GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THEIR PARTS
This was a banner year for those of us with an affinity for music that not only falls between the categorical cracks but obliterates categories altogether. Categories have typically been marketing devices rather than musical classifications, designed to slot an artist onto this radio station or into that CD section of the store. The breakdown of categories is another sign of the breakdown of the way the music business has long done business (hallelujah!), as the old means of pigeonholing, promotion and distribution have succumbed to the immediacy of the digital age.
Great music no longer needs to fit into place (if it ever did); it establishes its own place. The new paradigm of music consumption not only encourages artists to venture beyond their comfort zones, it rewards them for it, as comfort is the enemy of art. Thus much of the year’s best music came from collaborations that might have been inconceivable a decade ago, but now stake out their own musical territory.
What to make of the teaming of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, produced by T Bone Burnett? Since Krauss has long proclaimed her passion for ’70s rock (the cheesier the better), and Plant’s solo career has been less flamboyantly lubricious than his “squeeze my lemon” days, the gap between Led Zep and Union Station isn’t as great as some might suspect. Yet the music they made together sounds like nothing that anyone would have expected (what could anyone have expected?), and nothing like what any of the three of them would have made individually.
Then there’s the production of Lucinda Williams by New York conceptualist Hal Willner, with results that some (like me) thought ranked with her best music, others dismissed as affected at best, but which had a bracingly polarizing effect that could not be dismissed. Or the southern soul collaboration between Bettye LaVette and the Drive-By Truckers. Or Steve Earle’s venture into New York hip-hop with the Dust Brothers’ John King.
Or, to my ears the most inspired pairing of the year, the teaming of Mavis Staples and Ry Cooder for an album that could only be dismissed as civil-rights nostalgia by those who hadn’t experienced this music (or weren’t listening carefully) the first time through.
I frequently review for Amazon.com, and when the site asked me for Ten Best lists in three categories — country, folk and blues — I felt both stymied and liberated. So much of the music I loved most this year might have fit in two or even three of these categories (or into rock, my favorite catch-all). Such collaborations have happened before — Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin, Emmylou Harris with Daniel Lanois, etc. — but never have so many of them produced such richly unclassifiable results in a single year.
–DON MCLEESE
BLACK AND WHITE AND READ ALL OVER
Having been awakened to my stunted taste in music by the current generation of pop critics, I’ve had a bear of a time deciding which albums I loved this year. I thought I was in the clear after coming to terms with my “rockist” streak: The Justin Timberlake cure didn’t work so well, but OD-ing on the Boston reissue did the trick. But now I’m challenged by The New Yorker’s trendspotting scribe to confront the white-ist lurking inside me — the listener who doesn’t mind it when his favorite white artists fail to incorporate elements of black music into their sound. Whose music, for example, doesn’t swing.
Here’s my problem: I’ve always paid more attention to the things that are IN the music that moves me than the things that might be missing from it. But now, before I can pronounce something is great for what it is, I have to make sure I shouldn’t withhold my praise for what it isn’t. This absence of black factor has got me all turned around, as the Sterling Hayden character said in The Long Goodbye. I haven’t been able to sleep at night, worried about giving too many under-dimensional Caucasians a pass. When I try to picture sheep jumping over a fence, I see Jeff Tweedy tripping over the top rail.
Before I became aware of the black hole in Wilco, I loved Sky Blue Sky, which, far from being the “safe” return to alt-country that some herd-like reviewers have tagged it, is a thrilling step forward in playing off the center — even bolder than the band’s recent sonic experiments. Now, I tell myself I should drop Wilco from my top 20. I should also cut loose Spoon, and Fountains Of Wayne, and Loudon Wainwright III — oh, yes, definitely Wainwright. Who has less black in his sound than him? I should accentuate the black-i-tive and go with nothing but artists like Joe Henry, a white guy with unquestioned black cred who traffics in Afro-era pop and produces R&B legends such as Solomon Burke to boot.
But no sooner can you say Pat Boone than I’m saved by Mavis Staples. I ask, as I now have to, whether her transcendent album We’ll Never Turn Back is black enough, since it was produced by a grizzled white guy, Ry Cooder. Or maybe, the way this school of rock crit works, is it white enough?
I get cosmically bell-clapped for these thoughts. Thanks, I needed that. And I’m not the only one who does.
–LLOYD SACHS
