigan B

Carly Rae Jepsen

E•MO•TION

[Interscope; 2015]

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Joy in a bottle: bubbly, sweet, even-keeled, refreshing, perpetually new. I’ve always associated Carly Rae Jepsen with Bruce Springsteen. It’s a tenuous and perhaps confounding association, but the two are nonetheless bound in my mind. It’s in the endless anthems, the blind faith in the hook, the bubblegum uplift, the hardworking hero, the balladeer draped in honest fabric, completely sincere. Most importantly, they both provide an idol to pour oneself into. Carly Rae Jepsen: an adorkable hopeless romantic forever empowered, lost, and doing the most. She’s marked by a public-facing air of humility and stays in her lane with grace. With E•MO•TION, she gave us something to lean on.

E•MO•TION and its consequent reception signify the triumph of poptimism over the past two decades, but, further, it contributed to the divorce of pop aesthetics from strictly mainstream spheres. E•MO•TION was the moment that CRJ stepped down from the super-stardom of “Call Me Maybe” and into a minor-major mid-tier cult-pop status that characterizes the diversified and democratized idol landscape we have today. She helped carve a space for a new format of pop idol, the influencer-artist, a space where musicians can find greater creative freedom via fervent fan support and a creative license to call more shots. Much of the most exciting pop music today is being made in this newly carved space, where artists can take creative risks while performing something like an authentic self just an arm’s reach away from the stans.

Beyond this, E•MO•TION’s acceptance demonstrated a shift in pop criticism, one that moved beyond the condescending, protective defense that poptimism had accumulated. Because its production was lush and organic, because its songwriting was sincere and full of intent, and because its hooks were irresistible, E•MO•TION made it clear that it required no protection. Anthemic without naiveté and strong even when its singer was at her most vulnerable.

This was not pop re-purposed as a tool for critique of Western modes of consumption and production. Nor were arms twisted into taking it seriously tautologically, because it had already proven popular and hence influential. This was pop as a viable music in and of itself. It’s the simple euphoria. It’s in the feeling that arises with the perfect scansion that causes the line “I think I broke up with my boyfriend today/ But I don’t really care” to burst forth in climax. It’s the harmony between her proclivity to constantly ask if she’s “too much” (“Because I want what I want, do you think that I want too much?,” “Oh, did I say too much? I’m so in my head, think I’m out of touch,” or simply, recently, “Is this too much?”) and the fact that she dressed the question in an epicurean, sugary, and burning sonic architecture. Most importantly, Jepsen wasn’t grinning for a moment. She smiled with depth, warmth, vulnerability, and tenderness, but it was never a grin.

“Call Me Maybe” was infectious and viral. It shouted its way through grocery stores aisles jolting shelved goods and brattishly dodging consumers, running amok with love. E•MO•TION’s songs were reeled in, containing the passion but diffusing it, sweetly. They held a listener, talked with them, and left them waiting, wanting more. God bless this timeless crush. –B. Levinson

The Caretaker

An empty bliss beyond this World

[History Always Favours the Winners; 2011]

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Experience, the Tantrics tell us, is fundamentally empty of a coherent self and, at the same time, inherently blissful. It’s in the union that the trick lies — a trick that is an untrick, a seeing of a truth that was always right in front of us but to which we weren’t paying careful attention.

The partially illusory self is a vital concern of The Caretaker’s — zeitgeisty, time-ghosty (or is it the spirit of time itself?) in an age of self-care commodified and endlessly reproduced. The nominal impetus for An empty bliss beyond this World was the experience of Alzheimer’s disease — the mind slowly losing its hold on memory, on those contents that are often seen to constitute selfhood, a tragedy in which all “things” must literally pass.

But among this empty landscape of loss, specificity is not entirely destroyed. Tantrics understand this too, seeing the play of experience as the dance of the God/dess, which both manifests in the particular and is constituted of an underlying non-duality. In an exquisite tension, both perspectives are simultaneously and entirely true. Consciousness-objects persist, karmic or neuropsychological, traces of former actions and reactivities that remain to be set in motion when the appropriate trigger brings them to fruition.

Exquisite and loopy, then — like experience itself. In our dotage, we circle, our emotions are released by reproductions of the art of our prime.

And in the age of mechanical reproduction, there is a nostalgia that can be evoked by the recording as recording, a patina’d sense of “the past” as an idea, not an era. To wit, the crackling, wavering pre-war 78 loops that formed the foundations of Leyland Kirby’s decaying edifice, a hotel full of ghosts. Not so decaying, though, because where pieces like The Disintegration Loops or Kirby’s Everywhere at the end of time series were literally in deconstruction, here the music hovered like gossamer, like ectoplasm produced from the womb of the medium, before being abruptly snuffed out of existence. Each loop was infinitely cherishable, specific in (numerous) time(s) but infinitely extendable, both empty of meaning (if meaning is comprehension, if it is generalizable) and pregnant with innumerable significances.

And then, and then — a decade after its release, An empty bliss is now a historical artefact itself, subject to the fate on which it is also commentary. It’s a punishment that fits the crime (can’t cheat karma), evoking an infinite regress of nostalgias.

The angel of history sees catastrophe — the angel of memory, bliss. The function of the angel is to act as the Singing Detective, but when the time between the stimulus and the consciousness of the stimulus extends to encompass all of infinity — as any moment of time does — how can we ever ascertain whodunnit? –Rowan Savage

Grouper

Ruins

[Kranky; 2014]

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After years of wading through the mire of dystopian visions, uncertain futures, and supposedly imminent ends, Ruins was what it felt like to look back. It was a loose morsel of time captured through memory’s haze, eroded through absence and polished through rumination. It had a tangible presence, an organic universe built into its corporeal sounds, but in its soul, it was still a soft mystery. It was isolated and hermetic, honest about our era’s spirit of solitude and solemnity without being broken down, a passage between 21st-century dreams and the waking world beyond. It was, in a sense, just Liz Harris, her piano, and their frail partnership, but in every crack of silence and every sustained chord were sylvan echoes of a neverending tempest roiling outside. She envisioned herself, quiet and remote, cloistered against an apocalyptic storm, reflecting on lived histories and traditions through tender piano serenades. Before we were lifted into the architecture of a new age, Grouper transported us down to the ruins below. Someday we might return.

But what did we find percolating out of the rain-sodden soil? Faded lullabies about remembering what it is to laugh and love and fall apart as we turned numb in the gale. Spectral sense memories of lovelorn anguish (“Call Across Rooms”) and loneliness (“Clearing”), as well as — through some magic — remnants of a corroded hope (“Lighthouse”). Ruins had an arc of transformation, from material (“Made of Metal”) to ethereal (“Made of Air”), present to past, which was expressed in a sonic chart of ephemeral details — a croak, a creak, a rumble of thunder, a beep — that evaporated into glistening, imperfect reverberations of liberated sensations. Breaths became emotions, as in the lilting, whispered harmonies of “Holding” and the repetitive angst of “Labyrinth,” and then returned to vapor. We’re still turning circles.

Ruins survived beyond those tremors, though. Preempting the skeletal static of Grid of Points and the celestial miasma of After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house (as Nivhek), and unfurling from the full resonant body of The Man Who Died in His Boat, Ruins was Harris distilled but complete, balanced in meditation under solitary candlelight. It’s that minuscule aura of warmth and that light of guidance that will comfort us in the moors ahead. When nowhere felt quite like home, Ruins was a familiar enough wilderness. –Colin Fitzgerald

Arca

&&&&&

[Hippos in Tanks; 2013]

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We craved a way to say we’d changed. We sought an art to measure ourselves. We traced each others’ whole silhouettes against butcher’s paper and held the outlines up to light. Where the limbs jutted so, where the brow distended out, the neck, the nape, the ass, these whole sacs of we filled with nothing; how had we shifted? And had it been natural or somehow induced by a foreign agent? And had we meant to change? And how even were we when we’d started this stretch of 10 years, this arbitrary meaning marker? And how were these renditions — these places where pens had swerved, blobbing edges and adding nodules — how were these ruins of self-portrait different from how we actually were? And what if what we made was actually us, what if it were up to us? And and and and and!

She whispered, she shushed. It sounded like clicks and peals, but we recognized its meaning; any apprehension gave way as we distended, unknotted, reclined into an embrace. The first time you feel at peace for want of a lover’s limbs. The inching desire to be covered up by another, to uncover in the heat and glow and melt into, through, under? To recombine in grime, to find the holy and profane in clicks and peals — this was the gnashing brightness of &&&&&. This was where we first started to unrecognize.

We were cognizant of Arca before &&&&&. Her production stretched into monstrous dwellings, sutured the devout and hateful corridors of Yeezus, milked raw a well of want on FKA twigs’s EP2, would later marry into Björk’s elegy out of bondage. But &&&&& was sheer incandescence bellowing out and between the teeth of the future’s nerviest composer, a place where dub and hip-hop and piano concerto lost shape against each other. It was the shape of a new being shaking; we were shaped into newness by it, and it demanded nothing less than total transmutation.

Transmutation, as differentiated from the sometimes imperceptibly horizontal gene moves of transformation, is a complete change in appearance, structure, and metabolism. In &&&&&, lost sounds (whipping, a moan, guttural animal) were not recognized but re-rendered against a flanged history of musics. It was the evolutionary entry into a decade-long transmutation, shocking a swallowing whirl of flange deep in the belly (Xen) through the enmeshing of digital bodies into new being (Mutant), past the absorption and purgation of hate-bred traumas (Entrañas) into a pure peeling evolution of voice beyond the human (Arca). More than any other experimental maker this decade, Arca’s sounds were designed to be experienced as they were sounded (alongside each other unbroken — an arts of mixtapes!) and as paeans to an evermutatation. Change catalyzed in the moment of encounter. Reflection taken after occurrence was already watered down. As tempting as it was to trace and track and wonder through our history, we were prompted — those clicks and peals! — to be in and then move through. Her voice, unrecognizing, a fluent fluid full of swerve and love. And and and and and! –Frank Falisi

E+E

THE LIGHT THAT YOU GAVE ME TO SEE YOU

[Self-Released; 2013]

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Interpretation is an attempt to bring one’s preconceptions into play so that the meaning of a work can be made to speak for us. Our historically-effected consciousness defines a horizon, a culture, and a tradition that inform how we understand a text, art. I can’t separate my experience as a migrant and my Bolivian origin, two features I share with E+E, from my interpretation of THE LIGHT THAT YOU GAVE ME TO SEE YOU. Instead of chaos, worldbuilding cut-ups, or a sound collage for the digital era, in her music I hear the buses and pedestrians running around the streets of La Paz, I hear the markets in the border between big cities and indigenous areas, I hear Quechua youths dancing in abandoned warehouses. The way E+E picks and connects ideas, references and temporalities, sometimes with violence other times with great tenderness, is a method of knowing common to many migrants. We make sense of daily life by appropriating, preserving, remembering and discarding from the streams that lead our journeys. Thus, Lil Jon and huayño are no more contradictory than any other of the strands that compose our identities, at once ancient and futuristic, autochthonous and cosmopolite, deterministic and polysemic.

The heterotopia emerged from such process would sound, one imagines, similar to “Fire Gut,” “Steered,” “Crux,” or “Reinada,” tracks off THE LIGHT THAT YOU GAVE ME TO SEE YOU. That is, juxtapositions of spaces, times, forms, and styles, where Bonnie Raitt, saya, crunk, and plunderphonics not only coexist but make sense together. The thought experiment of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art could be enlightening to consider here. How would an alien archeologist interpret the history of (human) art, to then organize it as an exhibition? Most of the links they would propose are unthinkable to us, for they occur outside a recognizable sense of history. Free from normative frameworks, the alien would come up with essentially original groupings, emanated from a compressed and pure present.

In her work as E+E, Elysia Crampton heightens that strangeness, perhaps because she has been made aware of such character through her experiences. A topological examination of her work could describe her compositions as abstract spaces where information and objects appear, then undergo multiple and instantaneous transformations. If looked properly, that is also a description that applies to lots of other instances of the human experience. Being new to a collective or language, an alien, may bring that facet to the front; hence, putting migrants in an ideal position to examine those tensions. Not that this could be sufficient to explain the work of artists like Chino Amobi, ANGEL-HO, or Lotic, but perhaps it may catalyze the consistencies and similarities between their art and E+E’s. Thus, allow for a positivist reading, as I claim that blood-splattering effects, robot sounds, Afrobolivian drums, and the rejigging of R&B hits might be an emanation powerful enough to conjure the allure of an imperial-capitalist world in its degenerative splendor.

With all this, I tried to argue for the importance and value of THE LIGHT THAT YOU GAVE ME TO SEE YOU as a meaningful artifact of the last decade’s culture. Is it disingenuous to impose a retrospective narrative on music that defines itself in opposition to grand narratives? What can one make of the contradiction between the permanence of recorded music and the ephemeral connections to which E+E aspires? She seems preoccupied by that herself, seeing how hard she has worked to scrub her own tracks. Very little of her art is available online. Even less information on her and her activities. It is just natural for one who has made contingent reconfigurations a way of living. That which is very meaningful to her is simply random for others; a switch in that valence is feasible but not that both could stand on identical grounds. Interpretation can only be a rich melding of artifice and performance on that condition. That will likely make of this list and comment mementos of a ghostly expedition. Perhaps lost to oblivion. Certainly, open to alien reconfigurations and appropriation. –jrodriguez6

James Ferraro

Far Side Virtual

[Hippos in Tanks; 2011]

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EVERY SINGLE THING this decade was augmented and pushed to the extreme — and we bought it up. From absurd viral pop music to vanilla latte-flavored Pop Tarts, so much of the last 10 years felt captivatingly ridiculous, fake, over-the-top — so plastic. And we were saturated in it, embodying it, vomiting it. Sometimes literally: While the petrochemical industry nourished our landfills and choked our rivers, we were inhaling microplastics and eating plastic debris.

James Ferraro, our Last American Hero, explored this nightmare of excess and its ecological consequences early in the decade with Far Side Virtual. Rather than spewing diatribes about our current condition or signifying discontent through his then typical maelstrom of noisy experimentation and lo-fi hijinks, Ferraro captured the irrationality of consumption by becoming the nightmare itself. Far Side Virtual wasn’t about plastic; it was plastic. So why listen to it?

This disconnect between listening to stylized music “about” what we despise vs. listening to music that became what we despise found expression in various (and vaporous) ways this decade, but it was Far Side Virtual that united accelerationism, hyperreality, and a cheeky approach to High Art Aesthetics™ in such an unusual, confounding way that you could simultaneously embrace its kitschy simulacra and feel repulsed by its visceral fakeness. On the surface — which is where, despite our best efforts, we all tend to reside — its elevator beats, infomercial horns, and corporate chirping played like a “rubbery, plastic symphony” for avatars interacting and transacting in the virtual worlds of Second Life, like a “PIXAR meme” for digital natives raised on the global ambitions of Google and Bitcoin. But these URL-based evocations were met equally with IRL-based implications, sounding in this latter context like a soundtrack to the plastic trash swimming in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to the dead bodies emitting “incongrously cheerful” ringtones from their technological appendages.

Far Side Virtual felt like a comedy, but it wasn’t funny. Instead, the album offered a sound so lively it felt lifeless, so synthetic it felt alarmingly real, so nauseatingly jubilant and terrifyingly pristine that its vulgar caricature of societal structures largely overshadowed its complex musical ones. Far Side Virtual was described by Ferraro as “still life” — that is, a frozen depiction of 21st-century society — but perhaps the most depressing part is that this “still life” is also still the life we live. It was horrifying, overwhelming, oppressive. But we consumed it, because that’s what we do best. We consume. And then we consume more. And then we consume more. And then we consume more. And then we consume more. And then we consume more. And then we consume more. And then we consume more. And then we consume more.

But don’t worry. I hear it’s rebellious these days. –Mr P

Babyfather

BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow

[Hyperdub; 2016]

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Regardless of how you might feel about the current state of intercultural dialogue and mutual respect in the world, there is no question that we urgently require more unity. We need unity, not just in our neighborhoods, our broader communities, and our districts, not just across our nations or even our continents; we need unity as a species. This is arguably more imperative now than it ever has been in the past; we are connected before we are even born, plugged into a network before we even learn how to walk; we need to be able to navigate it in the same way and with the same level of dexterity of our day-to-day life in the physical world. But at a time when unity has never felt so necessary, it has also never been so fractured and distant.

BBF was the soundtrack to a transition, to a moment in the history of humankind that witnessed a shift in the way that we relate to people around us and away from us, people we have never met and people who we know intimately, people who we care about and people who will never know us by anything other than an internet pseudonym. But these tracks did more than document that transition. They channeled the before and the after, the corrupted relations that exist between postcodes and the potential unity that exists across continents, all on a radio station broadcast in London — a melting pot of vibrant multicultures, community engagement, hate-riddled phobia, and indiscriminate violence. Where is that unity, and what does it look like? Where is the pride that we should all feel, not about being from a place, but about instinctively respecting each other, regardless of who we might be or where we might be from?

BBF was assembled so fervently and so accurately that it captured a fracture across both the entire planet and the entire mind of an individual reflecting on how they fit into it all. The album was painstakingly curated by an artist so desperately in touch with the multidimensional realities around him that it also served as a prediction, at once filled with both a giddying sense of optimism and a desperately bleak amplification of despair. –Birkut

[pagebreak]

PC Music

PC Music x DISown Radio ft. A. G. Cook, GFOTY, Danny L Harle, Lil Data, Nu New Edition and Kane West

[PC Music/DIS Magazine; 2014]

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In 2014, on a front porch in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I read DIS Magazine almost everyday through a pair of Oakley sport sunglasses. Cloud chasing and trick vaping in a faux motor-cross-style shirt with an emblazoned “No Tears” logo (a blatant appropriation of the lifestyle clothing and energy drink brand “No Fear”), I favored a particularly “apocalyptic” electronic music. This music gained ground through DIS’s prime cultural coverage and creative output during the early and mid-2010s. The sinister tremor I feel looking back on the fashion feels like my generation’s “80’s hair moment,” a mixture of nostalgia and wincing self-consciousness that hits like the syrupy tang of butterscotch vape liquid (dripped onto a modded-out lightsaber premium rig). But through the gross, sweet-smelling clouds, genius music emerged.

The cultural convergence of DIS Magazine and PC Music was an inspired cross-Atlantic synthesis. In a crass way, the collaboration felt like the coming together of allied powers, a hilarious exaggeration with all the hubris of the “special relationship” between American and British relations. Suffusing NYC’s downtown scene and fashion week demonology with the futuristic, polyglot globalism of London, the houses of Solomon Chase and A. G. Cook merged at Red Bull Studios’s gallery space in Chelsea, New York in March, 2014. The cultural influence erupted like the 1981 NYC debut of New Order playing to a No Wave-loving East Village audience at the Ukrainian National Home: an inspired urban alliance formed that changed the course of musical history.

PC Music x DISown Radio stands as the definitive statement of the PC Music oeuvre and a masterclass in the collective MIDI sound that was prosthelytized widely across the decade. This was a technological crusade that used the genetic code of pop music in a way that allowed bedroom artists everywhere to proclaim their own reciprocity with the decade’s most high-definition forms of capital. It also helped popularize the mix as a new kind of album, one that audaciously premiered and distributed completely original new music and “exclusive content” with an effortless surplus value that has become increasingly hard to locate at the close of the 2010s.

The mix had savant-level composition, it had brilliant ingenuity, it had swing. Most importantly, it had legendary ambition. Then it’s gonna be PC Music signing a deal with Columbia, then it’s gonna be GFOTY touring with Animal Collective, then it’s gonna be Danny L Harle producing for Carly Rae Jepsen, then it’s gonna be Number 1 Angel, Pop 2, and Charli. A. G. Cook was 23 years old. –Nick James Scavo

Frank Ocean

Blonde/Endless

[Boys Don’t Cry; Def Jam; 2016]

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I was blonde when I was a boy, but I am not blonde anymore.

Brunette, they say now. Dirty blonde, others begrudge. Which is to say, I know what it’s like to stand on the anonymous tile floor of another man’s bathroom, knowing I am not the man I once thought I was. And I too know what it’s like to find solace in a bottle of cheap dye, to massage a myth back into my scalp. But myths have minds of their own. The bottle calls bullshit. The dye job fucks up, turns your fragile locks rust green. And you know you can’t hide that color. The color of a bluff finally called.

So you cry in the shower. You cry in the shower because boys don’t cry, and at least in here you can admit to yourself that is not what you are. You cry because you’re alone and no one is looking. You shield your eyes because you’re alone and everybody is looking.

Our mothers tell us, “Be yourself and know that that’s good enough.” The artist f.k.a. Prince Rogers Nelson warned, “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.” By the end of 2016, Prince was dead. “Indie music” had been reduced to a tag in a Spotify algorithm. Our president was blonde, and so was Kanye. Forty-nine people had sublimated into doves on a dance floor in Orlando, and our blood could not save them.

But Christopher Breaux had juked his way out of a broken record deal, and he had bought back all of his masters. He had dipped free hands into a pool of mother's wisdom and pulled out two versions. He had dipped his hands and pulled out twooo versions, when one would have more than sufficed.

“It’s hell on earth and the city’s on fire / In hell / In hell / There’s heaven.” They told Stevie that heaven was ten zillion light years away, but for 100 minutes, Frank wound those light years so tight that we could see the other side. And when we finally saw it, who could have imagined heaven to overflow with so much tenderness, so much velocity, and such boundless waves of ecstasy? At its best, this was love.

And how far is a light year, anyway?

Physics teaches us that a light year is 300 million meters per second times 31 and a half million seconds. It’s the distance that a particle of light dances across the pages of a wall calendar. But I’ve plotted a route on the broken GPS in my parents’ old Volkswagen, and I’ve confirmed that it’s also the distance between fingers on a keyboard in December 2019 and the cold glow of a computer monitor in February 2010. A light year between us now, I think about myself at 17. I think about a boy who is still blonde and doesn’t yet know which of these two things he’ll lose first. And I remember myself, huddled around that monitor, religiously counting down 100 versions of a decade I had survived but barely even knew yet.

We need lists like we need drumbeats and albums and staircases, because they break endless things into pieces small and finite enough to wrap a body around. A light year ago, I was still blonde and endless. But even then, I sensed that someday, when the breaking finally came and I was at last made finite, maybe this music shit might give me something to wrap my body around.

It has.

In 2016, in a golden decade, in a golden country, in the midst of a golden election, Frank Ocean emerged from a shower with hair the color of failed copper and built a spiral staircase up out of this motherfucker. Some of us have been climbing that staircase ever since. –Gabriel Samach

Charli XCX

Pop 2

[Aslylum; 2017]

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I spent the decade writing about music and bodies. I came to decide that bodies and music were pretty much the same, sensuous objects that held poses and draped themselves luxuriantly in images and signs and asked to be fucked and to move alongside other objects. I tried as best I could to map beat movement onto my body, to let rhythm and repetition and yearning become a tool for change.

Kanye did his part to rip apart the seams of popular music with Yeezus, a busted-seams shriek of auto-destructing rage and futility that tore into the body of sound, but it was perhaps Charli who best brought that template to aching fullness. She, too, sliced holes into the fabric of pop histories and stitched them up with surgical precision. But where Kanye found helplessness and isolation, Charli found a future beyond words in the love-sick swirls of popular music. Collecting a dizzying cadre of collaborators — A. G. Cook, SOPHIE, CupcakKe, Pablo Vittar, Carly Rae Jepsen, and seemingly everyone else on her wavelength — Pop 2 gleefully built a sonic world where all were welcome, where identity and gender and sexuality and, yes, luxury and consumerism seemed open to all and endlessly mutable. And so each of Kim Petras’s sweet nothings urging us to “Unlock It” wrote themselves on our bodies, became ours, were a door unlocked, flung open, while we re-wrote ourselves through these pop ditties.

It’s not that Charli engaged with the tired tropes of any specific “utopia” or anything like that; no, she simply worked on the assumption that every listener is one who fucks or is longing to be fucked, and that every listener becomes the specific vocalist fucking or longing. And so she gave us countless specificities, where the identity categories lose their rigidity but maintain their milieu, culture, and possibilities. The governing principle was the feminine. The feminine was sneaky, evasive, calculating, but relentlessly pretty. It was a principle that let Mykki Blanco weaponize his feminine body and cadence as a means of conquest and overcoming, where Carly’s lovesickness was both loneliness and a tender embrace with Charli.

Affect, posture, vocal quirks, vocal fry, and vocal mutability — Charli dug into all of them and pulled out the future, in the very literal and simple sense that she used what sounded like the future and made it sound even more like the future through joyful stacking and recombination. The “future” as sonic signifier is simply an affect, but for Pop 2, that was a means to building a future, not an obstacle. Charli emptied the present-ness and the past-ness of the present and made a sound that let us make new selves and affects. She killed retromania without losing the pop lessons of the past. She took all the tools of pop, all the forward urges in it, sliced them delicately open into their constituent sonic parts, and seamlessly soldered them into a glittering series of peaks. It was a crest that carried us into new bodies, new ways of fucking, and new loves, which were instantly recognizable because they were always with us, in our emotional maps and in our musical histories — except Charli made them new. If this sounds complicated, all I mean to say is that her music sounded very, very cool and very, very shiny, and that was a perfectly good way to get us to sing along and to think about what might come next.

Pop 2 was a high. We cue up a song and let it rush into us, let it move us, let it rip us through to the future. We hit it again. Finally, the future was feminine, not female, open, pure, not without sadness, ruptured with joy and friendship; the simple pleasures of moving a body next to another body made a whole new world. We blamed it on our love because she told us we could; we loved so much that we disintegrated and became new.

Pop 2 gave us “pop 2,” a sequel, an escape that played by all the algorithmic rules of contemporary pop with such fervor that it broke through. We played in the algorithm, in the playlists, in the choruses of digits and money, said fuck it and let ourselves shift. How many times did I dance naked in the bedroom in my mutating body with a lover or a friend while Charli crooned and it felt like pop was mine again? Fuck it, love wins. Cue A. G.’s sparkling coin drop. It’s pretty; we can be pretty in whatever way we please. We’re all here, we’re all there, we’re in it. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Oneohtrix Point Never

R Plus Seven

[Warp; 2013]

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There are 10 pieces here which open up quite unexpected vistas of the richness of realistic effect that may be obtained with sound. Never, for example, has the northern daylight in our apartments been rendered with the realistic power contained in “Boring Angel.” Never has the seething life of the street, the teeming of the crowd on the asphalt and of vehicles on the roadway, the waving of the trees on the boulevard in dust and light, the elusiveness, the transience, the immediacy of movement been captured and fixed in all its prodigious fluidity as it is in the extraordinary and marvelous “Americans.” From a distance, this stream of life (“Inside World”), this great shimmering of light and shade (“Problem Areas”), spangled with brighter light and stronger shade (“Zebra”), must be saluted as a masterpiece. As you approach, everything vanishes; all that remains is an indecipherable chaos (“Chrome Country”). Clearly, this is not the ultimate statement of art in general, nor of this art in particular. But what a clarion call for those who have a subtle ear to hear, and how far it carries into the future!

These words, I admit, are not my own, but modified excerpts from a translation of “Le plein air, Exposition du boulevard des Capucines” by Ernest Chesneau, an 1874 review of the First Impressionist Exhibition. But this doesn’t make them any less true of R Plus Seven, Daniel Lopatin’s 21st-century “impressionist” masterpiece. It would be a fair interrogation that using words written over 100 years ago in a blurb about an album less than 10 years old is ahistorical, that it sours any profession that Lopatin is terribly revolutionary. But if Oneohtrix Point Never is as “intransigent” as Manet, as “dazzling” as Degas, as intimate as Renoir, it is not out of mere imitation; rather, without directly referencing anything (but recalling everything), OPN’s output this past decade incidentally shared with these early dissidents of form not a distinct goal, but a proclivity for capturing “Still Life” from unusual angles, shedding light, as it were, along forgotten windowsills, exposing that “sinister” beauty that lurks in every nook and cranny of our crappy lives like floating dust that only refraction can reveal.

Later on in Chesneau’s review, he worries that Manet has opened a door for “inept painters” and “laggards;” he warns that embracing this trend invites “the kiss of death.” People would later say similar things about vaporwave, about what Lopatin was doing with arpeggiators and sequencers and samples of infomercials, but it was R Plus Seven that exhibited what really made early critics of “Impressionism” wary of backing a new school: that is, what had emerged from realism’s ashes was threateningly beautiful, a phoenix that ignited our guilt-wracked hearts before rekindling itself inside us as awe. Its magnanimity enveloped us entirely, inspired bloated words and eccojams, and ultimately freed us all from criticism’s clammy, historicizing, pen-fondling hands. No wonder critics were scared of it. “And how far it carries into the future!” Even grander how it rendered time right off its bones. We would never be the same again. –Jazz Scott

Macintosh Plus

Floral Shoppe

[Beer on the Rug; 2011]

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Very few records come to define a genre in the way that Floral Shoppe has. For many of us here at Tiny Mix Tapes, the first part of the decade was spent listening to and thinking about vaporwave. And in the years since its original release in December 2011, Floral Shoppe has steadily become the genre’s best-known document, vastly exceeding what any of us expected of it — of any vaporwave, in fact — even as we were championing it.

Floral Shoppe was nothing short of a phenomenon. By 2018, its most famous track “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (“Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing”) had amassed more than 40 million views on YouTube before being removed, apparently at the request of Sony, owners of that famous Diana Ross sample. The track was quickly re-upped, of course, and is currently sitting on a cool 8 million. These are simply not the kinds of numbers normally achieved by experimental or underground artists. Nothing by James Ferraro, Oneohtrix Point Never, Holly Herndon, SOPHIE, Laurel Halo, or Mount Eerie — not even Burial — gets remotely close. Not on YouTube anyway.

What’s striking with hindsight is that when vaporwave “landed” in 2012, part of the attraction was the presumed impossibility of it ever going mainstream. Vaporwave, we said, was democratic at the level of production not reception. Because its appeal was always conceptual at least as much as it was sonic, because it relied so heavily on appropriation, because in the most radical cases it was in fact nothing but an act of appropriation (such that the comparisons with plunderphonics and other sample-based musics missed the mark), it just never seemed like the kind of genre that would attract much of an audience outside the communities making and writing about it.

How wrong we were. Floral Shoppe confounded expectations because it married vaporwave’s characteristic critical distance with a more direct sensual pleasure in a way that few others managed or attempted. Compared with Ramona Xavier’s other releases under the New Dreams Ltd. faux-corporate umbrella — as 情報デスクVIRTUAL, Laserdisc Visions, PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises, and Sacred Tapestry — Floral Shoppe was much easier on the ears. But there was a paradox here. Tracks like “ODYSSEUSこう岩寺「OUTDOOR MALL」” by 情報デスクVIRTUAL or “By Design” by INTERNET CLUB were so “easy on the ears” they were grotesque. In fact, the deeper vaporwave dredged muzak and easy listening’s frictionless depths — i.e., the less the artist-corporation revealed themselves at the level of production — the harder it seemed to listen, such that the critical work required to keep tuning in was always also a kind of masochism. Vaporwave’s pleasure was often perverse.

Not so with Floral Shoppe. The grooves it sampled — especially from Diana Ross, Sade and Pages’ “You Need a Hero” — were all undeniable. And when the record turned to the German smooth-jazz/synth duo Dancing Fantasy in its second half… well, it turns out that Dancing Fantasy were in fact pretty good! Whatever else she may be, Macintosh Plus was an impeccable (digital) crate-digger. And the production, light as it may be, is artful throughout. The artist is present. Unlike other artifacts from this era of vaporwave, this record always felt composed.

Floral Shoppe is not vaporwave’s most radical release. Even Xavier has sometimes questioned its disproportionate success. Like pop art or rave before it, one of vaporwave’s more important interventions was precisely to put into question both the cult of artistry that demands and is sustained by lists like this one and its complicity with the affective economies of capital. But these structures are desperately hard to dislodge, doomed to return like some pitched-down Diana Ross: “It’s all in your head / It’s all in your head,” looping back again and again, each time a little less stable, before finally breaking down altogether.

With the second iteration of 100%ElectroniCON already behind us and as the scene moves increasingly from URL to IRL, I can’t help but wonder whether vaporwave’s apparent success has depended on it becoming a “sound” or “style” in a way that betrays the more radical possibilities that seemed available on its arrival. Nevertheless, Floral Shoppe served as a metonym for and gateway into a genre that — from its design a e s t h e t i c to its queer/trans roots to its unexpected and much-contested forking into genres like fashwave and trumpwave — proved surprisingly resilient across the decade and continues to defy expectations. –James Parker

DJ Rashad

Just A Taste Vol. 1

[Ghettophiles; 2011]

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Bear with me [one last time]: Mr P once told me that Mortal Kombat II helped him discover the internet, because of

SMASH CUT TO 1994,,,,

,,,,And it’s Keith’s ninth birthday at Putt Putt Golf. Unlimited arcade tokens in an infinite screen-to-game ratio. Mortal Kombat II popping off in the back corner. Enter: a new eternal battle of life.

The precedent DJ Rashad set in Just A Taste Vol. 1 started a whole new battle.

No other footwork bumps

samples[periot] sounded as good as,,

pitch black —like,,,

forever the loudest,,,,

Everything Mr P wrote about DJ Rashad became literature. And in my Fusion, I chose to boil it all down to Just A Taste Vol. 1. This was a new war zone for listening.

Most times, footwork after Just A Taste Vol. 1 felt like imitations. Few times, footwork after Just A Taste Vol. 1 matched various bits of it, but never in total. At best, Rashad’s footwork post-Just A Taste Vol. 1 was doing his best LucasArts impression: reworking the masterpieces for international audiences.

But Just A Taste Vol. 1 was the genesis to this decade’s evolution of recorded footwork, and listeners couldn’t help but Pledge all floors, buffing ‘em with a pair of fresh socks

Organized Chaos

You’ve no idea what Mr P has to go through to edit my content for this website [editor’s note: here’s just a taste]. I only try to be THE most extra in my TMT posts, because I compete with Mr P. Whether I was trying to out-weird, out-extra, or out-genre him in content, Just A Taste Vol. 1 was the initial adrenaline rush that he provided (in writing and recommendation of flavor) that made me go all out. All this content has always just been a silly afterthought of who can waste more time in their life. Or secret letters of admiration. Or testing Mr P with literal nonsense I deem intentional. I am eternally in battle with Mr P because of Just A Taste Vol. 1.

With All Due Respect

DJ Rashad set an expectation for nearly all electronic music in the past 10 years when Just A Taste Vol. 1 was released. Footwork found life outside Chicago. Club music expanded, vibrantly. Sound collage became rhythmically glitched. The line between DJ and producer continued to blur. DJ Rashad planted seeds this decade that haven’t even begun to sprout. The hybrid continues to mix genomes with Just A Taste Vol. 1. –C Monster

SOPHIE

OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES

[Future Classic; 2018]

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We exist under a regime that forgets — because it’s afraid of — the flesh. Under this regime, human bodies are assemblages of symbols that fit together & interrelate not unlike the component parts of a machine. Indeed, they’re subjects in a system of normative biopolitical imperatives — quite often enshrined in the Law — which would conduct conduct to maximize the productivity of our bodies. It’s not just self-help books & motivational speakers; these are just symptoms of a discourse that alienates us from our bodies, constructing the human as above & beyond nature.

Within this discourse, each appendage fulfills a particular role, often determined by one’s gender assigned at birth. HEAD represents reason, which sets us apart from “nature” (i.e., the non-human) & is seen as the epicenter of the human being; it’s no coincidence that reason is constructed as the domain of men. HANDS are the conduit through which we effect action out in the world, reflecting a narrow understanding of “action” in terms of work, which is masculinized by the representation of physical power in the fist. HEART, of course, hosts the human capacity for Love, yet is often seen as encumbrance rather than asset, despite our extreme altruism underwriting assertions of human exceptionalism — a conception surely buttressed by misogynistic tropes of women overly moved by emotions.

Strangely, it’s the genitals — repositories of sexuality & desire — that determine how hegemonic discourse imagines & constructs the rest of the body. In a discursive sense, the genitals are the appendages nearest to the flesh; sexual desire, indifferent to the attributes that make us human, “grounds” us through its reverence to the flesh, namely via the “private parts,” which, in fact, cast quite a wide shadow over the public sphere. Hence, the regime’s fear of the flesh ultimately zeroes in & flares around the genitals, through which the flesh draws attention to itself, abating the distinct attributes of our “humanity” & undoing the estrangement from the flesh that enables the regime to optimize the body & maximize productivity. Sexual repression is therefore the regime’s way to escape that to which we are inevitably drawn back.

Here we arrive at the threat of the queer body, which doesn’t choose the object of its desire or identify according to the dichotomies of the regime’s imposition. Of course, it’s no coincidence that queerphobic voices constantly assert that sexual expression is a choice; that is, that reason can trump it. Because, as far as the regime is concerned, the queer body is a terrifying example of the failure of reason, of the “human” succumbing to the flesh, to animality, to nature.

Among many, many other things, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES was a celebration of the flesh, which the regime ensures remains for the queer person a significant source of dysphoria. Even further, it was a reclamation of the body & its doings. SOPHIE was preoccupied not only with the desires of the flesh — although that was in there (“Ponyboy”) — but with the possibility of its deconstruction & reassembly (“Faceshopping,” “Immaterial”). Not to mention, by pairing her subversive discourse with production that shifted between industrial plasticity & bubblegum pop, SOPHIE disaggregated the correlations of strength-masculinity & frivolity-femininity. If the regime sought to conduct conduct, SOPHIE’s was an exercise in misconduct. Which is to say that, this decade, SOPHIE was the regime’s worst nightmare. –Baldr Eldursson

Kanye West

Yeezus

[Def Jam/Roc-A-Fella; 2013]

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Uh-huh, honey. In its own particular way, Yeezus was where the decade in Kanye began and ended. It zeroed the opacity and goodwill generated by My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, clearing the site for every last provocation that would follow hereafter; it was built on the scaffolding of former glories (most notably the urges and inclinations of Cruel Summer), before being gradually torn down bit by bit, as Ye turned his iconoclastic tendencies upon himself and his image. To be sure, even as we spent good chunks of the decade in adoration, revulsion, or downright indifference toward Kanye West, Yeezus was evidently one of the shining beacons of the 2010s according to Tiny Mix Tapes. Both upon its release and in our present moment(s), it felt, still feels, like a particularly enigmatic entry in the catalog of one of popular music’s most prominent enigmas, Bound up as it was in second guesses and internal logics. And yet, it truly stood apart in Kanye’s oeuvre in its total commitment to transparency and in its clarity of vision; a forthcoming, completely airtight expression of intent that now stands as the prism through which his life and work is best examined.

Really, Yeezus has heretofore said all it has needed to say of itself. We can safely presume the relatively quick turnaround in its recording, including some 11th-hour tinkering by Rick Rubin, as well as its austere palette pace the luxurious MBDTF, because that’s what it sounded like: triumphantly, pointedly minimal in its construction, engineered for a fullness of affect in a heartless world; the sui generis anti-masterpiece, encased in a plastic outer that featured little more than a lone, dispassionate red square for identification. On the mic, Ye was alternately on acerbic form — not deigning to niceties (certainly not to basic decency), not cowing to the overbearing arm of corporate America — and in a more measured, lucid mode; a kenotic God pared down to his rawest base instincts. This was hardly the first time Kanye had given himself pause, but the tussle with himself and/or his demons was more pronounced than ever on Yeezus, a monster that would come alive again, again, and again throughout the slippage of the decade. Moreover, it exposed the dangers and pitfalls of projecting an entire philosophico-politico worldview onto the biggest rock star on the planet, a purported billionaire no less; this isn’t to disavow both the latent and overt politicking on the album, given Kanye’s continued commitment to social justice, but rather to highlight the Void at the heart of culture, of celebrity, and of capital, a Void that Yeezus bore full witness to. If Kanye sounded at the peak of his powers here, it was patently lonely at the top.

Oh, yeah, the music. One could write entire paragraphs, theses even, dissecting every last skree and skronk between the beats (or lack thereof) that make up the architecture of Yeezus. From that initial blast of distorted warehouse acid, right through to the stark, unvarnished sampling from No I.D. that closed proceedings, the album operated with a contrarian logic that nevertheless excited and reviled; it really did “pop a wheelie on the zeitgeist,” so much so that no other major label rapper dared to make a return to its indignant pith. It was a melting pot — of voices, statures, and sonics — that gave Ye the munitions to craft some extraordinarily memorable (read: memeable) set-pieces. Isolated flashes of brilliance include: the gospel flip that punctured “On Sight,” the Malefic-in-a-coffin screaming and gasping in the Justin Vernon-featuring coda of “I Am A God,” and “Guilt Trip’s” effervescent synth work, wafting atop hollowed-out kits and terse sub-bass, to reductively pick out but a few. Elsewhere, entire tracks stole the show, as Kanye cornered sports advertising forevermore with a genuine anthem (“Black Skinhead”), desecrated “Strange Fruit” by way of TNGHT histrionics (“Blood on the Leaves”), and best approximated what Tricia Rose or Robert Beckford term “Black noise” in utterly indomitable style and phrase (“New Slaves”).

The devil, whose apparition apparently defined and informed an entire life’s work until very recently (“I been workin’ for ya my whole life”), was well and truly in the stitching of Yeezus. It seemed, for example, more than coincidental that Yeezy’s auto-tuned voice was typically preserved for his most cogent interrogations of Self, as on “Blood on the Leaves” and “Guilt Trip,” as if he could only humanize himself by way of effect and affect. A number of years, cold(est) winters, countless listens down the line from the 256kbps leak that still resides on my iTunes, and Yeezus can only continue to delight, to intrigue. Kanye West rarely made overtures to anyone or anything in the 2010s, but this was one of them: a properly beautiful, dark, and twisted fantasy that convulsed between our fried synapses and rattled us to the core; the zenith of a stratospheric career, the twilight of Kanye’s fading star. –Soe Jherwood

Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland

Black Is Beautiful

[Hyperdub; 2012]

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Black Is Beautiful, one of a few crests in the imposing Hype Williams wave of the 2010s, was recorded and released in a year of uncertain but likely apocalypse, and when held together in the mind on a list like this, it still judders and quakes with the possibility. Somewhere between career culmination and business as usual, Dean and Inga and co.’s final major offering maintained their day 1 promise of a certain form of honesty-if-nothing-else (a bizarre claim from such skilled and relentless mythmakers, but for fans of the group the very essence of what could be delivered), this time possessing a strangely charged sense of purpose, a series of movements in crisis that squeezed into any number of musical molds of the day while only ever sounding like themselves — whatever that was — “in-betweenness” somehow honed to a fine point.

The obvious stunners were the result of a locked-in and keyed-up pop sensibility in full flower, production miracles made more so in their permanent “demo” form, but the rest of the album could almost be tasted with enough concentration — interludes that reintroduced themselves on repeat listens as main tracks, exploratory and unpredictable to the very next note even as they traced the edge of recognizability; melodies so curious that the instruments producing them quickly slid out of mental view, only sub-bass and sensation left in deep (red) focus. There was a constant profundity to it all, even sometimes a profound stupidity (try to make it through “14’s” chicken-dance dead end with a straight face). Fairly new genres developments were “played,” like they’d already been drained by time, now just rows of atmospheres to rent and remodel. “History [was] inhaled and exhaled,” more than an accretion of what came before, neither in thrall to the past nor ignorant of its lasting afterimage, only a generously employed soft focus keeping everything from turning upside down.

Much has been made of Dean and Inga’s endless trapdoors and obfuscation; not nearly enough has been written about the rarity of their work ethic, their real-time risk-taking, their determination not to close themselves off from the world. In doing so, they commanded an unmatched emotionalism and intuition, fostering a kind of dignity in chaos. That music like Black Is Beautiful exists at all is a serious blessing. –Squeo

01 (∞)

Chuck Person

Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1

[The Curatorial Club; 2010]

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Last night, I dreamed I made the perfect eccojam. You were there, and you were there, and you were there, and you, and you, and you were there, and you were there, and you, and you, and you were there, and you were there too.

What were your favorite 50-(something) minutes of the decade?

It took a long time to get here, a lot of scrolling, at least. And after 10 years, we’re finally wise enough to make the wrong pick for our favorite release of the decade. A pick that could melt in the sun if you left it out on the passenger seat. Can you smile about it? Nod knowingly, maybe, happy. Or yawn. Did this wave crash predictably?

I believe The Caretaker or DJ Rashad or Grouper or Laurel Halo could very easily occupy this position, though I can hear in Eccojams variations of each of these artists’ adaptations to the physical constraints of time. I also believe our staff wishlist of personal favorites from the 2010s might’ve (and should’ve) effectively made this choice obsolete! But it’s a choice “we” made, and it’s one I believe in, like I believe in ghosts.

“Be real, it doesn’t matter anyway/ No, it’s just too little, too late/ Be real, it doesn’t matter anyway/ No, it’s just too little, too late”

In some respects, this list meant nothing. In others, it meant the world, to the community behind Tiny Mix Tapes, to me personally, and hopefully to you.

I believe Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 is our #1 not because nostalgia won our decade, whether reflective or restorative. We did not spend our decade drowning in the deeps of our miserable desire for endless summer nights and the eternal loop (for nothing). We haven’t all of a sudden been gifted a deeper appreciation for the afterglowing lineage of the Eccojams limited cassette release, its belonging to the purer internet, or even the premature and constant death of vaporwave.

I believe Eccojams is our #1 because we at Tiny Mix Tapes couldn’t get enough of music. And Eccojams, of music, begat more music.

Made music in us, made us make music.

Made us listen better. With every Pang and its Mutant child of rage, every mixtape sequel, every deleted SoundCloud track, every Liz Harris moniker, Instagram story snippets, Dean Blunt — through music, we learned how to love this decade.

How much of that time was spent wandering the internet? It’s hard to imagine wanderlust about the frontier internet anymore; it has been so assumed into everyday life as to make that observation null, but in 2010, when Eccojams was released, there was a little more magnetism in the links, before torrents trickled into streams, maybe a searching that had been a little less, say, streamlined for easy listening.

And so a reworking of easy-listening pop music sounded a special kind of project, not quite They Live glasses, but at least a message in a bottle: “Hey, listen!”

The most popular “lo-fi beats” background-listening livestream’s artwork is a swipe from Whisper of the Heart, one of my favorite movies, its original title literally translated as, “If you listen closely.”

Maybe Eccojams was our favorite because we wanted to save it from interpretation that would reduce it to the one reading — the understanding that it was a performatively unflattering and grotesque reflection of broken culture. We’d heard more than that. We heard in it instructions, lesson plans, accidents, tools, and effects. We heard a hundred different ways to say the same thing, a thousand ways to listen. As much as Eccojams was about casting a revelatory light on the material circumstances of this decade, it was also about our audition: our fidelity to hearing. To listening, which is the beginning of community, of creation.

“Did you make this?”

If you weren’t paying attention, or toiling away on something else, you could mistake anyone’s eccojam for one of Chuck Person’s. The creative process was an algorithm, the Swedish directions for a remembering-machine. It wasn’t a genre of classical nuance; it was about tapping into a feeling, drawing from your own archive, laying bare the beautiful abundance of your “hidden resources.” Like folk music.

In a Reddit AMA, Lopatin referred to eccojams as folk music, and in doing so suggested a hybridization of the polar organizations of composition laid out in Brian Eno’s “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts.” Eno references the “hidden resource” of folk music, which are the valuable idiosyncrasies of the individual performer, as compared to some classical music’s more rigid commitment to algorithmic formality that bows to hierarchical value systems.

Eccojams were a charged program, then, in their strict/open process: run a looped sample of radio music through a simple filter. The contradiction was how this rigidity transformed our ability to appreciate the smallest moments of MOR songs, make them as unnerving or thrilling as laying in the middle of the road. There was more than you thought possible, and now nothing felt impossible.

Ultimately, we arrived at the not-always-forgone conclusion that “changing environments require adaptive organisms.” Another not-always-foregone conclusion: if you find yourself overly dependent on a coping mechanism, it must not be working well enough anymore.

This was a decade that pressured us to play it cool and/or self-manifest as Homo superior. Nowhere could this desperate adaptation be seen like it was in memes. By virtue of its archive and fried architecture, Eccojams became the premier musical representative for meme culture — stacking levels of awareness, repetition as the medium, the message unfolding forever, like the scroll of The Caretaker, an edited collage of Pablo, a language of infinite collaborative possibilities, of mutually unknowing interconnectivity via parasitic networks, self-modifying code, and lairs of referential knowledge — all drawing from the most popular well, the well of loneliness.

And so, vaporwave was a genre and an internet meme. Chuck Person wasn’t a sole author.

“Where’d you get that information from (from)?/ Where’d you get that information from (from)?”

Before Eccojams, there was sunsetcorp, Daniel Lopatin’s YouTube channel channeling YouTube surfing, which included the best-ever eccojam, “END OF LIFE ENTERTAINMENT SCENARIO #1,” to be found nowhere and everywhere on this release. These media meditations prefigured the more unsigned emotional rummaging of Replica, which was our favorite album of 2011. Yet there was even more to love here, in Eccojams, maybe because it seemed to be made with us in mind, the way a friend who’s only a couple steps ahead of you can recommend affordable therapy, or provide a listening ear. What a gift, to be able to let go of what doesn’t work, and to hear something that does.

What are some songs that you love, that you could share with your friends? What makes you want to make an eccojam? What are some things you don’t like about eccojams?

These were labors of love, tracing the footsteps of the Screwtapes. As in DJ Screw’s chopped-and-screwed mixes, there was the idea that these song choices might be invitationals, appeals to recognition that get you thinking of the potential in songs, your own potential. That Daniel Lopatin modeled Eccojams, and indeed took his moniker, after a soft-rock radio station, Magic 106.7, speaks to his sentimental attachment to this music. Realizing this project is about channeling a connection to the radio, that this is not only a restaging of cultural detritus to reflect the heartbroken smoothness of capital and mass culture, meant the world to me, and I think you could hear it all along.

Chuck Person was a sincere YouTube commenter from 2012, an avatar that revoked the “supremacy of the original over the derived,” to invoke Adorno’s precious contempt for the impossibility of genuineness, writing about bourgeois moral gold. This love opened the door to so many possibilities for the derivative, the incidental, the illegitimate, the usurpers. I believe these songs could wear their bent-edge color Xerox unoriginality on their sleeves without hating themselves, without being statement pieces, perhaps just posing in front of the mirror, wearing themselves out like makeup or magnetic tape. Feeling themselves.

It’s not mere critique, it’s a love letter. It’s so head over heels, it repeats itself.

Like history. Getting not funny: a man who has somehow managed to corrupt the grossest seat ever, utter ecological catastrophe, multibillionaire space races, police-state terrorism — it’s the same Billy Joel or New Radicals or whoever song — echoes and continuities of crises from decades past, no less important or crucial. In fact, with increasing, additive importance, we’re in crisis mode — indeed, a crisis ordinary. It would be easier and not unsurprising to seek refuge in exhaustion, nostalgia, denial.

We looked at the brokenness of the decade, itself a post in a feed, though riven by towering fixtures and ideological fixity, and we heard the relentless, un-unchanging repetition of Eccojams and couldn’t help but remember, in the words of Marvin Lin (our Mr P), writing on Eccojams for 33⅓, that “nothing is truly fixed and everything is ripe for transformation.”

We heard a tension for the decade: the radical possibilities of the ever-unfolding and rapturously enfolding loop, and the conservative impulse to hole up in exactly what we already knew we loved and preserve it forever at any cost.

“I (I) know (know) that (that) door (door)/ That shuts (shuts) just (just) before (before)”

When I was at my worst, I loved riding out the spins. The looping of Eccojams made sense, in the way ad nauseum and ad infinitum could feel part and parcel of going in and going out and going in and going out.

It was Eccojams that I stuck my head in, and it was eccojams that pulled me through. In the lamentable years (years of my life, years of this decade) that I spent alienating myself from those I loved most with my drinking, I could at least attach myself to the feeling of memory, of missed connections, of another chance — somewhere on the horizon was the sunrise, where my salvation lied, at the edge of tomorrow.

It was Zech who introduced me to OPN (then pronounced, “Own-ee-oh-trix”) and Eric Copeland and Brahms and all manner of other shit, and it was in his room where we would just sit and listen. And drink, yes, with abandon. His bedroom had a door in each of its four walls, one to the kitchen, one to the bathroom, one to his roommate’s, and one to the street. I spent many nights trying to convince him how if you stood at the center of the room and spun 90 degrees repeatedly, you would be faced with the exact same wall at each turn. Over and over. I was not listening to myself. I was obviously not paying close enough attention. But I hoped he would get the gist. It was Zech who told me to get a grip.

Advice for the young at heart, soon you will be older.

When not much else obviously presented itself as an option, eccojams were a coping mechanism with few moving parts, little mystery, yet somehow still full of little mysteries.

Like years later. Years after throwing up on Zech’s floor and falling asleep in doorways, waking up in a hospital hallway the morning after my patron saint’s holiday, only to be told I wasn’t the only one, hours after I’d been listening to “Only One.”

A salve for the repetition of addiction found in the repetition of loops, these loops I made not only out of self-destructive habit, but prayerfully, with half-empty optimism, for my own ears, for no good reason. Eventually, I started listening. Actively listening.

Daniel Lopatin was a good teacher, in this sense, thanks to humility. Before the worldbuilding and world premieres, when he was clothed in Chuck Person, there was an intentional practice, founded in the belief that rudimentary tools and a simple ritual could create cosmopoetic compossibilities for listening, which instilled in us at Tiny Mix Tapes the belief that these fucked-up little songs could become gateways.

Door to another, door to another, door to another, door to another, door to another.

As soon as you’re listening for the echoing words in between, listening to “B1,” when that parenthetical turns into a portal, you find the door in the back of the wardrobe, and there you find not yourself, but yourself-listening for the sweet relief of that bass swell, the cooing hum that reliably zooms into the mix before “never,” the softly winding pan-synth that uncoils around “proud” — artificially bound by your relation to the music, into presence.

In the presence of each other, we found no stickier drama than the planetary entanglement of our relationships, coincidentally or however bound we found each other in the tidal-locked orbit of Tiny Mix Tapes, where we had your readership, and more and more writers who weren’t writers, but historians and web designers and teachers and parents and students and friends.

Our listening brought us closer together, into the belief that through listening and the music itself, we wouldn’t achieve actualization or revolution, but that if we listened closely, we would become unafraid and nothing would be unthinkable. Maybe we’d be sensitized to the possibility of each release, remembering that just about anything could make us exclaim, EUREKA! And then we’d repeat ourselves, listening for the call and response of our love, the deep in me calling the deep in you, Side A, Side B.

We learned a lot from a few seconds of that song, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, now nothing more or less than Chuck Person, a mantra and a close read, a wave of sound crashing whatever meaning was transmitted, now transmuted into the choppiness of the sea itself, like the water covers the ocean.

So Eccojams is a stand-in, for everyone and everything, the memories that looped in your head, the memories you wish did, the songs you dreamed of making, the times and time you wish you had.

A part of me wanted to write this whole thing without mentioning Daniel Lopatin at all. This release belongs, after all, to YouTube uploaders, Audacity users, and Chuck Person: carelessly thrown together, a cut of meat used for stewing, an individual, one of the triune components of God.

No goodbyes, no goodbyes, just hellos, just hellos.

In the fade-out song on Eccojams Side B, a resplendently remade loop of “Woman In Chains” by Tears For Fears, the shimmer (a freaky chorus effect, I think) keeps approaching and receding over the sample, never not there in the mix, until it overtakes the words, transforming the song and the tape into the glow. The loop opens up into a slow fadeout that transitions into your life’s sounds (as long as you turn off autoplay).

In the last song, maybe you felt the rush of recognition, or maybe you felt held by the sureness of the synth returning again and again, and, if the song connected, if Chuck Person echoed your feelings, you heard your heart beating.

We couldn’t have made it this decade without you. I believe that’s why Eccojams is our favorite.

Our favorite music release of the decade is something you could’ve made. –PAT!!!

Feature: 2010s: Favorite 100 Songs of the Decade

TMT Staff — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:58:52 +0000

Sometimes the most pyrrhic ventures prove the most gratifying. Gleaning a decade’s worth of song in 2019 feels like sifting sand with a hula hoop, the enormity of the ever-accumulating archive sluicing through our woefully inadequate tools, its elusive pith elementally, stubbornly incompatible with the implements of capture at hand. Nothing like an egregiously mixed metaphor to communicate an aporia, a kind of category mistake: I get the sense that we should be doing anything else with the incalculable amount of music released this decade than grasping at straws, while the lion’s share slips through our fingers. If only taste didn’t imply abjection or preference a failure to hold.

But curation demands scission, and we can only deposit some faith that its trimmings might help make something of this most recent and most harried time slide into the future. All of which is to say that we at Tiny Mix Tapes are aware of the glorious futility of any enterprise as conceited as this.

Par for our predictably wonky course, TMT’s Favorite 100 Songs of the Decade are not arranged with the airless authority of the list. Less a ranking than a repertory, presented over the course of the next two weeks will be a succession of 10 themed mixes (count ‘em: that’s twice as many as usual). You don’t need to know what the word “phenomenology” means to understand that this decade’s myriad unruly soundings did not lend themselves to the schemes of valuation and accounting at work in the economization of life itself.

Somewhere between choreography and improvisation, we slunk from the BED to the OFFICE (in whatever configuration it took) to the GYM (or, you know, we wish we had), then, spent, to the BATH, and, revived, hopped in the COUPE (literal or figurative), skidded through the ALLEY, convened around the BONFIRE, teetered on the CLIFF, contemplated the VOID, and approached BEYOND. And none of it was soundless. And so we put the cart before the horse in saying that this lilting and braying and bumping and grinding and seething and soothing ensemble of songs did not just soundtrack, post hoc, a readymade ceremony lived in the concretion of stochastic skews and managerial directives and calculated risks.

Not a chance. Like so many granules of wet sand cohering palatial, these songs textured the very grist of our experiential apertures, the hermeneutic hula hoops of our conceptual scaffolds. The broken circle demands a new analytic (way of listening to the music), avows Moten. And then some: I want to listen to what sound does to interpretation. Sounds good. Us too. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

The BED mix is a new addition to the TMT Mix Collection™. Featuring solo artists with visions of love, maximalist sentimentality, and idiosyncratic songwriting, this early-morning mix offers personal style and endless possibility. Rest easy: from showroom to bedroom, this is how you bring Home™ to the destination of your choosing.

PART 1: “BED” mixed by Adam Devlin

Lily Konigsberg

“Rock and Sin”

[00:27]

[Ramp Local; 2018]

Here was a song about being stuck. Stuck being subject, plastic, always shifting and reforming, losing center. Here was a song about relating to another, tying yourself to them and learning yourself through them. Here was a song about being held, too touching and too scary, close to the edge. Here was a song about voices shuffling, being several. All songs are like this but some are more. Lily’s song was really lovely, deceptively complex, layered, piquing ears; it put us present and gave sweetly. Independent, it worked rightly. Steady walking. –B. Levinson

Caroline Polachek

“Door”

[03:49]

[Perpetual Novice; 2019]

To say that Caroline Polachek came on strong would be an understatement. As the frontwoman of Chairlift, the singer conceived of love as a head-on collision, a high-speed, life-or-death chase after the object of her desire. The weight of its impact and the pain of its fallout were subtexts that wrinkled the surface of the band’s sterling production and an ache that Polachek brought to the fore with her gorgeous, operatic voice. “Door,” the first single under her own name, was the sound of the artist changing her mind. Love was no longer a beacon on the horizon but the pursuit itself, a multiverse of possibility unfolding before her that she was poised enough to enter and graceful enough to accept on its own terms. In a feat of songwriting, Polachek demonstrated the boldness of leaving behind one’s old self — and all of its comforts and quiet certainties — to pursue an abstract togetherness with another person. It was a vision of love that was swirling, airy, and brimming with possibility, the closest analog to Kate Bush’s “The Sensual World” this decade. Like Bush’s masterful rendering of “Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy,” the romantic tension that propelled Polachek’s “Door” was her willingness to say “yes” to the unknown within and beyond herself. Polachek did one better, the exaggerated outline of her features merging at the end of the song’s video into the ether, a glowing field of pure white light. –Harry Tafoya

Destroyer

“Kaputt”

[09:08]

[Merge; 2011]

The fading days of the aged libertine. In the haze of a debauched past, “Kaputt” suggested the silhouette of Dan Bejar in a smoking jacket, part Leonard Cohen and part Bryan Ferry, weathering the toll of depravity, standing as the living testament of a God who will keep the promise that it all ends with this. Sure, the trope of the drunk in the midnight choir is as pervasive as that of the teen rebel or the struggling artist, but there are good reasons for that. It represents a lament for freedom of consequences, the demise of the dream of invincibility, and the chance of some measure of glory without compromise. The recent past has seen such sentiment extended to the level of a nation, a generation, and, ultimately, the human species. It is always the same metaphor, just bleaker. At some point, we are all the canary in the coal mine of our own dejection. Girls, cocaine, the nocturne. In terminal retreat, but up for anything. Animals crawl toward death’s embrace. More than this, there is nothing. Bejar wrote a song for America. Who knew. –jrodriguez6

Jai Paul

“BTSU (Demo)”

[15:01]

[XL; 2011]

“I know I’ve been gone a long time/ I’m back and I want what is mine.” Jai Paul’s falsetto-spun chorus on “BTSU (Demo)” donned Prince-ly airs for a bedroom producer with exactly three tweets to his stage name. We swooned despite the swagger. The pheromone-jacked single from the elusive artist’s official debut album, Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones), still torqued our torsos after its first Myspace sketch in 2007. While street-wise drum pads wooed heat-seeking synths, a woozy bassline cued a charming sax solo. Whether or not he’s back for good, we are reminded that one’s workload is not chained to one’s footwork. More ghost than earthly host, Jai Paul returned without ever really arriving. That’s quite the party trick! –Todd B. Gruel

Perfume Genius

“Hood”

[18:29]

[Matador; 2012]

Put Your Back N 2 It was full of songs about quiet desperation that were tinged with hope. None were better than “Hood,” a piano- and drum-driven ballad about feeling unworthy of love. Simply and efficiently constructed, the song’s brevity only strengthened its impact. The intimacy of the vocals, the rawness of the piano, the spry hopefulness when the drums kick in – there was much to cherish in those brief two minutes. I’ve returned to it often over the last decade, sometimes because I needed to hear it, other times because I wanted to spend 120 seconds blanketed by its blissful beauty. –Jeff Miller

Grimes

“Oblivion”

[20:22]

[4AD; 2012]

Let’s not forget that the #MeToo movement is as much a retrospective on past wrongdoings as an expression of solidarity going forward. Grimes implicitly relayed her own experience with sexual assault on the track “Oblivion,” and the rhythm of the drum machine offered an intriguing tonal contrast with the seriousness of her lyrics. We started with the anxiety induced by the perpetual fear of someone “coming up behind you,” but the narrator at once recognized the need to cope in lieu of a cure. Our respective bedrooms were just a temporary refuge. –Mike Reid

John Maus

“Believer”

[24:29]

[Ribbon; 2011]

“Believer” burrowed out brilliantly from a glinting iridescent shaved ice heap-frastructure, its faint succor draining out before it could be properly tasted. This closer was banal Xmas vibes at their most abstractly essential. Like spending all Saturday in a Barnes & Noble just reading and milling around. Didn’t matter if it was “Swear all night on the possum moon” or “Ding Dong Diet, an impossible move,” you were rolling too deep in that driving bassline to care, stricken with an implacable yearning that nonetheless tidily receded like all the wretched transitional pain we continue to coolly contextualize for fun and profit. –Willcoma

Tami T

“Birthday”

[28:32]

[Trannytone; 2019]

It’s hard not to think of them as wasted years, nights ending alone at sunrise, on the floor, outside, in the hospital, at your place, waking up with my contacts left in so I can see clearly how I don’t know how I got there. I kept leaving things behind. This ruins, in the name of fun. Tami T left her window open to let in the sad truth of her sad birthdays, playing her sad keyboard to cheer us up. It didn’t work, but she gave me courage. I entertain the possibility that there’s no climax at dawn, that nothing will save me, and I don’t have to run scared. –PAT

Kate NV

“Kata”

[32:40]

[Orange Milk; 2016]

In a decade in which independent music was so dubiously preoccupied with the idea of “chillness” as an aesthetic principle, Kate NV’s “Kata” was authentically laid-back and retro. She delivered the song without avoiding the underlying disharmony inherent in reviving nostalgic signifiers in an era desperate for progress. The torrentially smooth kitsch of its lite-rock colors was like the sweet and silk of honey, while the stammering, nonsensical lyrics and restlessly overlapped lead melodies pushed toward the absurdity of postmodern, maximalist friction. It was a jaunt through both knowing and unknowing, equally blissful and mindful, and a truly independent demonstration of mellow cool in an age of mild hysteria. –Colin Fitzgerald

Frank Ocean

“Solo”

[38:37]

[Boys Don’t Cry/Def Jam; 2016]

Looming along the edge of the club, or the party, until a break in the vibe reveals how to move. I could slide, but what about my hands, desolate without a message to read. I could spiral until interrupted by the right song, but who will sing it with me. Is it humiliating to want to be the shape of lovers entwined in the stars. Is it more humiliating to be waiting outside in a sequined jacket, resisting the impulse to text: will you come hold me like a shell you might pick up on the beach? –Caroline Rayner

Click to the next page to hear the “OFFICE” mix by Weaver.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

Our floral shop is looking for a new avatar to handle tasks in our virtual OFFICE. You will be taking incoming Skype calls, converting web visitors to users, and redefining our far-side virtual enterprise for the next level of integration and optimization. In order for you to be selected as a candidate, you will need the ability to create deepfakes and vaporware. A pleasing online persona with intuitive keybind skills is also highly valued.

PART 2: “OFFICE” mixed by Rick Weaver

Macintosh Plus

“Floral Shoppe” (花の専門店 Hana no Senmon-ten)

[00:00]

[Beer on the Rug; 2011]

Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus

Much of my young professional life I owe to vaporwave, but Macintosh Plus shaped what adolescence meant to me in my maturity. How not to accept reality and pressure my own psyche into planes of existential dimensions that were constantly slipping through my fingertips. “花の専門店” made me believe I was nothing as C Monster, which pushed me further as C Monster. Nobody ever saw me stutter-step like “花の専門店,” repeating content in micro doses. Macintosh Plus convinced me I could always hide in plain sight. –C Monster

Nmesh

“Climbing the Corporate Ladder”

[03:47]

[AMDISCS; 2014]

Corporate - /ˈkôrp(ə)rət/ – relating to a corporation, especially a large company or group. late 15th century: from Latin corporatus, past participle of corporare “form into a body,” from corpus, corpor- “body.”

The corpus callosum is a thick cluster of nerve fibers that divides the brain into left and right hemispheres. Among other things, it helps with tactile localization, which means it plays a crucial role in enabling one to climb, say, a ladder. And it just so happens Nmesh released a song in 2014 that involved both a ladder and a corpus derivative. “Corporation” adapts corpus to refer to a group (or body) of people maneuvering in tandem to maximize profit. Nmesh soundtracked such maneuvering with “Climbing the Corporate Ladder.” The song never deviated from its central sample/beat despite using variegated samples, tones, and rhythms throughout, kinda how days at the office turn into months turn into years that are the same but different. How to break that ennui, you ask? Well, you climb. You shine. You work to understand the supply and demand. You fall in love with the fluorescent lights, the water jug, the staff fridge, and whatever else with Sysiphian zeal. Work hard and be kind; everything will fall into place, and then, yes, you too will climb. What is vaporwave, you ask? To that I say, have you ever watched an episode of How It’s Made? Have you watched the poetry of manufacture, heard the delicate song of automated labor? Look and listen closely, and you will forget that you ever asked about vaporwave. Instead, you might hear Nmesh soundtracking your own climb to the top. –Alex Brown

Omar-S

“Thank U 4 Letting Me Be Myself”

[08:10]

[FXHE; 2013]

I don’t know what “Thank U 4 Letting Me Be Myself” was about (nor can I be certain that it was about anything). Omar-S enjoyed the electronic musician’s luxury of allowing highly specific intent to remain private and highly personal interpretation to run wild. Accordingly, my version of the latter is this: “Thank U” celebrated the mere fact that it came to exist; that circumstances conspired, even if only in the past tense, to provide a spark of inspiration. It was a victory simply to have been heard, driven home with every loop of the gloating bassline. –Corrigan B

Mark Fell

“Multistability 1-B”

[15:56]

[Raster-Noton; 2010]

Dry, productive. A serene post-human hallucination. One remarkably singular result of all this bumping, rebounding, making, forgetting, and who’s doing the hallucinating. Each of us, so many; what are the chances? After so long, what are the chances? The result of everything in the midst of it: this one sound repeating, rhythm varied but steady, a chord, a kick. A total investigation, yes, of only one thing, not much else. Robotic precision and contingent encounters, new points of interest melding. I thought this was made for me to dance to. I thought this was the dance, all this bumping, forgetting. –B. Levinson

Nonlocal Forecast

“Planck Lengths”

[21:08]

[Hausu Mountain; 2019]

The game is about to begin. And in the black black between title screen and adventure mode, Max Planck says, “We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.” And Angel Marcloid, the brilliant scorched noodles in Fire-Toolz and the ambient every of Nonlocal Forecast, suggests You have no right to assume that music exists, or if it has existed up to now, or that it will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future. And so we bubble up, every one, and the game begins. –Frank Falisi

Ford & Lopatin

“Break Inside”

[25:06]

[Software; 2011]

The Brooklyn-based Software Recording Company functioned memorably, and for an abbreviated amount of time during the 2010s (and not uncommon for labels started with a paucity of resources), its founders saw it fit to get things going with a release of their own programming. “Break Inside” was far from the lead single off Channel Pressure, but despite its relegation at the hands of unnamed PR professionals, listeners were rewarded simultaneously for deep listening and for deep fucking. R&B songs and R&B throwbacks tend to benefit from a coital context. Even better that Ford & Lopatin timed humps with synth ruffles. –Mike Reid

coolmemoryz

“4月20日「P A N I C 」”

[29:56]

[Self-Released; 2013]

The undersung coolmemoryz — a nod to one of the quintessential theorists of the uncanny, the all-too-Real — was responsible for some of the most quietly (and noisily) invigorating vapor tracks of the decade, released in fits, starts, and bursts before simply… vanishing. “4月20日「P A N I C 」” was an exemplary eccojam amongst a bunch of them bearing the coolmemoryz banner, one that brought together a number of readily definable traits — obfuscated and fragmented samples, haphazard cuts and loops, a queasy and impending sense of dread — in a manner that still feels fresh and hard to properly pin down. The gradual, then violent, breakdown of the central loop seemed to remind us that time’s arrow was against us, always — what could be more OFFICE than that? –i S O E J H E R W O O D作家「2 X 1 9 」

James Ferraro

“Global Lunch”

[31:25]

[Hippos In Tanks; 2011]

James Ferraro was an early adopter and definer of this decade’s myriad aspirations. While those influenced by him were doing minimal edits over found music, Ferraro made new replicas from scratch, embarrassing the overhyped future past by showing us how quaint it could be just a few years later. It was his adept navigation of shtick and genuine craft that made Far Side Virtual great, and “Global Lunch” was a perfect encapsulation, portraying an alternate history where all promises came true, the dot-com bubble never burst, and those stiff-lipped Microsoft Marys kept their assistant positions. Synced to the inoffensive, saccharine rhythms of this cyber-world, we tacitly accepted whatever the Company told us as gospel. “The maze has an exit. The pipes are in use. A global world is alive, online.” But today, the reverb suggests too small a room, too limited an imagination. Prioritize scalability. Many, many, many people are typing… –Adam Devlin

MediaFired™

“Pixies”

[33:33]

[Exo Tapes/Beer on the Rug; 2012]

A strip of forever, rippling enticingly, MediaFired™’s “Pixies” spun a twilight zone out of a four-second snapshot of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” Opening with a fade-in, the track whispered into existence, little more than the acrobatic contours of Bush’s voice slowed to a narcotized, hollow revenant of its original. Similarly, it closed with a fade-out, receding into the aether like a memory on the fringes of forgetting. Somewhere between vaporwave and eccojam — its intentions more ambiguous than the former, more pointed than the latter — “Pixies” communicated grave truths about capitalism while embodying its seductive beauty absolutely. What it said, exactly, is best left to the listener, but the effect was pure Uncanny Valley, muddling the sublime with the obliquely grotesque. For the full effect, don’t skip the video above; it’s a real nightmare of a thing. –Jonathan Patrick

PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises

“Beauty Plus”

[35:35]

[Beer On The Rug; 2013]

Home: Complete Edition by PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises

Don’t you just LOVE home cooking?! The sensation of your face melting into the rice cooker! Add corn starch for that extra meaty texture — that’s right, taste it, so good on your tongue! I simply adore my husband. I can’t bear to be away from him for even ONE SECOND. Sorry, that’s the food compressor going off! Do you ever think about how “Be Our Guest” is just a tribute to the act of being a servant? What a jingle! Oh dear, I left my hand on the stove again… –Sam Goldner

Click to the next page to hear the “GYM” mix by Alex Brown.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

The GYM mix comes complete with top-of-the-line musical exercises, including intense bubblegum pop cardio, free-weight dancing, and full-body synth-workouts. Let these hyper(-active/-real) pop jams flow through your earbuds, as you sculpt your abs, tone your thighs, and work your pecs. With the GYM mix, you can achieve the body that you want tomorrow today.

PART 3: “GYM” mixed by Alex Brown

Jam City

“How We Relate To The Body”

[00:38]

[Night Slugs; 2012]

…In which we experience velocity and learn to anticipate turns. First: a ride sample to spin your wheels on. I’m ready. START GAME. I can almost hear the announcer: “3… 2… 1… GO!” We’re off. We catch air on the opening ramp. For a second, it all drops out and my heart skips a beat. Then we land, flawlessly. Damn, this thing is a beast. A real machine. Who built this? You’re real calm on these tight corners. Me, I feel like my neck might snap. Do you wear special things on your knees? Faster now. No time to think — the machine transforms, spins smooth. The gears whir and blur. Tunnel lights start to strobe, flashing reliefs of a sleek design. Ethereal green with gold, wrapped around sexy fiberglass contours. It doesn’t matter when or where it ends. I can still feel the rhythm in my body. –Adam Devlin

A. G. Cook

“Beautiful”

[05:15]

[PC Music; 2014]

In many ways, “Beautiful” was TMT’s song of the decade. Since 2013, we’ve been analyzing, dancing to, and championing nearly everything PC Music and its adjacent contemporaries have done. And in the 2020s, the collective’s influence will likely be more even more apparent than it is now, especially in the Top 40. While “Beautiful” may not be the best PC music track (that title goes to “POBBLES”) or the most memorable (that one’s “Pink and Blue”), it’s easily one of the most recognizable and most lovable, the song we pointed others toward when they wanted to hear A. G. Cook’s vision for pop music. Never mind PC Music’s relationship with late-stage capitalism and mainstream pop. Never mind the many reductive interpretations of its music. In this decade, above all else, A. G. Cook made us feel beautiful. –Sam Tornow

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu

“きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ” (“PONPONPON”)

[09:15]

[Warner Music Japan; 2011]

I know there are die-hard J-pop fans out there who will drag me for this, but it was “PONPONPON” that first blew my mind wide open, exposing my tightly-knotted grey matter to what was already becoming an especially virulent new strain of bubblegum-bursting sound. It wasn’t just that it was fun — and it was undeniably so — but every kick, every synth-horn stab, every bass slap, every blip and bloop and beep was like a rubber hammer aimed at my eardrums, prompting unusual reflexes like dancing and smiling. Before “PONPONPON,” I didn’t think music could inspire physical joy; I didn’t think good music was supposed to. That it remains one of my favorite songs of these past 10 years, nestled between other decade-defining, genre-eliding tracks by Young Thug and Chief Keef, doesn’t just underscore Kyary’s proclivity at belching out banger after banger; it also spotlights Pamyu Pamyu’s boundless, hungry imagination as it eats my heart out over and over and over, with fruit salad and donuts and Kraft Mac & Cheese and bread slices and eyeballs on top. Mmmmmmmmm. –Jazz Scott

Azealia Banks

“212” [ft. Lazy Jay]

[13:10]

[Self-Released; 2011]

So many threats in hip-hop feel like empty bluster. Not “212,” Azealia Banks’s house-hop anthem and ad hoc mission statement. In just under three and a half minutes, the Harlem firebrand could bust your balls, end your life, and steal your girl if she really wanted to. This brag-rap viral sensation, which started making the rounds on music blogs in September 2011 and ultimately wound up on the rapper’s astonishing debut LP Broke with Expensive Taste, demonstrated Banks’s exactingly precise flow with intimidating nonchalance. Over the course of the decade, Banks would find herself in the middle of a litany of flame wars (Wikipedia lists more than 50 celebrity beefs under her stultifying “Controversies” tab), which in a way validates the truculence displayed on “212.” It turns out she wasn’t fronting when she promised, “I’ma ruin you, cunt.” –Sean Hannah

SOPHIE

“BIPP”

[16:30]

[Numbers; 2013]

There’s a door I didn’t notice before, and it’s right there in front of me. Everything has kept me away from this moment for so long. I’m afraid, because the decision to feel good makes me afraid… Once I open it, there’s no going back. I can go past irony, past cynicism, into “futurity smearing into sincerity” (JJDR, 2019). I know the flesh of my dreams is just behind this step. My whole life I’ve been hesitant, but then there is a voice, soft and sweet, telling me a promise. It’s all I need to hear. I can make you feel better. And I know I will. –Lijah Fosl

Le1f

“Wut”

[20:03]

[XL/Terrible; 2014]

Le1f’s gay AF flow was bright as balloons, digging up auntie’s bon mot “light in my loafers” over a taunting horn riff, striking a house mother pose, reading a white boy with “fever in his eyes” who wanna “see what’s in my jungle.” Wut was a bossy-bottom party with Le1f for dessert, demanding his Oreos be double-stuffed, throwing down hip-hop cartoon overconfidence with crazy oral athleticism. He laughed and destroyed with droll assessments of the sexual fetishizing and political rage his cookie cocoa butter presence stirred up, LOLOL’ing at racism, delighted that he “make a Neo-Nazi kamikaze wanna firebomb.” –water

easyFun

“Laplander”

[22:39]

[PC Music; 2015]

“Baby, if your life’s just a love affair… count me out.” In the past couple years, I’ve soured a bit on PC Music. The lazy, arrogant critic in me — the part that wants to believe it can evaluate things based on some intrinsic criteria of value, without relativism or respect to contingency — justified my criticism of the collective, telling me it was a cynical, superficial pastiche and therefore “bad.” More realistically, I might say that it was so singular in its attitude, so radically independent, and that it so easily oiled the rusty machinery of the music industry that, post-Red Bull Music Academy, I take for granted certified bangers like “Laplander.” Listening fresh, the song transports me to the halcyon days of 2015. It was a happy hardcore epic, a kind of generational statement for a generation drunk on nostalgia and “poptimism,” which is a kind of pessimism. With jaded 2020 ears, it’s easy to dismiss, but all that mattered was that it bangs. “It was only just to keep us together.” –Will Neibergall

Perfume

“Flash” (album mix)

[26:18]

[Universal Music Japan; 2016]

If the worst moments in our lives can often feel the longest, does that mean the best periods feel the shortest? On their fifth album, eight years after their technopop debut, Perfume chose the cosmos, and it was felt most clearly in the record’s richly harmonic, ingeniously syncopated moon mission, “Flash.” The song was especially momentous because it was about the moment itself, the spark, the flare, the flash: the kind of passing something that feels so abbreviated and transient and spontaneous that you take its impact for granted. While “Flash’s” four-on-the-floor version may have been the single, this album mix was the celebration, and like most good things, it went by just… like… that *finger snap* –Mr P

Robyn

“Dancing On My Own”

[30:37]

[Konichiwa; 2010]

If 2009 was defined by tense end-of-decade anticipation, 2010 was a year many found their aspirations grounded. But Robyn was always the exception to the rule; and, of the spate of songs spanning her still-brilliant Body Talk cycle, “Dancing On My Own” remains the most eternal. And for obvious reasons: with “Dancing,” Robyn had managed to craft what few would argue is the foremost post-breakup song. The opening salvo itself — “somebody said you’ve got a new friend” — foregrounded a paean of self-acceptance, a vision of closure. Crystallizing an audacious comeback, “Dancing On My Own” permanently assigned Robyn a well-deserved place in pop’s pantheon. –S. David

Hannah Diamond

“Pink And Blue”

[34:10]

[PC Music; 2013]

Pink and blue: two stylized avatars on adjacent bathroom doors, a gender reveal detonation responsible for a 47,000-acre wildfire, two stripes on a flag. What if you can’t outwit desire because it wasn’t ever yours in the first place? I think I like you maybe. This isn’t about a metaphysics of choice but a crisis of attachment, gut spur, spontaneous disidentification. I want to fucking sing this song like her, but these thickened vocal cords won’t let me. Which is to ask: What if loving yourself is also loving someone else? Maybe love is an artless dysphoria, but we look good in pink and blue. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

Click to the next page to hear the “BATH” mix by Corrigan B.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

The BATH mix brings the sexiness of the spa to your tub. With its throbbing beats and seductive moans, this mix will melt all stress away while arousing you in places you never thought possible. If you’re feeling frisky, pair the mix with your tub’s massaging air bubbles and jet stream — you’ll thank us later.

PART 4: “BATH” mixed by Corrigan B

Ariana Grande

“imagine”

[01:08]

[Republic; 2018]

In October 2018, I broke up with someone. This isn’t an outlier experience in the grand scheme of orchestrated life: for as long as atoms have comprised bodies, collision, ignition, and separation has been a norm. Such separation isn’t sad. Seeking sadness in breaks is seeing sadness in the water washing the sand. Of course, we do this. I did this. And just when I thought, what if I am not OK, “imagine” arrived, tidal and incomplete and urging me to think beyond “thank” or “you” or even “next.” It urged me to imagine what I couldn’t see. It reminded me it was out there. And for that, I’m so thankful. –Frank Falisi

D’Angelo & The Vanguard

“Sugah Daddy”

[04:37]

[RCA; 2014]

Earthy and nude, “Sugah Daddy” soothed the 14-year ache of D’Angelo’s absence in a way both contemporary and throwback, locked in rhythmic tension with the immutable, timeless groove of dance and sex. Sung from the basement of his voice in a near indecipherable murmur almost exclusively sensual and expressive, D’Angelo reemerged as pure soul in abstract, returning us to a functional ethos of movement. Jazzy instrumental breaks found inhibition released in the syncopation, while the song’s hard-funk minimalism compelled us into motion as a physical manifestation of the music. Stifled by the terrifying potential of social and political stasis, “Sugah Daddy” was the healing appeal to move that we needed. –Colin Fitzgerald

Teyana Taylor

“Hurry”

[09:30]

[G.O.O.D./Def Jam; 2018]

You want me to talk about this song? Really? Well, just be aware that every word of mine here will make this song a little less sexy. So do yourself a favor: hit play and stop reading right now. Just do it. You need me to explain what she’s talking about? Discuss the song’s politics? Aesthetics? C’mon. You get it. Teyana Taylor wants you to “Hurry.” What could she possibly be referring to? What is she in such a rush for? Duh. It’s 2019, and we’re not subtle anymore. Light some candles. Sex candles. For sex. –Adam Devlin

Clairo

“Closer to You”

[12:06]

[FADER; 2019]

Over the last 10 years, auto-tuned vocals have made the evolutionary leap from “effect” to “instrument.” Even though vocals were distorted and contorted to suit a range of aesthetic aims way before 2010, so much music of the past decade has been dependent on it. In the case of Clairo, who’s debut album Immunity came at the very end of the decade, the direction of that evolution reached its peak. The Atlanta musician coupled her distinctive take on auto-tuned vocals with “Closer to You,” the most private and unassured diary pop, where auto-tune was incorporated as a “wall” that she spoke through. Immunity permitted a fresh, impeccably tender insight into auto-tune as a means of exploration, and “Closer to You” provided the bass-heavy lowlight that made it all feel worthwhile. –Birkut

18+

“EXECUTION”

[14:52]

[Self-Released; 2012]

There’s a ding dong, and then there’s a ding dong. Whether it was ringing from a doorbell or sliding into (and out of) an orifice, the kind of sexual experience offered on 18+’s “EXECUTION” was alluringly vacant and musically asphyxiated, “always situational,” a few late-night mouse clicks too deep. Its muted, thumping sample — find it yourself! — was paired with seductive drawls and assertive commands, juicy pussy and power play, resulting in the kind of sexual tension typical of an 18+ release — which is to say no release. Instead, we had buildup, anticipation, paranoia. “Oh, the doorbell…” moaned Sis. “Oh fuck, she’s home!” exclaimed Boy. We fetishistically observed, from afar. –Mr P

FKA twigs

“Water Me”

[17:02]

[Young Turks; 2013]

FKA twigs has made a career of stylistic instability, but the Arca-produced “Water Me,” released long before either had reached the mainstream, was the apex of structural instability. Anchored and de-anchored by a persistently tempo-changing ticking clock, the song constantly fell in and out of sync with itself, reverb landing on a beat only to miss it a moment later, breaths added and falling short, the longing vocals continuing plaintively throughout, an effect beautifully highlighted in its now-classic music video. It was sensual in the sense that measuring an ever-changing distance between bodies is. It was both a breakup song and a plea for self-growth, the classic archetype. But under their yearning touch, it inhabited a barely-formed futurity — of music, of love, of bodies — shivering to life like tiny hairs under the palm of an outstretched hand. FKA twigs and Arca would spend the rest of the decade mining the same territory, but here it still sounded so delicate, so fragile that it broke our hearts while keeping us yearning. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Erika de Casier

“Little Bit”

[20:05]

[Safe Distribution; 2019]

It took us a decade to get a proper self-care anthem, but goddamn it was worth it. “Little Bit” was a mood & the color scheme was pastel pink & blue: A sexy bubble bath, sweet seductions effervescent in a foam of whispered invitations. Sure, Erika was “a little bit down,” but it was just a passing feeling. The Birth of Venus, but instead of sea froth, Aphrodite emerged from a bath bomb, kicking back with a joint: “I’ll put it aside/ And take a hit.” No devastation, just good vibes: Come to my place & let’s light some scented candles. –Baldr Eldursson

Jeremih

“773 Love”

[24:30]

[Def Jam; 2012]

It’s still unclear to me what fresh wrinkle in Jeremih’s ever-present label issues manifested the DJ Drama-hosted Late Nights with Jeremih, but thank God; Jeremih is not associated with Chicago nearly as closely or as often as he should be, instead existing in the stateless kind of universal bedroom to which the modern R&B star is confined. Unburdened by the expectations of a full-album rollout (and most known at the time as the “Birthday Sex” guy), Jeremih dropped an instantly-classic tape with a time, place, and personality of its own. “773 Love” lay at its heart in more ways than one, an ode to unhurried, unqualified love that was the tracklist’s chronological midpoint and musical peak. –Corrigan B

Mariah Carey

“GTFO”

[28:05]

[Epic; 2018]

This decade took our love for granted, left us lost and disenchanted, bulldozed our hearts as if it planned it. Through all the devastation, Mariah Carey has been around — she had two stellar albums in I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse and Caution — but she has been sort of marginalized and left behind in poptimism’s enthusiastic and impotent attendance to the new. Still, as an impotent poptimist myself, I like what I like, and I love “GTFO.” I will offer no critical justification. Instead, I’ll point out that while Caution was not the most challenging or inaccessible album of the decade, it was the only one that began by telling you to “get the fuck out.” It’s one of the best album openers in post-internet pop history. –Will Neibergall

How to Dress Well

“Repeat Pleasure (A. G. Cook Remix)”

[31:48]

[Weird World; 2014]

A. G. Cook’s vast remix catalog is often the source of his most intriguing work. This goes doubly for his contribution to the bonus tracks of How to Dress Well’s What is This Heart?: a deconstruction of “Repeat Pleasure,” a song that already bore the ideological trappings of a PC Music tune. As its title suggests, “Repeat Pleasure” aimed for a contradictory intersection of the ephemeral and the permanent, the cyclical search for satisfaction and the inevitable need for just a little more — something else. Distorting the track’s pitched-up verse and chorus into near incoherence, Cook zeroed in on its thesis statement, tearing through a synth pad stratosphere: “Even when we get what we wanted / Our hearts babe will never stop longing / Pleasure repeats on and on / Even broken my heart will go Broken my heart will go Broken my heart will go Broken my heart will go Broke̛̜n ḿ̗y ̪̌h̝́e̲͡a̒͟rt w̻̋i̪͌ll̪͝ ́͜go B̫͌r͈͑ǒ͎̈͟k̪̋e̦͗n ̛̺m̬̽y̠͞ ̩̂h̼͎̐̿e̲̟̊͡ǎ͉ṟ̔t ̱̼́̐wil͉͡l̙̍ ̬̉gȏ̺̤̎ Br̞͠okĕ͉͑͜n ̺̲̕͘m̞͌ȳ̳͕͡ heā̝rt ̦͗wiļ̀͘͜l ͍̀go B̛̹̹͌rơ̝͙͝ǩͅe͉̗̍͒n my h̞͌earț̰̾͞ ̡̼̒͋w̙͘i͉̽ll go –Jude Noel

Click to the next page to hear the “COUPE” mix by Alex Brown.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

The COUPE mix is where performance, style, and the best jams in the world meet. With 10 of the hottest singles of the decade, this mix fills your coupe with a sleek, turbocharged collection of sounds, road-tested to hype you up for a night on the town. Vroom vroom: the party starts now.

PART 5: “COUPE” mixed by Alex Brown

Young Thug

“Constantly Hating” [ft. Birdman]

[00:33]

[Atlantic; 2015]

Nick James Scavo had it right in 2015. “Constantly Hating” was/is a “masterpiece” of a track. All of Thugger’s hovering, egomaniacal bile escaped in syrupy hiccups of perfectly fried, perfunctory flex. That fragile Wheezy beat sat way in the back of debased, lashing sing-song verses, with a music box melody so faint you felt like you were imagining it. Something so simultaneously damaged and resplendent that it forbeared any sober scrutiny. It wobbled and warped us down into its rank baptism and congealed something fierce. –Willcoma

Playboi Carti

“Magnolia”

[04:55]

[Interscope; 2017]

“Magnolia” will likely be the calling card par excellence of the Carti-Bourne hit factory, and why not? Its sound and tenor have proven to be unmoored by time, but it will invariably belong to Summer 2017; a perfect crystallization of the trends and movements that surrounded it, yet the ground zero for a million imitators and “… type beats.” Carti finessed the strictures of an idealized/imagined perfect bar, but it didn’t matter: it didn’t matter that he milly rocked in New York on the hook of a tune named for the Magnolia projects; it didn’t matter about the subsequent string of lyrical non-sequiturs, the zones carved out by gulps, gasps, and “bihs,” or even paying mind to the beat at times. The carefully-honed abandon of “Magnolia” was what mattered to us — then, now, and forevermore. –Soe Jherwood

Valee ft. Jeremih

“Womp Womp”

[07:50]

[Def Jam; 2018]

One of hip-hop’s most imaginative stylists — up there with Thugger, Uzi, Carti, Drakeo The Ruler, and Ski Mask — Valee sauntered into the hottest banger of his career with “Womp Womp,” a collab with fellow Chicagoan and R&B divinity Jeremih that sees both artists nonchalantly conjure trap utopia. The (in)arguable 2018 song of the summer was engineered, above all else, to flood your brain with dopamine. The Cassio-fashioned production, an ice chamber of stair-stepping synths and rattly percussion, coupled with Valee’s and Jeremih’s Brut-dry lyricism and cooly stuttering cadences made it one of the most ruthlessly efficient earworms of the decade — and an imperious wrecker of clubs nationwide. –Jonathan Patrick

Charli XCX

“Vroom Vroom”

[11:20]

[Vroom Vroom/Atlantic; 2016]

The kind of forced intimacy I once felt “Vroom Vroom” required should be evident to anyone who’s read my review of its EP. At the time, I thought it sounded like the future. Whether it really foreshadowed anything other than its own release vehicle is debatable. So while I will always share a uniquely personal relationship with this song, I’ll never again pretend a political one. Towering in its own right, the song, perhaps ironically, best existed in the past tense, with all its signatures of youth: as a pre-2016 dream with whom I will always play the hypnic jerk. –S. David

Princess Nokia

“Tomboy”

[14:30]

[Rough Trade; 2016]

Add +25 to incredulous swag when you listen to Princess Nokia’s “Tomboy.” Shouts out to Grinder soldier Soe Jherwood, who put “Tomboy” out there in a brand new form too. When it came down to it, Princess Nokia was the much-deserved version of John McClain we’d been waiting for, and “Tomboy” was what Die Hard II: Die Harder could’ve been: subtler, heavier-hitting around the curves, more engine revving-er, and actually located in New York. Welcome to the trap: it’s all around you but inside. Come on out! –C Monster

Tyler, The Creator

“Yonkers”

[17:22]

[XL; 2011]

“Yonkers” — or, really, the moment Ty puked in its video — was the moment I realized the Creator wasn’t just a meme on his way to obscurity; this was HARD, vibrant boom bap with a menacing heart and a bleak vision. And what a surprise that was after the hijinks of early Odd Future. Yeah, it took him five years to deliver on “Yonkers’s” promise with a solid full-length, but as a standalone piece of art, the track suggested a much darker, much more compelling core than Ty had previously hinted at. Apparently, there was a real person underneath his façade, and here he was, getting puked out into the world. “Damn,” I said at the time. “Is this guy serious?” Well, guess what? HE WAS. –Reggie MT

Cardi B

“Bodak Yellow (Zora Jones & Sinjin Hawke Bootleg)”

[21:32]

[Self-Released; 2017]

Zora Jones and Sinjin Hawke began their bootleg of one of the decade’s biggest songs with a fakeout. For 30 seconds, “Bodak Yellow” unfurled slowly, its icy melody filigreed with Jones and Hawke’s unmistakeable choral melodies. And then just as Cardi stepped up to the mic, the song shuddered to a halt. Horns. A pause. The song began again. But this time, it launched into outer space. A truly monumental reworking of a monumental song, “Bodak Yellow (Zora Jones & Sinjin Hawke Bootleg)” was the sound of two of the decade’s undisputed masters at the peak of their powers. Graceful, profound, unfuckwithable. –Rafael Lubner

Beyoncé

“Countdown”

[26:09]

[Columbia; 2011]

I’ll attempt and fail to transmit a tenth of the feeling in the opening word on the fifth single from 4, T-minus three minutes to us screaming midair (“Houston ROCK IT!”), two seconds before the marching band lifts off in homecoming, that one single word, written on azlyrics.com simply as: “Boy!” Instantly, my adrenaline is high and we’re moving with precision; wherever we are is now one of those parties from eight years ago. Beyoncé’s superpower, that you still try to sing with her, “Killing me softly, and I’m still falling—” –PAAT

ILoveMakonnen

“Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday”

[29:42]

[Sherantino Motel; 2014]

Imagine “Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday” as some superconnecting node for this decade’s pop music. The nexus linking Drake and Viper, iLOVEFRiDAY and Byung-Chul Han, 3Pac and the gamechanging DatPiff crowd, Lil B and Biz Markie. But, you know, it was also an all-time banger. In the parlance of millennials circa 2015, it was lit. And that’s a status it will keep for a long time, despite the cringy remixes and all the revisionist hot takes. So hat tip to all those pop anomalies that continue to confound customer-centric marketing, trend-chasing, and all sorts of industry analysis, that connect us with the true joy of complete spontaneity. No fireworks, chemicals, or corporate budget can match this kind of rush. –jrodriguez6

Rich Gang ft. Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan

“Lifestyle”

[33:10]

[Cash Money; 2014]

People pay thousands of dollars and more to achieve euphoria by, like, going in a zero-gravity jet or buying designer drugs (I think). I don’t really get that when you can achieve the same effect by just listening to Young Thug’s chorus on “Lifestyle.” Someone once described this song as “divisive.” If that’s true, it’s dividing people into two categories: People worth spending any amount of time with during your brief stint here on Earth, and everyone else I guess. –Lijah Fosl

Click to the next page to hear the “ALLEY” mix by Sam Tornow.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

You’re in the ALLEY now, under the blinding neon lights, among narcissists and hackers, Babyfathers and bbymuthas. All your friends are here — Inga and Arca, Lanza and Shmurda, Young M.A and JPEGMAFIA. Walk the streets. Taste the city. Taste the night. The city is yours.

PART 6: “ALLEY” mixed by Sam Tornow

copeland

“advice to young girls (w/Actress)”

[00:00]

[Self-Released]

I’m not the person to be determining what advice is suited or not suited for young girls. I don’t understand what’s that like. But Igna Copeland does, and she offered wise words on this collaboration with Actress, a highlight off her 2014 solo debut, BECAUSE I’M WORTH IT. “My advice to young girls would be: Go home after school. Pretend to go to sleep. While your parents argue in the kitchen, put on some makeup and dress up. You sneak out of the window and meet your friends in the corner. Together, you’re strong. You walk the streets. Taste the city. Taste the night. The city is yours.” While I sat back, struck by her portrait of rebellion and the importance it plays in identity formation for young women, Inga continued speaking. And for this song and for the rest of the decade, we continued listening. –Sam Tornow

Arca

“Desafío”

[03:36]

[XL]

Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Before you can remember, you were touched. And after you can’t remember, you will be touched some more. Which is not to say that all touches are commensurable to one another; some touches solicit relation while others excise its very possibility. Some touches change what it means to feel. “Desafío” was not a history of touches, but an erogenous thrust, its imperative mood a seduction, a suffocation of unconsummated anteriority by strangulation, a dissolution of barricaded interiority by the inexorable intensities of its lilt and lithe and lick. “Desafío” staged the wrenching undoing of a touch so abyssal I still ache from and for its encounter. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

Young M.A

“OOOUUUU”

[06:45]

[Self-Released]

“OOOUUU” was like floating in a warm glass of Hennessy, without a fly’s fear of slow death. Your pores absorbed perhaps a bit too much of the alcohol, but there was no hangover. Instead, there was a wire cord through both your arms, someone shaking it at a slow but steady pace. In an interview with Noisey, Young M.A threw a killer spiral 35 meters down a football field to her receiver, recalling her Randy Moss line off “OOOUUU.” But she was the quarterback now. Sure, the video for “OOOUUUU” did numbers, but M.A wasn’t about appearances. She was the just real. “I don’t gotta look fly […] look, I’m driving a fuckin’ Hyundai Sonata, man […] And that’s real shit.” –Anatole Mamourian

bbymutha

“BBC”

[10:26]

[SmokeOuts]

bbymutha’s demeanor spoke volumes; 13 seconds into the video for “BBC,” the song’s opening line — a flip of the all-time “I’m a bad bitch, you can’t kill me” Vine — was already redundant. Less a hook than a pedal point around which the verses gave color, it was a shorthand for bbymutha’s entire persona: by her pen, self-determination became musical and self-aggrandizement a matter of fact, all without apology. “BBC” wasn’t bbymutha’s only song, but it was her best; a mission statement that set the tone — and the stakes — for the whole of her discography. –Corrigan B

Babyfather

“Skywalker Freestyle”

[13:16]

[Self-Released]

“Skywalker Freestyle” was the spit in the face of every art gallery owner. It was the spliff you lit up in the back of the club because fuck security. It was the gossip you were over-pretending wasn’t true anymore. It was the speaker in your car starting to clip out but you kept turning the dial up anyway. It was the WeTransfer link that didn’t exist anymore, and the YouTube re-uploaded set on repeat. It was the condensed loop of all our collective anger and disillusionment banging against the walls of this prison and still finding something that sounded like freedom. “If this tune bangs, bust it two times.” Why stop at two? –Sam Goldner

Bobby Shmurda

“Hot N*gga”

[15:47]

[Epic/GS9]

It’s impossible to write about Bobby Shmurda without recognizing that where my eyes find a path, violence follows in step. That’s true as well for the millions of eyes fixed upon this YouTube video in 2014. The legacy of viral rap sensations is a tome of genius and corpus, but of them all, Bobby’s “Hot N*gga” was the most penetrating. The track was his unwavering stare back at us, his moment of invincibility, his infinite jest. With violent eyes looking back to the past, the only thing I can say now is that Bobby was right and honest. It was the rest of us who were wrong. –Lijah Fosl

JPEGMAFIA

“Jesus Forgive Me, I Am a Thot”

[19:28]

[EQT]

“Jesus Forgive Me, I Am a Thot” was religious, but not in the church-going, sermonizing sense. Instead, it was a parable on all the fucked up, unconscionable events that occured in any cultural Good Book. If Sodom and Gomorrah were the Mecca, would JPEGMAFIA constitute Allah? Bust out your good Bethlehem 7’s; it’s mosh pit time. We stayed preaching and baring our souls just to feel that one drop of ecstasy. Let us all be thots in solidarity. In JPEG’s name, amen. –Eli Schoop

Jessy Lanza

“Oh No”

[21:22]

[Hyperdub]

Wriggled free from the utopian digital veneer that burnished so much of the decade’s musical capital, Jessy Lanza’s “Oh No” stumbled forward into a homespun tangle of pop-noir anxieties and the panicked rush of the urban hustle. Spellbinding and mechanical, the song was like a mystic incantation that brought life to the uneasy synthesizers, the runaway jumble of drums, and Lanza’s own breathless vocals under the buzzing neon lights and fluorescent watchtowers of our metropolitan passageways, ticking at every moment closer to the next hollow peal of midnight. Who had the energy? Who had the time? I’m a worker, baby. –Colin Fitzgerald

Death Grips

“Hacker”

[25:26]

[Epic]

Closing out one of our favorite albums of the decade, “Hacker” was a wrestler’s entrance theme marked by a promise to take garbage cans and steel chairs up into the stands. Lyrically, a lot of Death Grips tracks are violently turbulent, but on this track, the motivation to “grab your fucking chain and drag you through the bike lane” felt more like a dizzying statement of purpose. Death Grips were officially “in your areaaaaaaa,” regardless of a preceding welcome. And they totally brought their geocoding skills. –Mike Reid

Dean Blunt

“The Narcissist (feat. Inga Copeland)”

[29:42]

[Self-Released]

When The Narcissist II first appeared in early 2012, it existed only as an anonymous MediaFire link, passed around by word of mouth. This was back in that magical moment when the alleys of the internet felt rich and endless, like the labyrinth of a Borges story. Now, nearly a decade later, that original download link is long since broken. But this narcissist lives on like a phantom, haunting streaming services thanks to an excellent reissue from the tragically shuttered Hippos in Tanks label. All things end, even if they seem like they’re going to last forever. Some alleys you only get to walk down once before, turning back for one more glance, they’re gone. –Gabriel Samach

Click to the next page to hear the “BONFIRE” mix by Willcoma.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

The BONFIRE is not where we gather, but why we gather. From epic sing-alongs to social rallying to communal mic-sharing, this mix creates space for celebratory experiences and dramatic intimations of the universal. The fire here is to warm our hearts, not our dinner.

PART 7: “BONFIRE” mixed by Willcoma

Creek Boyz

“With My Team”

[00:00]

[Cross Creek]

It was all about community and feeling. The Creek Boyz’s now-legendary posse-cut yoked the enduring pain of loss to the unalloyed joy of friendship — the feeling that anything’s possible because of the people at your back. Set to honeyed, unobtrusive production by A2rBeatz, the Baltimore quartet sounded at once thrillingly loose and spectacularly practiced. The hand-offs from rapper to rapper were barely-there smooth, every ad lib darting in at just the right angle. Member ETS Breeze’s supple delivery was a whole sensual universe unto itself. But it was the crew’s intoxicating harmonies that elevated “With My Team” from sung storytelling to a felt experience. We were invited to share in their hurt, their communal strength, and their good vibes, which emanated effortlessly from their raps like a life-giving glow. Friends died, mothers cried, and memorial t-shirts were printed, but there was hope to be found in each other, and that proved enough to electrify an entire fucking city, and eventually the world. Yeah, it’s gon’ be fine. –Jonathan Patrick

Yung Lean

“Leanworld”

[02:50]

[Self-Released]

Lay me down, concrete love. I blinked through watery eyes that stared bloodshot at an LED screen. I saw myself, and it wasn’t in a reflection. I saw myself in a green haze of light. Then I was floating through a skyline – not actually floating through a skyline, mind you – but I saw the cityscape of Los Angeles in the year 2019. I’ll see you in another life, when we are both cats. And then I saw myself in a garden among the weeds, among the soil. And I was home. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. –Jeff Miller

Kendrick Lamar

“Alright”

[06:35]

[Top Dawg]

The pressures of excellence weighed on Kendrick Lamar like an anvil, both in real life and in the narrative of To Pimp a Butterfly. “Alls my life I has to fight,” he brashly intoned at the top of “Alright,” the centerpiece of this grandiose, intimate jazz rap masterwork. His foes included the police (they want him dead in the street) and his doubters in Compton (Lamar’s own Nazareth). And of course, there was the temptation that had been hounding him since at least good kid, m.A.A.d. city; it beckoned with promises of houses, cars, and reparations. He knew this materialism was dubious, but that was the game, and he had been pimped into it. Prostrated beneath all these millstones, Kendrick heard a reprieve by way of Pharrell: “We gon’ be all right…” –Sean Hannah

Angel Bat Dawid

“Black Family”

[09:49]

[International Anthem]

The Oracle by Angel Bat Dawid

If this were Tiny Mix Tapes’s Favorite Basslines of the Decade list, it would consist of Angel Bat Dawid’s “Black Family” and… well, just that would be enough, really. A spiritual jazz number that incidentally alluded to the subgenre’s misnomer, reminding us how all ~~jazz~~ music could be spiritual, all spirituality music. A piece whose intricacies lay hidden in its simplicity. A solo expression of community from a multigenerational one-woman ensemble. A single lyric, its affirmation brilliantly repeated like the revolutions of the sun: “The Black Family is the strongest institution in the world.” And that bass… –Samuel Diamond

Rihanna

“Higher”

[16:06]

[Roc Nation]

Here are some shamelessly cheesy questions concerning Rihanna’s “Higher,” an anthem for those shamelessly and cheesily in love: Do you have someone? Do you want to? Have you ever? Where are they now? Have you stared at a fire sitting next to someone, their gaze fixated on the same glowing ember as yours? Have you ever been a little tipsy and wanted to tell them everything all at once? Do the words escape you? Do you feel you could be more creative, but I love you is the only thing that comes to mind? Do you feel cliché? Awkward? Cheesy? Have you ever opened a space inside someone else that fits you so perfectly that all you have room for is two short verses from a desperately genuine love song? Do you feel sad, nostalgic, high, anything? Has Rihanna ever explained something you felt, something you didn’t even know was there, but always has been? She did that for me with “Higher,” when she had “a little bit too much to say,” so she said it all by saying very little in a short but triumphantly intimate, beautiful love song. And the shamelessly cheesy romantics like myself simply couldn’t get enough of it. –Alex Brown

Autre Ne Veut

“Drama Cum Drama”

[17:52]

[Olde English Spelling Bee]

"s/t" by Autre Ne Veut

Then-mysterious Autre Ne Veut took their striking, fully-formed shape in the silvery dawn of the 2010s, a pop cloud radiating sugared holograms of flesh in pain and in ecstasy — a speak-and-spelling Al Green, a runny watercolor Francis Bacon. “Drama Cum Drama,” at the halfway mark of their self-titler, was a bed of pretty, decaying electric jolts trimmed with Christmas-in-the-80s candy keyboards. Gooshy, splayed-internal-organ vocals growled and soared through gargled lyrics and a joyful, longing mantra of “gotta be alive,” holding back a late-in-the-game climax: a delirious just-can’t-wait falsetto swoon anticipating an unintelligible something “to be there in my heart tonight.” –water

Japandroids

“The House That Heaven Built”

[22:07]

[Polyvinyl]

What is the meaning of life? It’s a question that has stumped us since the dawn of rational thought. Is life really that complicated though? Sometimes, sure. Other times, however, the meaning of life really can be as simple as cracking open some cold ones, putting your arms around your favorite people, and scream-singing “The House That Heaven Built” in unison until God themself knocks on the front door and tells you to shut the hell up, this is a family neighborhood. “The House That Heaven Built” was a rock anthem to end all rock anthems, a complete and utter jam that burned the candle at both ends, threw the candle in the air, and then blew it up with a shotgun. –Jeremy Klein

The National

“Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks”

[27:03]

[4AD]

“Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” followed me through the decade like an old sweater. One that you never wear, so that when you do, you’re conscious of its age and the maudlin contours of memory that hang from it. If I had an old sweater band in the 2010s, then The National were certainly it, and I mean that endearingly. 2010’s High Violet was a marvel for me during my high school years, and “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” was its wistful dénouement, less an anthem than a eulogy for that unique strain of nostalgia that’s at once happy and sad. In its essence, it was an open embrace of the past and the future, both a sunset and a sunrise, depending on your vantage point. And like everyone, I had many vantage points in the 2010s. Life changes, we change with it, but certain artifacts stay with us. For me, one of them was this song, packed away in the closet, not so much gathering dust as absorbing time, waiting to be worn again when the weather was right. I never really understood the lyrics (What, or who, is a Vanderlyle? And who, or what, are the geeks?), and I don’t think anyone ever did — even now, googling them feels like a betrayal of their malleability, words that somehow become specific in their vague appeal to the universal: “All the very best of us/ String ourselves up for love…” Sometimes I listened to this song on repeat for months, sometimes I didn’t listen to it for years only to have it resurface in the most peculiar way. And now, here it is again, waiting for me to press play like so many times before. –Alex Brown

Kanye West

“Ultralight Beam”

[30:57]

[Def Jam]

This is my part nobody else speak, this is my part nobody else speak. Pause, gasp, apophasis. To those who could never speak, who were never heard. To those who could speak but got all choked up. To those who could not and still cannot breathe. A chorus gathering to voice a silence so insistent even Kanye gets quiet. For all the latter-day posturing, proselytizing, and profiteering — the convert’s sweaty hands stretching toward a gilded dais — this moment of hush evoked another sort of entity. Illuminated by the ultralight beam: an ensemble looking not for asinine redemption, but a modest clearing in which to sojourn. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti

“Round and Round”

[36:19]

[4AD]

Sometimes brilliant things are kinda dumb, like a song called “Round and Round” anchored by a bassline that sounds, duh, circular. The words echoed the bass (“We die and we live and we’re born again”) and the chorus summoned an optical illusion (“I’ll back you up/ As your frontman”). The dreamlike synth vamp led nowhere at all. Constant motion blurred into a feeling of total stasis — kinda like bein’ alive, right? Brilliant. Just how many of Ariel Pink’s phone calls were we privy to this decade? Was this all some kind of joke? –Austin Gerth

Click to the next page to hear the “CLIFF” mix by B. Levinson.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

You’re finally alone, sitting at your contemplation spot on the CLIFF. Shifting from the complexities of community to the crisis of the individual, your concerns gently move inward, where it feels like everyone has disappeared and everything is embarrassing. “Who am I?” you wonder, expecting no response.

PART 8: “CLIFF” mixed by B. Levinson

Beach House

“Silver Soul”

[00:02]

[Sub Pop]

Everyone has disappeared, because I fucked with the mood when I changed the song. What drew me into another room, what made me collapse into a pile of dresses, heaving like a river, was language moving inside her mouth, close to my clavicle, where it condensed, humid and phenomenal. Syllables round as pearls that I could hold, or winged like thrushes. I gathered what I could and braided my hair, then slid my blouse down my shoulders. In this fantasy, I know how to sing, it is happening again, it is happening again. –Caroline Rayner

Sky Ferreira

“Everything Is Embarrassing”

[04:44]

[Capitol]

While the rest of Ghost struggled through mainstream congestion, “Everything Is Embarrassing” retreated onto its own plot of 1980s dreamland, where lyrics shielded by auto-octave idealism strove for romantic hustle and elbow-grease affirmation. Slap bass bubbled out of tar-pit reverb, glam drums flumped their butts down over the mix, and hi-hat hits slid across the asphalt like skipping stones. Woozy keyboards showed early symptoms of cassette deck lovesickness, contrasted by the evocative simplicity of firm piano chords encapsulated in chorus. Above the viscous mix, Ferreira’s voice blue-skied like a lovelorn eagle. –Rick Weaver

Angel Olsen

“Stars”

[09:04]

[Jagjaguwar]

Angel Olsen had just picked up stakes and began what has become a career of redefining her musical self. “Stars” was her first freeing moment, car windows down in the stark blackness of a clear night. The beauty of wearing your heart on your sleeve and hanging it out of the car door in a trail of rubber smoke and choking exhaust. While it seems so hard to leave a life lived from a comfortable passenger seat, Olsen grabbed the wheel to steer toward a new destination. But the drive was scenic, and sometimes it’s the journey that matters. –Jspicer

Amen Dunes

“Bedroom Drum”

[13:38]

[Sacred Bones]

Through Donkey Jaw by Amen Dunes

Psychedelia as self-help was a relatively new space to inhabit early in the decade. Since then, it’s become fad-as-mantra. Yet “Bedroom Drum” has resonated throughout, largely due to its massive buzz and simple percussion, harnessing the isolation of its titular space. Damon McMahon was a young man here pacing the floor, banging out an incessant melody across a reverberating room to find inner peace in a stuck melody, while also acknowledging a scary truth: this will eventually become his burial plot. –Jspicer

Mitski

“Your Best American Girl”

[17:48]

[Dead Oceans]

While most songs on Mitski’s Puberty 2 explored either the desire to live with abandon or the inevitability of settling, “Your Best American Girl” dwelled somewhere in between: a torch song of a woman who was done contorting herself into an alien shape to please her beloved. “Your mother wouldn’t approve/ Of how my mother raised me/ But I do, I finally do,” she declared, seeming to locate a confidence proportionate to the thunder of her guitar. Yet it was doubt we heard creeping back into the song’s final moments, a yearning for the wholeness wholly deserved, yet still out of reach. –Joe Hemmerling

Grouper

“Clearing”

[21:44]

[Kranky]

Ruins by Grouper

When I first heard Elizabeth Harris’s voice, I was subleasing a basement apartment for an especially sultry Wisconsin summer. I didn’t have a bed, but it came with a couch that appeared much, much larger than its actual reclining space; I stretched a fitted sheet over it so I could justify sleeping on it for three months. As it happened, bad weed stench permeated everything, and my summer toilet would periodically flush itself and overflow; I didn’t spend much time there, but when I did, I would lie bent sideways on that big brown turd of furniture and blast ambient music recommended by friends who read Tiny Mix Tapes. Replica, Beaches and Canyons, and Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill would envelop every creak and gargle by drawing it all in rather than drowning it all out. Grouper eventually became part of that space, inseparable from its smells and sounds and sights; it transformed that blanket of malaise I was living under into one of comfort. When Grouper released Ruins in 2014, I was inundated, but “Clearing” remains the only Grouper song I can recall melodically without hearing it. Imagine a sound so strong it becomes not just a part of your world, but a part of your body, one you can love without limits. –Jazz Scott

Mount Eerie

“Soria Moria”

[26:22]

[P.W. Elverum & Sun]

How about a little Turing Test, courtesy of Phil Elverum? Ready?

I saw fireworks many miles away but didn’t hear them
And I felt a longing, a childish melancholy
And then I went to sleep
And the aching was buried, dreaming, aging, reaching for an idea of somewhere other than this place
That could fold me in clouded yearning
For nowhere actually reachable, the distance was the point.

Results:

• If you are really an artificial intelligence, I’m sorry, but you are now broken.

• If you are really a human being, I’m sorry, but you are now defeated. –Dan Smart

Sufjan Stevens

“Death with Dignity”

[32:48]

[Asthmatic Kitty]

Trebly fingerpicking conveyed the anticipation of tears, emotion rising to the throat as the death of a “tired old mare” — his mother — drew near; Sufjan Stevens’s vivid landscapes and still lives belied his claim to not know where to begin. Elsewhere on the album, strikingly contemporary subject matter collided with ancient mythology, but “Death with Dignity’s” setting was strictly rural mid-20th century: the “amethysts and flowers on the table” were perfunctory well-wishing; a signal searchlight was a metaphysical guide. Its simple structure — a naked piano bridge linking the anticipation of death to its aftermath — only amplified the crescendo to a final acknowledgement that “you’ll never see us again…” –water

boygenius

“Me & My Dog”

[37:01]

[Matador]

I dare you to find a taller, sheerer, “cliffier” CLIFF on this mix than Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers’ loosely strummed homage to golden-era, Liz Phair indie folk, in which the only counterfactual that could possibly match the hugeness of the pure human feeling being presented is to find oneself “on a spaceship/ just me and my dog and an impossible view.” In the truest spirit of “friends strumming guitars and singing about all the bittersweet shit they see and feel,” the trio of 20-somethings had never even stepped into the same room all at the same time before meeting to tour and record their eponymous EP (having, naturally, traded riffs and ideas and encouragement via the internet). As usual: the results of not-giving-too-much-of-a-fuck-about-transcending-humanity were transcendentally human. –Dan Smart

Julia Holter

“I Shall Love 2”

[40:25]

[Domino]

It could be rising against anything. In a wave, it pushes and resists constriction. Overcoming, it undoes me, this rapturous attention to another. This quickly forgetting being alone and quickly projecting a new foundation. Quickly losing and stretching. Reaching forth for all that’s left when there is nothing else. And, really, there is nothing else, just desire pulling. That is all, that is all. Loving again, unfairly. Economic with words because they just keep losing me. The few changes here are a fertile ground for sowing. Or building. A very gradual build through yearning, the push and pull of it. I am in love, what can I do. –B. Levinson

Click to the next page to hear the “VOID” mix by Colin Fitzgerald.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

And then we felt loss, negation, nothingness. We are now in the VOID.

PART 9: “VOID” mixed by Colin Fitzgerald

Triad God

“Chow Bat Por”

[00:00]

[Presto!?]

Desolation. (What do we fear in empty churches past midnight? Is it the weight of abandon in the hollowness of a space ostensibly populated by ethereal guardians — the grace of saints, of gods?) Undoing of con-solation; unraveling of hope. It leaves a nakedness: the hypersensitivity of exposure, which resolves into numbness, a form of self-defense. Baptism requires it: Underwater rebirth is the redemption of drowning; the hands that push you down are the same that hold you afloat. Sometimes you push yourself down. It’s comforting out there sometimes, in the middle of the ocean; you’re not alone — you’re surrounded. –Baldr Eldursson

King Krule

“Dum Surfer”

[02:42]

[XL]

Archy Marshall as King Krule is a mirror hall of contradictions and incongruities. He sings like Joe Strummer but barely looks pubescent. He plays pretty jazz chords, yet writes songs about Motorola-brandishing criminals and human-shark chimeras. His inconsistencies reflect off one another, creating an iridescent if grubby kaleidoscope. On 2017’s THE OOZ, the Londoner found grimy perfection in the drunken “Dum Surfer.” With its car horn saxes, trip-punk drums, and near-incomprehensible vocal trade-off between Marshall and bassist James Wilson, “Surfer” struck a spellbinding balance between no-wave cacophony and smooth-jazz poise. Even as the song’s mantra “don’t suffer” disappeared into the ether during the outro, Marshall’s noxious lounge music had indelibly made its way into your cortex. –Sean Hannah

D/P/I

“DEPRESSION SESSION”

[07:40]

[CHANCEIMAG.es]

“DEPRESSION SESSION” is beyond YouTube rabbit-hole goals. If you put “DEPRESSION SESSION” on your YouTube playlist, the algorithm will get all fucked up, trust. Also, where is this man in this video?

☯Then☯
— Is the physical structure a warehouse? This man’s only wearing socks in odd numbers; you know the vibes.
— D/P/I changes lives on the daily.
— YOU CAN DO WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANNA DO.
— Believe in Elliott Hulse.
☯Now☯
— Oh, wait no — this dude didn’t age well.
— Please don’t look up what he’s talking about these days.
— Instead, reflect upon a dimension Elliott Hulse could’ve aged well within — thanks!
–C Monster

The Knife

“Full Of Fire”

[13:08]

[Rabid]

One morning, early this decade, I woke up and found a tear in my skin. It started small, like a run in a pair of tights. But as the years wore on, I began to pick at it incessantly, peeling myself apart, strand by dying strand. And then one night, I took the loose frayed edges in both hands, pushed my fingers deep underneath, and ripped myself inside out. Bathed in fire, pores dripping with hot black fracking fluid, the face in the mirror looked out with new eyes and winked. Let’s talk about gender, baby. –Gabriel Samach

Prurient

“Dragonflies to Sew You Up”

[22:30]

[Profound Lore]

Magnetoreceptive, dangerous to crops, and difficult to exterminate, the common grackle is a city bird characterized by its black iridescent plumage and unusually harsh song, like a mirror sliding down your throat. A group of grackles is a plague. They can fill the dead trees in winter so that, in the silhouette of early morning, it looks like summer out. Alone, grackles are beautiful — I saw one riding in the back of a truck, his yellow eyes glossed over. If it had the 24,000-ommatilia eyes of a dragonfly in that moment, it would’ve seen a different street. The grackle thrives in a crowded city, but could it survive as an ice climber? If its wings were sewing needles? –PAAAT

EMA

“California”

[28:40]

[Souterrain Transmissions]

Although couched as a kiss-off to her adopted home, “California” was a ballad of survivor’s guilt, a reflection on the ambivalence of someone who got clear of a bad situation but couldn’t shake the memories of the friends she’d left behind. Over four-and-a-half minutes, Erika M. Anderson dragged the wreckage of her life in North Dakota, the abuse, the isolation, the illness. A legacy of pain and violence handed down for generations. By the song’s end, Anderson assured us that she’d put down the gun placed into her hands by her ancestors, but what of Stephen, Andrew, and Gracie? What of the ghosts whose martyrdoms haunted her sunny coastal days? –Joe Hemmerling

BEBETUNE$

“NERO CEA$ER/ANTI CHRIST”

[33:12]

[Self-Released]

The final sprawl of James Ferraro’s inhale C-4 $$$$$ narrowed into need and nothingness. As a cyber-diminished crooner itched “I’m trying to get my mind off you,” an empire of strings and chanters tuned up in the orchestral birthplace. All aboard the sleeper ship, starlight seared the second half with the afterglow of collapse. Dirge beat crumbled rock walls while soporific synthwork parted waves. Verses of vocal cord tangles and rearrangements square-wheeled toward the split-level lobby of Babel, until an abrupt end disrupted us with silence. –Rick Weaver

“Hey QT”

[38:26]

[PC Music]

Perfectly manufactured, perfectly curated, perfectly tested: “Hey QT” was lightning in a can by which performance artist Hayden Dunham and PC Music used to fuel their grandiose ambition of dominating the pop world with auditory simulacra. “I feel your hands on my body/ Every time you think of me” was the quintessential internet lyric, framing love as an unphysical experience. It was a marketing executive’s love song, plugged into the endorphins of our collective hivemind. We consumed “Hey QT” unabashedly, just for that sweet nectar of infatuation. Love really is a hell of a drug. –Eli Schoop

Future

“Mask Off”

[40:44]

[A1/Freebandz/Epic]

This was the eye of the storm, the distant sun around which every planet in Future’s ice cold universe orbited. “Molly, Percocet.” His impressionistic hedonism blurred into a binary of high and low, capturing the Zen feeling of walking through the club on a perfectly balanced cocktail. The ups and downs moved both in slow motion and all at once. Future couldn’t move as he was bustin’ one; he hit the gas as needed, but it was gone before the song was over. He never nodded off, but what if this was already a dream? All the while, the track’s stark production of glistening, skeletal beats wrapped around the instantly iconic flute loop like an ornate cage containing some exotic songbird. Time and space bent around “Mask Off” — it was the high peak of Future’s gift to imply mournful reveries amidst such numb revelry. It felt like the one moment since DS2 promised “Imma choose the dirty over you” that Future took a long look at the destruction in his wake. And both the genius and tragedy was that he was too high to feel anything at all. –Miles Bowe

Klein

“Marks of Worship”

[43:57]

[Self-Released/Howling Owl]

Notwithstanding the deceptive simplicity of its lowercase presentation, “Marks of Worship” was Klein’s masterpiece among what was already some of the most conceptually enthralling music in recent memory. Its wealth of ideas was impossible to sum up; as is, the track summed up Klein’s oeuvre. Included on her breakthrough record ONLY, “Marks of Worship” inaugurated many of the themes that recurred on her subsequent output, particularly the tensions of ambivalence & contradiction — especially between religion & ethics — the fraught intersection between faith & tradition, & the broken promise of hope. Don’t miss the video; it was stunning in its own right. –Baldr Eldursson

Click next to hear the final installment, “BEYOND,” mixed by Will Neibergall.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

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PART 10: “BEYOND” mixed by Will Neibergall

E+E

“The Totaled Angelica”

[00:00]

[Total Stasis]

On one end of the world, a window cracks. A billionaire unveils an electric truck styled after a 1996 polygon render. A President is removed. A company’s stock rises. On the other end of the world, someone predicts the obsolescence of Human art. After all, machines have been making better choices than humans for a long time. This is just fascist Silicon Valley propaganda, someone replies. You say that all worlds are fake? Well, that is a thought not many can afford. Can you simulate hunger? Oppression? The punishing gaze of the Other? Would you? In the works of Elysia Crampton, worlds ended and spawned. Crystals glistened and found the reflection of beauty. Sparks and blood marked the trail of ascension. Pastures turned gray under the smoke of a machine, then mixed with the clouds. Things emerged transformed. A new time and a new world. A tumult in sound. Lacerating silence. Beyond. –jrodriguez6

Alex Zhang Hungtai

“Matrimony”

[02:46]

[NON Worldwide]

“Matrimony” is a timeless piece belonging to no decade. The space, the date, and the location are insignificant footnotes swallowed by the dunes of audio that engulf them. But if they did have some relevance, they would be motionless, life-affirming droplets of anti-gravity; a droplet of space, a droplet of time, and a droplet of spatial awareness that have all been excavated from some teeming synergy of voices. And when we listen, we are not alone. There are our hands that clasp at our open palms, as we stumble over rounded pebbles, broken fence panels, and neat piles of soil. There is no light. We feel unnerved, but we don’t want any more company. –Birkut

Angelo Badalamenti

“Dark Space Low”

[06:15]

[Rhino]

dark space low
noun
    1. a potent dread untetherable to any specific memory.
    2. a violent reminder that you don’t remember whose hand you raised to ring the doorbell.
    3. the weightless whisper the door-opener passes to someone you cannot see.
    4. a pervasive schism: if things aren’t at all right, they are at least all that they are, which is to say neither wholly good nor effectively bad.
    5. a devastating blank stare at the end of time.
    6. a wind that moves across her hair and brings with it a roar of recognition.
    7. the return.
    8. the end.
–Frank Falisi

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

“Love’s Refrain”

[07:53]

[Geographic North]

A Kodachrome sun beamed throughout Tarentel veteran Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s solo EP In Summer. The lead track “Love’s Refrain” evoked the humid thud of Dead Can Dance through a shoegazing haze: liquid guitars ricocheted off hollow drums, while a ragged bass drifted from pasture to dance floor. And yet we neither withered nor burned in the heatwave. Tangled in fruit trees, mangled tapes lathered more than lulled, streaking our gothic eyeliner across an August sky. Those seeking the postal code to this golden dreamscape will have to wait. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is a sonic nomad impervious to the world’s demands. Wherever it is, he’s summered; he can’t hear us from his side of the shore. –Todd B. Gruel

James Blake

“The Wilhelm Scream”

[15:30]

[Atlas/A&M]

This song’s arcane film trope reference may’ve been oddly suitable. But on this side of our brand new decade, Blake’s immaculate rain-streaked tweed sulker was known simply as “Entourage brought me here.” “The Wilhelm Scream” remains the ideal introductory James Blake song, even with the disorienting fever-spike distortion at the end. It masterfully flushed the listener with a numb rush of warmth, too assailing to be just another lament and too chilly to lull. It was a long, buoyed radar blip drift, somehow galvanized in its self-doubt. Not unlike much of what’s brought us here. –Willcoma

Yves Tumor

“Limerence”

[19:54]

[PAN]

V/A - mono no aware by PAN

One of the only constants in Yves Tumor’s career in the last decade is his mastery of shapeshifting. There’s the noise on Serpent Music, the pitch-shifted new age all over Experiencing the Deposit of Faith, and everything in between on Safe in the Hands of Love. “Limerence,” from PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation, was a different kind of shapeshifting. Here, he slithered between memories, obsession, regret, and nostalgia through an intimate conversation between two people, one who wanted to take videos to chronicle their relationship so they could look back at them in old age, and one who was indifferent. I listened once, and I’m the one being asked to smile; on another listen, I’m the one asking. Sometimes I’m watching the conversation happen; other times I’m watching the older couple, now separated, thinking about those videos that could have been, for entirely different reasons. –Sam Tornow

Laurel Halo

“Light + Space”

[25:02]

[Hyperdub]

Quarantine by Laurel Halo

Words are just words that you soon forget. At the end of a decade suffocated by empty forgotten words, these ones can’t be forgotten. On “Light + Space,” the stunning finale to her 2012 masterpiece Quarantine, Laurel Halo’s breath poured out in heavy plumes across the frozen tundra of our digital winter. The result was one of the warmest, saddest, most beautiful, and most human works of electronic music this past decade. It stands as a reminder that, somewhere in the cold night, there is a body, and a mouth, and a voice. And this, at least, will not be forgotten. –Gabriel Samach

Panda Bear

“Tropic of Cancer”

[29:26]

[Domino]

In September 2000, a month after Avey Tare and Panda Bear released their first album, my father died. I was 10 years old. I didn’t discover Animal Collective until six years after that, when some friends recommended Feels. Merriweather Post Pavilion created an insatiable need for more, and I listened to track 5 from Young Prayer every year on my father’s birthday. I had a picture of Noah Lennox, his face covered in paint, that I ripped from a magazine hanging in my dorm room sophomore year. My mother asked if it was a picture of me. “Yes,” I responded, “but not in the way that you mean.” –Jeff Miller

David Bowie

“I Can’t Give Everything Away”

[35:36]

[Columbia]

Existing under normal circumstances, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” would have been an excellent album closer, a note of serene uplift capping an album that often alternated between haunted and chaotic. Of course, David Bowie died two days after the release of his now final album, and this song has since become something else entirely. It is a farewell that resonates down to your very core. Major Tom’s final transmission from the great beyond. The reveal that, otherworldly as he always seemed, David Bowie was a fragile human being like the rest of us. In a career characterized reinvention, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” pulled off the act one last time as the curtains came down for good. –Jeremy Klein

DJ Rashad

“Love U Found”

[40:53]

[Ghettophiles]

This is the only footwork track that made it onto this list. On one hand, that sucks; nothing is more important to the past 10 years of electronic music than footwork. On the other hand, it’s hard to praise footwork on the basis of individual tracks. That the genre ever left Chicago is thanks to the internet, and it works here for the same reason it works there: it isn’t the province of individual geniuses and their masterworks, but that of performance, the marginal, and the apocryphal. We collect bits and pieces of and tell stories about it; we don’t anthologize. DJ Rashad wasn’t given a lifetime achievement award or greatest hits compilation. His life, like the best footwork tracks, came and went too quickly to process. But at least he left us breadcrumbs like “Love U Found” — the splayed, stuttering Michael Jackson sample; the weird, plastic synth; that snare. Totally flawed and totally perfect. –Will Neibergall

Click to the next page to view and listen to the entire list.

[pagebreak]

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

PART 1: “BED” mixed by Adam Devlin

[00:27] Lily Konigsberg - “Rock and Sin”
[03:49] Caroline Polachek - “Door”
[09:08] Destroyer - “Kaputt”
[15:01] Jai Paul - “BTSU (Demo)”
[18:29] Perfume Genius - “Hood”
[20:22] Grimes - “Oblivion”
[24:29] John Maus - “Believer”
[28:32] Tami T - “Birthday”
[32:40] Kate NV - “Kata”
[38:37] Frank Ocean - “Solo”

PART 2: “OFFICE” mixed by Rick Weaver

[00:00] Macintosh Plus - “Floral Shoppe” (花の専門店 Hana no Senmon-ten)
[03:47] Nmesh - “Climbing the Corporate Ladder”
[08:10] Omar-S - “Thank U 4 Letting Me Be Myself”
[15:56] Mark Fell - “Multistability 1-B”
[21:08] Nonlocal Forecast - “Planck Lengths”
[25:06] Ford & Lopatin - “Break Inside”
[29:56] coolmemoryz - “4月20日「P A N I C 」”
[31:25] James Ferraro - “Global Lunch”
[33:33] MediaFired™ - “Pixies”
[35:35] PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises - “Beauty Plus”

PART 3: “GYM” mixed by Alex Brown

[00:38] Jam City - “How We Relate to the Body”
[05:15] A. G. Cook - “Beautiful”
[09:15] Kyary Pamyu Pamyu - “きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ - PONPONPON”
[13:10] Azealia Banks - “212”
[16:30] SOPHIE - “BIPP”
[20:03] Leif - “Wut”
[22:39] easyFun - “Laplander”
[26:18] Perfume - “Flash” (album mix)
[30:37] Robyn - “Dancing On My Own”
[34:10] Hannah Diamond - “Pink And Blue”

PART 4: “BATH” mixed by Corrigan B

[01:08] Ariana Grande - “imagine”
[04:37] D’Angelo & The Vanguard - “Sugah Daddy”
[09:30] Teyana Taylor - “Hurry”
[12:06] Clairo - “Closer to You”
[14:52] 18+ - “EXECUTION”
[17:02] FKA twigs - “Water Me”
[20:05] Erika de Casier - “Little Bit”
[24:30] Jeremih - “773 Love”
[28:05] Mariah Carey - “GTFO”
[31:48] How to Dress Well - “Repeat Pleasure” (A. G. Cook Remix)

PART 5: “COUPE” mixed by Alex Brown

[00:33] Young Thug - “Constantly Hating”
[04:55] Playboi Carti - “Magnolia”
[07:50] Valee ft. Jeremih - “Womp Womp”
[11:20] Charli XCX - “Vroom Vroom”
[14:30] Princess Nokia - “Tomboy”
[17:22] Tyler, The Creator - “Yonkers”
[21:32] Cardi B - “Bodak Yellow (Zora Jones & Sinjin Hawke Bootleg)”
[26:09] Beyoncé - “Countdown”
[29:42] ILoveMakonnen - “Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday”
[33:10] Rich Gang ft. Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan - “Lifestyle”

PART 6: “ALLEY” mixed by Sam Tornow

[00:00] copeland - “advice to young girls (w/Actress)”
[03:36] Arca - “Desafío”
[06:45] Young M.A - “OOOUUU”
[10:26] bbymutha - “BBC”
[13:16] Babyfather - “Skywalker Freestyle”
[15:47] Bobby Shmurda - “Hot N*gga”
[19:28] JPEGMAFIA - “Jesus Forgive Me, I Am A Thot”
[21:22] Jessy Lanza - “Oh No”
[25:26] Death Grips - “Hacker”
[29:42] Dean Blunt - “The Narcissist ft. Inga Copeland”

PART 7: “BONFIRE” mixed by Willcoma

[00:00] Creek Boyz - “With My Team”
[02:50] Yung Lean - “Leanworld”
[06:35] Kendrick Lamar - “Alright”
[09:49] Angel Bat Dawid - “Black Family”
[16:06] Rihanna - “Higher”
[17:52] Autre Ne Veut - “Drama Cum Drama”
[22:07] Japandroids - “The House That Heaven Built”
[27:03] The National - “Vanerlyle Crybaby Geeks”
[30:57] Kanye West - “Ultralight Beam”
[36:19] Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - “Round and Round”

PART 8: “CLIFF” mixed by B. Levinson

[00:02] Beach House - “Silver Soul”
[04:44] Sky Ferreira - “Everything Is Embarrassing”
[09:04] Angel Olsen - “Stars”
[13:38] Amen Dunes - “Bedroom Drum”
[17:48] Mitski - “Your Best American Girl”
[21:44] Grouper - “Clearing”
[26:22] Mount Eerie - “Soria Moria”
[32:48] Sufjan Stevens - “Death With Dignity”
[37:01] boygenius - “Me & My Dog”
[40:25] Julia Holter - “I Shall Love 2”

PART 9: “VOID” mixed by Colin Fitzgerald

[00:00] Triad God - “Chow Bat Por”
[02:42] King Krule - “Dum Surfer”
[07:40] D/P/I - “DEPRESSION SESSION”
[13:08] The Knife - “Full of Fire”
[22:30] Prurient - “Dragonflies to Sew You Up”
[28:40] EMA - “California”
[33:12] BEBETUNE$ - “NERO CEA$AR/ANTI CHRIST”
[38:26] QT - “Hey QT” [remix]
[40:44] Future - “Mask Off”
[43:57] Klein - “Marks of Worship”

PART 10: “BEYOND” mixed by Will Neibergall

[00:00] E+E - “The Totaled Angelica”
[02:46] Alex Zhang Hungtai - “Matrimony”
[06:15] Angelo Badalamenti - “Dark Space Low”
[07:53] Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - “Love’s Refrain”
[15:30] James Blake - “The Wilhelm Scream”
[19:54] Yves Tumor - “Limerence”
[25:02] Laurel Halo - “Light + Space”
[29:26] Panda Bear - “Tropic of Cancer”
[35:36] David Bowie - “I Can’t Give Everything Away”
[40:43] DJ Rashad - “Love U Found”

TMT Comics: Important Comics - “Goodbye Forever”

Dina Kelberman — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 01:30:00 +0000

• Important Comics: http://importantcomics.com

♫ Listen: Andy Koufax - “Practice Makes Worseness”

C Monster — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 17:45:26 +0000

Ya fuckers thought C was out the game? Ya, that’s totally true, sorta, but rn, this one for long-time TMT contributor [and ultra-ultra conflict of interest for me to write this for] Samuel Diamond. Man’s flipping his est. 2014 ultra in-depth and solo-run website Long Island Rap Blog into Long Island Rap Records. And as with all young, 21st-century record labels, LIRR is going to start out on-the-reel with some tapes. First release is from Long Island legend, Andy Koufax.

Tape title is announced as I’m From A Little Place, and Koufax continues to stretch alternative rap with single “Practice Makes Worseness.” Phaser guitar riding out, cut with vocal lyrics that sharpen the mutual melody, knocking listeners around with a snare-drum beat like a fury of fists. A perfect match between Queens of the Stone Age and XENNIS RODMAN. Is it angsty? Yes! Does I’m From A Little Place drop early February 2020? Here’s the pre-order link. Wait, it includes autographed baseball card with hand-numbered liner note and download code? FUCKOUTTAHEEEERE!!!

Peep the Long Island Rap Records manifesto. Nod to “Practice Makes Worseness” by Andy Koufax below. You’ll never regret being you.

Chance the Rapper cancels upcoming tour

Jeremy Klein — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 22:03:59 +0000

By now, you’ve surely heard the news: Chance the Rapper has cancelled his entire upcoming big tour, “The Big Tour.”

In an apologetic Instagram post, Chance lamented the decision, but seemed devoted in spending his newly free time with family, making new music, and coming back with his “best show to date.” Previously, the tour had been understandably — not that this cancellation isn’t — postponed following the birth of Chance’s second daughter.

Concrete facts on the cancellation are scarce, but you could certainly look to low ticket sales resulting from an album that was not been met with nearly the same positive embrace as previous releases. (For perspective, Acid Rap made it onto our feature highlighting some of the TMT staff’s personal favorite releases of the 2010s. We didn’t even review The Big Day.)

Or maybe Chance has just been so busy as of late, he realized there’s been no time to watch any of the great television programming he’d been meaning to check out this year!

Think about it: Chernobyl. Barry. Watchmen, his neighbor won’t shut up about it. The Righteous Gemstones. The final seasons of Game of Thrones and Veep AND Silicon Valley. Fleabag, who can argue with those Emmy wins? Los Espookys. I Think You Should Leave, he watched the “Focus Group” sketch on YouTube and cannot stop quoting it. Russian Doll. Succession, Chance is a huge Cousin Greg fan. And so on. It would all make perfect, logical sense — and be way less upsetting than a once-vaunted artist having to cancel an entire tour because no one liked his album about loving his wife.

Anyway…wow. Reading all that, looks like I’ve got a lot to catch up on too.

Alright, scroll down below to see Chance’s Instagram post. I gotta call out sick from TMT for a bit to attend to… other matters. Is Mrs. Fletcher supposed to be any good?

View this post on Instagram

Hey guys I’ve decided to cancel the Big Tour. I know it sucks and its been a lot of back and forth with reschedules and rerouting, but it’s for the best. I’m gonna take this time to be with family, make some new music and develop my best show to date. I’m deeply sorry to anyone with a ticket who has supported me this past decade by coming to a show and rocking out with me and I feel even worse for anyone who was planning on making this their first Chance concert. Thank you all for an amazing year, and a huge thanks to my team and family for being so strong through this whole year. I promise to come back much stronger and better in 2020 and hope to see some of you guys there. I truly love you and God bless.

A post shared by Chance The Rapper Owbum (@chancetherapper) on Dec 15, 2019 at 12:00pm PST

Feature: 2010s: Exercises in Listening

Max Power — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 18:43:55 +0000

“I don’t think bells ask questions.”
-Mary Ruefle

Introduction

I don’t believe that the last decade can be easily summed up. I do believe, however, that how we listen has changed to some degree. We can quantify this and analyze this, but only insofar as we can define listening — and it’s not clear that we will ever have a shared definition. To listen to something is, inherently, to ascribe value to it, and we are living in increasingly devalued times. That said, however you define listening, there is evidence enough that we listen less than more (even while hearing more than ever before). Fortunately, the effects of this decade can be entered into contemplatively. The recommended meditations below are some suggestions for doing so.

In many ways, these meditations are sequential, and each one assumes the “growth” that the previous meditation provided. In other ways, these meditations are non-sequential and assume nothing about where you’re at or who you should be while reading them. (You’ve blessedly made it this far without my help!) They are not all-or-nothing. They are not designed as a spiritual program. Rather, they’re intended to facilitate listening to contemporary music and, through a larger reach, contemporary humans and non-humans, things, and, loosely speaking, nothing at all.

Lastly, to the extent that these meditations privilege something like “silence” is a foundational, rather than a day-to-day, concern. It’s true, daily life can’t be lived without some foundation, but foundations are not inextricable from daily life either. At best, I think, we can hope for more moments of coherence than less. For the first time, this decade, I learned to hear myself positioned between two chickadees and their babies. I listened to the variations in their chips as they flew above and away from me. I listened to them tell me about myself in relation to them. It was not a happy story or an unhappy story. But, in the end, regardless, it felt like a small victory over my own tendencies.

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Meditation 1: Laying Down

Wherever you are in this moment, whatever your posture, simply stop. To stop is to cut the thoughts wandering through your mind, to relax your focus and ease the tensions in your body. It may seem abrasive, and in this respect it is not in itself sustainable. But at the beginning, wherever you are and whatever you are, you must stop in order to proceed. To proceed, breathe in deeply through your nostrils, counting in a silent, slow rhythm. Hold your breath for a few seconds, relax your facial muscles into a soft smile, exhale slowly through your mouth. Your eyes may be open or closed, although you may find that it is easier, at first, to keep your eyes closed. Your eyes, it’s true, listen. Images projected inward create a kind of noise, inarticulate and scattered. With your eyes closed, it is easier to begin to hear. You have only your thoughts to quiet. As you breathe, lay your thoughts down. As they float up, gently lay them down again. Let them fall deeper with each exhalation. As they fall, you will become attuned to other senses. Begin listening. Without judgment, listen to the sounds around you. You may be in a room, or on the bus, or outside. You may be sitting up or lying down. Eventually, it will become easier to be anywhere. For now, just breathe and listen. You are amidst the source of all sounds, a tremendous gift.

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Meditation 2: Decentering

Go outside. Find somewhere comfortable to sit. While sitting, close your eyes and allow the muscles in your face to soften into a smile. Inhale slowly through your nostrils, briefly hold your breath, and exhale slowly through your mouth. As you sit, begin to listen to the sounds around you. You may hear languages, words you know and words you don’t know. You may hear the sounds of birds or other animals. You may hear the sounds of machines, low hums, reverberating pressure, the sounds of speed. In fact, you may hear nothing discernible at first, or simply the slight wisps of wind through the trees, or water carrying through the distance. Listen to these sounds without judgment. When associations rise in your thoughts, smile at them and let them gently scatter. As you sit, as you breathe, relax your ears with each exhalation. Allow even quieter sounds to take shape in your senses. They are there, and there, and there, too. With each exhalation, rest in sound’s thereness. Even sounds that come from your body — the beating of your heart, the sound of your breathing, your stomach rumbling and creaking — are not you, but have a presence, there, in your body. Listen for the sounds that you cannot hear, cellular and synaptic. As noisy thoughts pass through your meditation, imagine their actual silence. As your skin silently sheds itself, imagine its quiet falling to earth. Listen to all that remains; it is not you.

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Meditation 3: Gratitude

This meditation requires that you listen to music aloud, without headphones, so that noises in the background remain unimpeded. Put on any sequence of songs. Find somewhere to sit or lie down that is comfortable. Adjust the light, if possible, to diminish the definition of the objects around you. Press play and close your eyes. Whatever your posture, begin inhaling deeply through your nostrils and then exhale slowly through your mouth. Allow the exhalation to gently form a soft smile. If there is any other tension in your face, allow it, too, to relax into a soft smile. Allow this smile to settle as you relax. As you breathe, the music will begin to present itself to you. As you begin to notice the music, listen without judgment. If thoughts or associations arise, allow your exhalations to settle them. With each inhalation, breathe in a new aspect of the music’s presence:

begin with the sounds, themselves; with each exhalation, thank the sounds
then, the musicians; with each exhalation, thank the musicians
then, the technologies that allow for production and consumption of the music; with each exhalation, thank the technologies and its laborers (especially those who suffer)
then, the energy that allows you to listen to recorded music aloud; with each exhalation, thank the earth and its laborers (especially those who suffer)

In truth, this chain of gratitude is itself like a breath. You may ascend it even further than this (consider even greater “chains of production”), and you may descend it even further than this (consider the particles of sound themselves, or the unique acoustics in which you’re hearing, the shape of home). As you breathe and thank, allow, without judgment, domestic sounds to show themselves and pass away. With each exhalation, thank these interruptions, too. As the sequence ends and the meditation closes, continue to keep your eyes shut, continue to breathe and to thank. Allow yourself, at last, to hear how the materiality of the song and the world intertwine.

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Meditation 4: Release, digital (in three parts)

a. This meditation requires that you sit, open eyed, in front of your computer. Sit in a comfortable posture, and begin to pay attention to your breaths. Casually, breathe in deeply through your nostrils. Casually, exhale deeply through your mouth. Allow each exhalation to gently hold a soft smile. Open up the application or drive on which you store music. Slowly scroll through the music that you have saved, with consideration only for volume of files. As you scroll, continue to casually breathe deeply, and with each exhalation give thanks for what you have been entrusted with on this earth. Give thanks for the time in which we are alive, in which we can amass such personal libraries. As you scroll, give thanks for the immateriality of files; and give thanks to the earth, which provides the energy for such storage, which provides the minerals and metals for your device, and which provides the final resting place for what is here. When you’ve at last scrolled to the bottom, sit for several minutes in stillness, open eyed. Allow thoughts to pass through your mind without judgment, but let them gently scatter with each exhalation.

b. This meditation should take place after the above meditation, but not immediately. It also requires that you sit, open eyed, in front of your computer. Sit in a comfortable posture, and begin, again, to pay attention to your breaths. Casually, breathe in deeply through your nostrils. Casually, exhale deeply through your mouth. Allow each exhalation to gently hold a soft smile. Open up the application or drive on which you store music. With each inhalation, consider the gift of breathing in. Consider that, now, there is enough oxygen to breathe. Consider the ways in which we are gifted, moment by moment, with what we need. We exist in a network of unthought and exuberant perpetual giving every time that we breathe. With each exhalation, consider the gift of breathing out. Consider that, now, our bodies regulate themselves. Consider the ways in which we are gifted, moment by moment, by what we give. We exist in a network of unthought and exuberant perpetual giving every time that we breathe. Allow thoughts to pass through your mind without judgment, but let them gently scatter with each exhalation.

c. This meditation should take place after the above meditation, but not immediately. It also requires that you sit, open eyed, in front of your computer. Sit in a comfortable posture, and begin, again, to pay attention to your breaths. For several minutes, with each inhalation, chant “gift” in your mind. For several minutes, with each exhalation, chant “thank you” in your mind and allow a soft smile to form gently. Like our lives, the gifts that we give and that we receive are transient. Our bodies will one day no longer inhale or exhale, except perhaps in their most unconscious and mechanical decomposing states. Our pleasure in accepting the inherent giftedness of living ought to be far greater than the pleasure we experience in consuming and collecting, but this is not often the case. The earth depends on our resources as much as we depend on the earth’s, but this relationship has been imbalanced for far too long. Even our digital archives take resources without giving anything back. Open up the application or drive on which you store music. Proceed, incrementally, with deliberate slowness. With each inhalation and exhalation, examine the file or folder before you. With each inhalation, chant “gift.” With each exhalation, chant “thank you.” With deep thankfulness, consider the file or folder. Let recollections and associations pass by without judgment, but with each breath gently usher your thoughts back to the present moment. Ask yourself: is there life to be be lived in this file or folder? If so, move on to the next. If not, ask yourself: am I holding on to what has already passed, like a breath long gone? If so, delete the object. You may stop at any time. You may skip objects at any time, for any reason, after any answer. The goal is not purification by subtraction, but is simply the easing of a burden. What is enough? Chant “gift” with each inhalation and “thank you” with each exhalation.

[pagebreak]

Meditation 5: Release, physical

This meditation requires a degree of faith that can only be discovered after the fact. In this respect, it is like Duchamp’s comet, with its tail in front. Even so. This meditation is not dependent on any posture or manner of breathing. It only requires that you look upon your physical music collection, select from your music collection a significant percentage of objects or varying meaning and value, and selling these objects — for a profit or at a loss. Give all money that you’ve received to those in need.

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Meditation 6: Missing Out

You may practice this meditation wherever you are, at any time, without any consequence. For later understanding, it might be useful to keep a pen and notebook on hand. You may be sitting, standing in line, waiting for a train, or perhaps, frighteningly, even driving or walking. You will get the impulse to pull out your phone or open your laptop to see what has been happening. This impulse has not always been — or if it has been, it has existed in a different, often healthier mode. You will feel a need to be up to date with an event, a conversation, or often with something far more ambiguous and undefinable. You will have a sense that you’re missing something. When this feeling comes, acknowledge it without judgment. (If you have a pen and notebook, write down the impulse before acting upon it.) Recognize its presence, even if its source remains ambiguous. Show kindness to it. Before acting upon it, breathe deeply. Exhaling, allow a gentle smile to form. Smile upon all your unknowing: all that you will not know in total, all that you believe that you know but truly do not know, and all that you will never know. Smile at your folly, at your perceived omniscience. Smile, too, at all you are missing, although you know not what it is exactly. Without knowing, continue breathing. In this moment, allow what is present to return to your senses. Above all, listen to what is there. In this ambience, continue breathing. There may already be much around you that were already missing out on. There will be precious sounds far more limited than those editions that already sold out while you were breathing. There will be precious life around you that remains present, but neglected and unthought. Whether or not you finally act on the impulse to check your phone or computer is, at this moment, inconsequential. At this moment, you will — only increasingly — be able to understand its presence. In fact, nothing was ever missing.

[pagebreak]

Meditation 7: Writing a Review (nine questions)

In whatever manner you’ve absorbed the music (with preference for the meditations above), now sit down to write. There are no requirements for this meditation, but it is recommended that you sit comfortably and, through deliberate breathing, make yourself present to the page. It is also recommended that the page is expanded to fill your field of vision, that the blank lies before you. In writing about a piece of music, it’s recommended that you ask any nine questions. Below are some recommendations:

1. If language and music struggle to correspond, must I then write about myself?
2. If language, music, and myself struggle to correspond, must I then write about others?
3. If language, music, myself, and others struggle to correspond, must I then write about ideas?
4. If my ideas come to arise in a failure of correspondences, then do they become music?
5. What was I listening to again?
6. In this moment, how is it that questions come to precede the words they’re made of?
7. In this moment, is this blank space already sufficient?
8.
9. Is this the last word that I will write?

Pussy Riot to tour North America next spring, whether you like it or not

Dan Smart — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 16:22:57 +0000

Yeah. That’s right. FUCK YOU. Cuz Russian protest-punks Pussy Riot are coming to North America this coming March and April.

Don’t like it? FUCK YOU.

They are also partnering with good old PLUS1 to donate $1 from ticket sales to each city’s local Planned Parenthood affiliate.

Don’t like that, either? FUCK YOU.

Get you tickets here and check out the band’s tour dates — followed by a new trailer featuring some previously-unreleased tunage — down below.

Don’t feel like it? Well…I mean, you know:

Feature: 2010s: In Kanye’s Wake

Adam Rothbarth — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 20:12:19 +0000

I. On November 22, 2010, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received the distinction of Best New Music with a score of 10 from Pitchfork, an award more elusive to musicians in the 2010s than the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, and the National Medal of Freedom. While artists like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Kendrick Lamar, and Bob Dylan won honors in the latter categories during that time, Kanye West is the only musician who received a perfect score this decade from the critical website for a new studio album. It may seem arbitrary to point this out, but it means something. It means that according to the most influential music website in the world — or, in its words, “the most trusted voice in music” — no artist has since expressed the ethos of their moment in sound as well as Kanye did in 2010.

What My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy achieved above all else was that it was able to portray in a new way the failure of contemporary America to provide the type of life it had always seemed to promise. For Kanye, gone was the excitement of the college years, metaphor or not. Gone was the possibility of, in the words of his working title for the album, “a good ass job.” Even the violence and agony of love lost had been worked out by Kanye in 2010, processed to beautiful auto-tuned effect with 808s & Heartbreak (2008). Leading up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye was dealing with the emotional fallout from his mother’s death, the end of a romantic relationship, and an increasing number of public relations disasters, from his 2009 VMAs outburst during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech, to a weird 4:45 AM performance at Bonnaroo in 2008, to countless industry rants on Twitter. In spite of it all, he was the most visible and successful he’d ever been. It would prove to be the perfect storm.

With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye explored a feeling he shared with many: the forlorn acceptance that the Obama administration would fall devastatingly short of the change it had guaranteed. While America was in a recession and unemployment was around 10%, politicians remained deeply committed to the protection of Wall Street bankers and continued to ignore the needs of the 99%. They ramped up the mass deportation of immigrants; drone strikes and torture overseas became normalized in American media and culture. “Obama was in office for eight years and nothing in Chicago changed,” Kanye would tweet in 2018. Today, especially in light of our current political moment, many people look back on that time as a simpler, happier one. But the truth is that nobody felt good in 2010.

His disillusionment was ours. His experience of the vacuity of the American dream was ours. Whether it was crime and violence (“All of the Lights”), wealth (“So Appalled”), the male ego (“Runaway”), or the antinomies of love itself (“Lost in the Woods”), Kanye was plugged into something fundamental about living under late capitalism. In “Power,” he summed up our frustration and ambivalence with, “The system broken, the school is closed, the prison’s open/ We ain’t got nothing to lose, motherfucker, we rollin’.” My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was an arresting statement on the intertwining fates of excess and despair, success and desolation, confidence and shame. More than anything, it felt true.

Musically, the album brought Kanye’s 2000s style to its fulfillment. Tracks like “Monster” and “Power” saw his creativity reach new heights with aggressive beats, career-making features, and some of his most athletic lyricism to date, while the one-two punch of “Lost in the World” and “Who Will Survive in America” showcased a total wizardry of sampling and the repurposing and recontextualizing of that borrowed material, taking lyrics from Bon Iver and Gil Scott-Heron and offering us new ways to hear them. Across the album, he sampled Aphex Twin, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, and Smokey Robinson. “Runaway” sought to break the form of the rap song with its dramatically long (but somehow simple) ostinato keyboard hook, explicitly self-conscious lyrics, and a sprawling three-minute outro, complete with emotionally-fuelled, nearly unintelligible auto-tuned vocals.

If Kanye’s first four albums were classical exercises in modern hip-hop, his fifth was his Romantic turn. In other words, it was where he really started breaking away from the styles and techniques of idols like 2Pac, Nas, JAY-Z, and Ma$e. When My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received Pitchfork’s 10 rating, it signified a new chapter in American popular music. Kanye had rounded up aspects of indie rock, hip-hop, R&B, spoken word, and soul, put them in a box, and taken a bat to it.

As important as the album was for the development of popular music, it also represented a landmark in the category of the popular artist. What did it mean to be a pop star in 2010? What were our expectations from one, and what was their duty to us? In addition to maintaining a heavy presence in culture at large, from awards shows and magazines to social media and commercial products, we wanted the pop star to represent our own values to us in digestible ways. The pop star has always been meant to be a mirror of sorts, a thing to both aspire to and criticize; with this album, Kanye started to seem uniquely in touch with his role as such a figure. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was portentous of a class of modern musicians that would become increasingly political and reactive. All of Kanye’s music going forward would hold within it the conversation of what it meant to be a pop star in this decade. It was as if, starting here, he was working to not only fulfill the category of the pop star, but also destroy it.

II. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received many accolades, including winning Grammy Awards for Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song (“All of the Lights”), and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (with Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Fergie for “All of the Lights”). Kanye also won Best Rap Performance with JAY-Z for “Otis” (from 2011’s Watch the Throne). It was an unprecedented level of exposure for the musician, who, a contrarian through and through, would take a violent left turn for the album’s follow-up. To begin, he left America and went to France.

“I lived in Paris in this loft space and recorded in my living room,” he told Jon Carmanica at The New York Times in 2013. “And it just had the worst acoustics possible, but also the songs had to be super simple, because if you turned up some complicated sound and a track with too much bass, it’s not going to work in that space.” He went on to talk about how he was inspired by minimalism and the Louvre. He was moved by the work of Swiss-French architect and designer Le Corbusier. “This one Corbusier lamp was like, my greatest inspiration,” he told Carmanica. The music promised to be more personal and more conceptual. Collaborations for his next album would include a mix of electronic, avant-garde, and indie artists, young hip-hop underdogs, and veteran producers: Daft Punk, Arca, Justin Vernon, Frank Ocean, Kid Cudi, Chief Keef, Charlie Wilson, Travis Scott, Mike Dean, Hudson Mohawke, and more. After a whiplash series of sessions with Def Jam Recordings sorcerer Rick Rubin in the week before its release, Kanye dropped Yeezus on June 18, 2013.

With album art consisting of a clear jewel box adorned only with a single strip of red tape, showing a silver CD inside, the album alluded to its own sparseness before the listener even hit play. The opening seconds of the album’s first track, “On Sight,” saw flailing, detuned synths spiraling quicker and quicker out of control, eventually settling into a horrifically gnarly beat. It was a violent moment for Kanye’s fans. “Yeezy season approachin’,” he started. “Fuck whatever y’all been hearin’/ Fuck what, fuck whatever y’all been wearin’/ A monster about to come alive again.” The song, produced by Daft Punk, was an urgent, radical departure from the sound of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “How much do I not give a fuck?” he asked later in that song. “Let me show you right now, before you give it up.” The opening moments of Yeezus signalled a new Kanye to the world. The truly despairing could sense it immediately, because we can smell our own. This was the sound of someone beginning to unravel.

You know what followed. Car crashes, blowjobs, MDMA, running naked through the lobby, putting a fist in her like a civil rights sign, Michael Douglas out the car now, black dick all in your spouse again, soul mates become soulless, all that cocaine on the table, you can’t snort that, doing 500 I’m out of the control. There’s an immense amount of violence, drugs, destruction, and straight-up fucking on this album, whose themes of doom find a perfect match in the skeletal, bombastic musical frame they overlay. But it wasn’t only doom and gloom — there was some hope, right at the end, in the form of “Bound 2,” a loving and explicit tribute to his then girlfriend, Kim Kardashian.

Kanye has always been sensitive to the pitfalls of success, but Yeezus was where we really started to see it unfold. From the album’s art to its sound and lyrics, Kanye was reacting to the feeling that he’d become a commodity, a thing, a character in the news, consumable in the same way that a TV show, a pair of shoes, or an Instagram story is. Yeezus dealt with both Kanye’s specific experience in the world and his attempts to subvert the commercial aspects of his work. Something about the success of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy had pissed him off and left him feeling lonely and destructive — it’s in the DNA of Yeezus. If everybody liked My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, something about it must have been false.

“As soon as they like you, make ‘em unlike you,” Kanye rapped on “I Am A God.” If there’s any line in Yeezus that looms over the whole album, it’s probably that one. With Yeezus, Kanye wanted to press our idea of him as a pop star into new territory. He wanted to make us unlike him. It backfired. We liked him even more.

III. John Coltrane’s last few albums were really out there, especially everything after A Love Supreme (1964). The following year’s Ascension was a cacophony of broken melodies and wacked-out polyphony, while the same year’s chaotic Meditations saw the almost total disintegration of composition. It was the sound of a jazz orchestra out to sea, and the man who should have been steering it to cohesion was in fact the one charting increasingly treacherous courses, as he found, more and more, that the bebop-rooted styles of albums like My Favorite Things (1961), Ballads (1963), and Crescent (1964) were no longer appropriate for what he needed to express.

As Coltrane’s spiritual turn continued to amp up, his crew started to drop out. By 1967, Coltrane’s last year on earth, only drummer Rashied Ali remained in the studio with him. Together, they recorded Interstellar Space, which felt like free-jazz, but a free-jazz deconstructed beyond any functionality at all. The gestures of jazz — swing, rhythm, syncopation, harmony — felt all but gone; in their place, endless improvised melody and permanent drum solo. It was the popular version of a controlled, Wagnerian pressing of everything to its natural extreme. Fifteen years earlier, John Cage reached a similar conclusion about music and wrote a score with no musical notes in it at all (4’33”); here was the jazz musician, taking the louder route. The album felt like Coltrane lifting his fists to the cosmos and yelling, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore!” And what was left to do? Modal jazz had appeared to make teleological chord progressions obsolete, but Ornette Coleman’s free-jazz didn’t seem to push things far enough ahead. What needed to happen was unclear, but nevertheless, many jazzers kept going. Even Miles Davis continued to experiment, but he became dissatisfied with the increasingly regressive nature of jazz, calling the 1980s neo-bop trend — a predominant style at that time — “warmed-over turkey.”

Why bring up Coltrane? Because he’s a rare example of a popular musician who pushed his form to its edge and was forced to confront the wall he hit there. Sometimes I think about where he might have gone if he’d lived beyond 1967. I’m sure many will feel differently, but to me, Interstellar Space — and Coltrane’s death after recording it — basically represents the conclusion of bebop — via hard bop, modal jazz, and free-jazz — and thus a major turning point for the form. That isn’t to say that everything after it was bad; it wasn’t. But nothing after it felt as original or as extreme. I won’t say that Kanye’s follow-up to Yeezus, The Life of Pablo, was the end of rap, because it wasn’t, but it definitely represented the culmination of a crisis in Kanye’s relationship to both his own work and the musical heritage it came out of. The man had something powerful to express and was reaching the point where he could no longer find the most appropriate way to say it. There was a synthesis of idea and form that came about in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, found full voice in Yeezus, and started to rip its own seams in The Life of Pablo.

With Yeezus, Kanye had found a dissonant, personal, and hugely alienated new path forward, jettisoning the soul samples and the groovy beats, and largely trying to leave behind the radio-friendly pop hooks and the explicit social commentary of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. But the initial tracks Kanye recorded after Yeezus didn’t feel like the right way forward. He traded in Daft Punk and Rick Rubin for Paul McCartney, recording the soulful “Only One” and “All Day,” the latter of which felt like a Watch the Throne leftover that he saved for himself; meanwhile, the folky (and super catchy) Rihanna- and McCartney-featuring “FourFiveSeconds” felt like a step backwards toward radio play and Billboard charts, where, naturally, it was immensely successful. But none of those tracks bore anything of the growing heaviness of what it meant to be Kanye West. And perhaps he knew it, because none of those songs were put on The Life of Pablo. On January 8, 2016, he unveiled the first official taste of his Yeezus follow-up with “Real Friends,” a devastatingly melancholy song about the loneliness that came with his growing success. “Guess I get what I deserve, don’t I?” he asked, reflecting on both his own selfishness and that of his family members and friends. More money, more problems.

As Kanye was wont to do, he started drumming up attention by acting out on social media and in public — this has always been his unique advertising technique going into a new album, one where excitement and anxiety converge into a destructive force possible only in the age of the internet. He tweeted “Bill Cosby Innocent !!!!!!!!!!” He got into a Twitter feud with Wiz Khalifa after Khalifa insulted his use of the word “waves” on the album; Khalifa’s girlfriend and Kanye’s ex Amber Rose responded, “Are u mad I’m not around to play in ur asshole anymore? #FingersInTheBootyAssBitch.” Kanye got skewered online by a prude public who turned Rose’s mobilization of his sexual fetish into some kind of slam dunk on his masculinity. He brought the 2009 VMAs incident with Taylor Swift back into consciousness with his “Famous” lyric, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous (Goddamn).” To be sure, it was aggressive.

When The Life of Pablo was released on Valentine’s Day, it saw Kanye going further into himself than ever before. In this album, he wanted us to really see him, to understand what his life had become. He showed us the true particularities of his life as a popular artist and entrepreneur, a man who had benefited from capitalism more than almost anyone, who was part of one of the most famous and profitable families on the planet, who had in fact monetized in some way most of the corners of his life. Whereas he had once advertised the frenzied passions of a life of excess, he now seemed unhappy, as if the supposed freedom achieved by his success felt insufficient and empty. Were these the values we wanted to see from our hero? Was he still someone to aspire to? And if he wasn’t, did he care that he might be starting to void his contract as a pop star?

In this album, Kanye divulged new parts of his story, from the cousin who stole his laptop and demanded $250,000 to the fact that he had been taking the antidepressant Lexapro. Politics in his music has always been woven into the narrative of his life, but by shifting the main focus of his music to his own inner life, he was actually able to offer a deeper kind of social critique; instead of talking explicitly about society and its institutions, like he did on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he mostly talked about his own day-to-day operations and how bad he felt. What made The Life of Pablo so powerful was that its political aspect came not from the angle of identity politics or class, but from the standpoint of the social activities and modes of exchange that we all participate in. He traded in the schools and jails, the presidency and the African-American experience of the 2000s for the mundanities of American life as Kanye West knew it: church, marriage, taking pills, running a company, having sex, making smoothies, staying in touch with friends, working on music, going on vacation. It was his way of commenting on the fallacy of the fantasy of capitalism and the gift-wrapping of neoliberalism, the idea that happiness is bound up with wealth and success; that anybody who works hard can raise themselves up, accumulate money, and lead a pleasant life; and that the government’s role is to facilitate this.

Dissonance in his music had reached an apex, both musically and lyrically, constantly shifting mood, tempo, mode, tone, and texture. In “FML,” anxiety about his family and success concludes with a detuned, doleful sample from Section 25’s “Hit”: “See through the veil/ And forget all your cares/ Throw them, throw them away.” The sample gives way to a distant thought in a distant key: “Ooh, life’s a feeling and/ Ooh, the body is a feeling, yeah.” One of the weirdest songs of Kanye’s career, “Freestyle 4” opens with spooky strings and a man growling, which leads to Kanye wondering what would happen if he fucked Kim on a dinner table at a Vogue party. The song ends abruptly, with everything devolving into a bizarre percussion and synth outtro that sounds like an alarm from a sci-fi film.

While the album opened with the encouraging “Ultralight Beam,” which featured gospel-tinged production, compassionate lyrics from Kanye and The-Dream, and a status-elevating contribution from Chance The Rapper, The Life of Pablo ended on a significantly darker note. “Saint Pablo,” which is probably Kanye’s most underrated song of the decade, pulled all the highs and lows of Kanye’s life into a six-minute rollercoaster of emotion. “I know I’m the most influential,” he rapped. “That Time cover was just confirmation/ This generation’s closest thing to Einstein/ So don’t worry about me, I’m fine.” But was he? Sampha’s chorus suggested otherwise: “Yeah, you’re lookin’ at the church in the night sky/ Wonderin’ whether God’s gonna say hi/ Oh, you’re lookin’ at the church in the night sky/ And you wonder where is God in your nightlife.” Kanye continued with another verse, punctuated by “I am one with the people (Real!),” which is halted by a stream of gunshots. He re-entered: “I’ve been woken from enlightened man’s dream/ Checkin’ Instagram comments to crowdsource my self-esteem.” Soon after, “I’m prayin’ a out-of-body experience will happen/ So the people can see my light/ Now it’s not just rappin’.” If Kanye ever gave us a preview of what was to come, that was it.

The album concluded with a rhapsodic set of bars from Sampha, directed at God himself, which revealed a cosmic sense of loss and a profound need to be seen. It was the most private moment in all of Kanye’s oeuvre.

Please face me when I speak/ Please say to me somethin’ before you leave/ You’ve been treatin’ me like I’m invisible/ Now I’m visible to you/ Oh, the invisible truths they sold/ I can’t quite understand the games you play/ Understand, understand, understand I’m standin’ under oath, and I promised I/ I wouldn’t fall anymore, now I’m cryin’ at the bar/ I’m wishin’ that you saw my scars, man/ I’m wishin’ that you came down here and stood by me/ And looked at me, like you knew me/ But I feel so alone/ Like I don’t know anyone except the night sky above.

In the months following the album’s release, Kanye continued working on and updating the album. He changed some lyrics to “Famous,” created a new version of “Wolves,” and then went ahead and updated most of the tracks in some way or another. He extended “30 Hours” to contain a new outro and eventually tacked on “Saint Pablo” to the end of the album. Eventually, the album had grown to a long 20 tracks. Kanye also plotted a 32-date tour, which opened in Indianapolis, Indiana on August 26, 2016. I was at that show with my friends, and it felt like we were at the center of the universe. As the tour continued, Kanye ranted from his floating stage about everything: Beyoncé, NIKE, Adidas, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, social media, and more. On November 21, he cancelled the tour and was hospitalized shortly after. His personal doctor told the police that “a patient” was suffering from “temporary psychosis as a result of sleep deprivation and dehydration,” as reported in The Los Angeles Times the following day.

The stresses outlined on The Life of Pablo and its tour — during which Kim Kardashian was robbed at gunpoint in Paris on October 3 — had officially taken their toll. Kanye the pop star was maxed out. Being admitted for psychiatric observation at the UCLA medical center was the culmination of the unbearable weight of over a decade of success and its discontents. It was almost as if The Life of Pablo, which was filled with so much life and despair, had simply exploded. He remained in the hospital until after Thanksgiving of that year, after which point he was released, dyed his hair blonde, and met the President-elect of the United States at Trump Tower in New York City.

IV. When Kanye had a meeting and a photo op with Donald Trump on December 13, 2016, it started a new chapter in both his life and our understanding of his life. If he hadn’t predicted this in the business-obsessed lyrics of The Life of Pablo, which referenced everyone from Larry Jackson and Tim Cook to Don C and Louis Vuitton, he certainly did in “So Appalled” on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy six years earlier with “I’m so appalled, Spalding ball/ Balding Donald Trump taking dollars from y’all,” a valorization veiled as an insult. At a time when Kanye’s entrepreneurial conquests were starting to expand — Adidas’s Yeezy Season 1 had been released the previous year — the rapper had shown in his music and interviews that he was moved and inspired by successful business owners as much as he was by other musicians. Perhaps even more so at this point. Trump was culturally known as a successful businessman and had just been elected as the President of the United States without one shred of political experience. And on top of that, he did it while standing against things that many Americans were committed to, like progressive environmental policies, open borders, and the Affordable Care Act. Trump was hated by much of the country and most of the media, but he still won the election. Why?

Kanye never really supported Trump’s policies, even when he said he would have voted for him if he’d voted. “The Ye version is maybe the Trump campaign and the Bernie Sanders principles,” he said in a lengthy video interview with Charlamagne. “That would be my mix and stuff. But I think both are needed.” Kanye was attracted to the fact that a cultural and economic figure that everyone seemed to hate could not only be successful, but could hold the most powerful position in the world: Commander in Chief, which is the government version of a CEO. For Kanye and over 62 million other people, Trump in 2016 appeared to be a force coming to change the status quo; to create jobs; to continue Obama’s initiative to strengthen the border; to further the welfare reforms supported by Clinton in the 1990s, Bush in the 2000s, and Obama in the 2010s; and to stand against the growing tendencies of identity politics.

At that time, almost 5% of the country was unemployed, or around 7.8 million people. Americans in general were unhappy in 2016, and Trump appealed to something in a lot of them — they believed he could change it. While Kanye obviously had employment, accumulated wealth, healthcare, and other things people need to survive, many didn’t. They felt Trump could give that to them. So he won the election, and that was extremely powerful for Kanye.

The more support Kanye voiced for Trump, the more people began to hate Kanye. The rapper took most of 2017 off, but came back strong in the spring of 2018. He called Trump his “brother in dragon energy” on Twitter and started associating with conservatives like Candace Owens. He recorded a weird song with T.I., a conversation where he tried to explain his support of Trump to the “Whatever You Like” rapper. “I know Obama was heaven sent/ But ever since Trump won, it proved that I could be president,” Kanye said in the song. He went on to challenge the idea that all African-Americans should be Democrats. He likened his newfound “conservatism” to his attempt to bridge political lines, “Like a gang truce, the first Blood to shake a Crip’s hand.” He questioned T.I.: “Is it better if I rap about crack? Huh? ‘Cause it’s cultural?/ Or how about I’ma shoot you? Or fuck your bitch?”

The song was ultimately a joke, but it was precursor to one of the biggest work pushes of Kanye’s career. That spring, he moved to Wyoming and produced five albums for his label, G.O.O.D. Music: Pusha T’s Daytona, Nas’s Nasir, Teyana Taylor’s K.T.S.E., his own ye, and a collaborative, self-titled album with Kid Cudi as Kids See Ghosts. The albums were relatively well-received, especially Pusha T’s, which was considered by many to be a career high for the Clipse rapper.

I reviewed ye for Tiny Mix Tapes and won’t repeat much of it here; instead, I’ll talk about how it has aged. When it came out, I gave the album a high score. At the time, I felt that it was a bold exploration of Kanye’s psyche, a rich immersion into his experience of the Other. I still think that’s somewhat right, but I’ve also come to see the album as a misfire, though a necessary one. Its production is excellent, and it contains powerful imagery and experiences from Kanye regarding the state of his family and mental health — he used the album’s cover art to announce his bi-polar diagnosis — but in the end, ye failed to address the formal and stylistic crises that the musician had arrived at in The Life of Pablo. ye was an opportunity for Kanye to figure out how to move forward. Could he continue working in the old ways, with the old team? Could he continue filling his beats with dark narrations of his own life? Was impeccable production — and ye has that — enough to make a song? Did it really express his struggle?

Because of Kanye’s support of Trump and his comments about slavery on TMZ — “When you hear about slavery for 400 years… 400 years? That sounds like a choice.” — even more people were turning on him, yielding calls of cancellation from many fans, as well as a number of hateful reviews of ye that never moved beyond an aversion to his “politics.” They were right to be skeptical of the album, but they were skeptical for the wrong reasons. Ultimately, ye didn’t move Kanye’s project forward, nor did it really evidence new moves in his self-critique as a pop artist — something that he’d done with every previous record. ye shows now that Kanye really didn’t know how to move forward from The Life of Pablo.

But his attempts accelerated nonetheless. Toward the end of the year, he announced that an album called Yandhi would be released on September 29. It never appeared. Kim Kardashian then tweeted that the album would actually be coming out on November 23, Black Friday. Talking to TMZ shortly after, Kanye said he was going to Africa to record more of the album. Black Friday came and went without Yandhi surfacing.

V. At the beginning of 2019, Kanye became increasingly devoted to his Christianity. He began the Sunday Service, a weekly worship event that featured new and old music, sermons, and guest musicians. Over the course of the year, the group would perform everywhere from L.A. to New York, with special events at Coachella, in Detroit and Chicago, and more. On August 29, 2019, Kim Kardashaian posted a photo on Instagram with a tracklisting for an album called Jesus Is King, which would ostensibly be released on September 27. Questions about Yandhi resurfaced, with fans wondering whether they were now waiting for two different albums or whether Jesus Is King was just a different appearance of Yandhi. And when Kanye missed the release date, people were enraged; providing no updates about the album, Kanye suffered a further hemorrhaging of his fan base.

Then, versions of Yandhi, which had slowly started to appear online, began popping up more frequently. Fans shared leaked versions of the album, some of which even appeared on Spotify and YouTube. Its tracklist changed occasionally, eventually settling around nine songs. Different versions of the Jesus Is King tracklist floated around the internet as well, with rumors that some Yandhi songs would be remade for Jesus Is King. I’m not sure what the official final state of Yandhi was, but the last version I heard was pretty bad. Thematically, it was all over the place, and musically, it felt regressive, a deepening of the issues present in ye. XXXTentacion, who had been murdered the year before, appeared on the album in “The Storm,” and his work there was weak. “New Body” was a long work in progress, with Nicki Minaj purportedly recording new bars well into the fall of 2019. “Chakras,” which featured magnificent, Yeezus-level production and saw a totally unhinged Kanye, was the sole great song from Yandhi.

Ultimately, though, Yandhi was minor. Kanye must have felt like this too, because he never released the album. Shortly after the final version of Yandhi, Kanye tweeted that Jesus Is King would be released on October 25 and would be accompanied by a film of the same title. This time, it actually came out.

The Christian-themed music of Jesus Is King was part of an attempt to grapple with the stylistic impasse that Kanye had been dealing with since The Life of Pablo. ye and Yandhi had proven that the rapper could no longer work as effectively in the same artistic paradigm as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus, and The Life of Pablo, and his Sunday Services showed that the life that needed to be expressed in 2019 was thoroughly different than the one he had been leading during those albums. Furthermore, he had exhausted those methods of production and had expressed those dissonances to the best of his ability. The answer to the question of what was to be done was essentially to leave rap behind, take up gospel, and compose a post-rap album.

It was a genius turn. “Everybody wanted Yandhi/ Then Jesus Christ did the laundry,” he rapped in “Selah.” This lyric holds the key to Kanye’s stylistic revolution: in having Christianity take the place of the bourgeois topics of his last four albums, he effectively found a vessel to actually push his work forward. Kanye could not escape the ills of late capitalism, but Jesus Is King proved that he could find a new way to express them.

In this album, Christianity is hugely fetishized. Of course it is — Jesus Is King isn’t a true Christian album, but rather the aestheticization of performed Christianity. Kanye’s spiritual turn wasn’t private and devout, but the further mobilization and the necessary appearance of his entrepreneurial and musical pursuits. To put it another way, Jesus Is King is not an album about living a Christian life, but rather an album that provides a different way for us to examine the same psychological phenomena of late capitalism we’ve always dealt with. Repression, thought-policing, prudism, shame, and greed are all here, but where they were handled in one way on Yeezus and The Life of Pablo, discussed from the perspective of the broken individual — the character of the “entrepreneur” — and their family life, they appear here as an opposite: false purity and a devotion to God. That is to say that Kanye’s Christianity is both as real as bourgeois liberalism and as symptomatic, just a different expression of the problems in our world today. Christianity is an institution that not only hasn’t rejected Kanye, but can also forgive him for failing. One appealing aspect of Christianity is that, for better or worse, it appears concerned with the individual’s personal upbuilding and their struggle to lead a good life. It’s a logical choice for someone who has felt so deeply maligned.

In “On God,” Kanye sings, “That’s why I charge the prices that I charge/ I can’t be out here dancin’ with the stars/ No, I cannot let my family starve/ I go hard, that’s on God.” Shortly before that, “I’ve been tellin’ y’all since ‘05/ The greatest artist restin’ or alive.” A lot of this content is not new, but Kanye’s new way of situating it changes the way we hear it. The jazz-meets-rap-meets-gospel “Use This Gospel” is both a gorgeous recycling of ideas from the discarded Yandhi’s “Chakras” and proof that Kanye remains one of the best producers in the business. He not only reunites Clipse for some unusually self-conscious bars — “But who am I to judge? I’m crooked as Vegas,” Pusha T muses — but makes room for a solo by the widely (and very wrongly, in my opinion) maligned smooth-jazz saxophonist Kenny G. At so many points on Jesus Is King, Kanye still wants to challenge our way of seeing him and the world. As ye and Yandhi showed, that was something that could only have been done by changing his approach from the ground up.

As a pop star, Jesus Is King-era Kanye is more withholding than he’s ever been. He doesn’t give us anything that we want, whether it’s releasing music on time, beefing with other artists, committing provocative social faux pas, making club jams and radio hits, or articulating our political and social values back to us. He doesn’t curse or sing about sex anymore. The repression that was always there, sublimated caustically in his early and middle 2010s albums, has been made explicit, part of the visible fabric of his new cosmos. But he is still incredibly famous, and maintains a massive and dedicated group of fans who will not only listen to everything he does, but who, despite it all, still trust and believe in him.

The reason we continue to care about pop stars is that they’re products designed for consumption, ones that we find a special and complex kind of meaning in. Even if we don’t enjoy this or that figure, their music or films, we pay attention to them because they’re totems of the American dream, a narrative built on the idea that we ought to always strive for a more fulfilling and successful life. Although many would say that the content of that dream is superficial, focused on the accumulation of wealth and power rather than transcendental happiness (actual freedom), we are still attracted to it — it’s a sacred part of the world we live in today. Pop stars are often expected to embody the ethos of the world at any given time; they’re part of the reproduction of capital itself. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t also see in them some form of our own potential.

Perhaps, then, at the end of the day, what we love about our pop stars aren’t the lies they feed us, but the small shreds of truth that we sense in them and their work. If Kanye has failed to uphold his end of the popular artist contract, maybe the problem isn’t as much with him as it is with what we desire from pop stars in the first place.

Jesus Is King isn’t the direct critique of 2000s and 2010s politics and culture that Kanye’s earlier albums were; rather, it’s an attempted self-critique by a pop star confronting the truth: that it is impossible to make music the same way we did 10 years ago. It’s a tour de force vision of what a different kind of popular music could sound like. This isn’t to say that everyone should start making albums like Jesus Is King, but it is to say that the album shows that it’s possible for us to be different than we are. At minimum, Kanye’s most recent album has produced a new dialectical evolution in his work and therefore a new crisis to deal with. Kanye has not lost his way, it’s just that his path has divulged from itself so many times that most of us have lost the patience to continue following. And rightly so, for what other popular artist has prepared us to deal with something like this? Who else has offered such a deep, continuous interrogation of what’s still at stake in popular music?

At the end of 2019, Kanye has come full circle, going into the next decade with the same question he entered this one with: What, really, is left to do? We would be smart to listen for his next answer.

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ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND

BED · OFFICE · GYM · BATH · COUPE
ALLEY · BONFIRE · CLIFF · VOID · BEYOND