But wait, there’s more! Of course there were runners-up — twenty, as a matter of fact — that, depending on the time of day or the way the sun streams through a window, could have made this top 15 (+1). And now to put my obsessive-compulsiveness to rest.
Mos Def’s latest album, The Ecstatic – with a cover featuring a cropped still from Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, one of the greatest American movies of the last four decades – has been described as his best since Black on Both Sides. (See my short blurb on his recent “Black on Both Sides in its entirety” tour.) One might say that isn’t saying much; the previous two albums were merely decent, and didn’t quite live up to the promise of his debut album (and certainly not if you count Black Star, his excellent collaboration with Talib Kweli).
But still: “Quiet Dog” has become my favorite Mos Def track ever, the real Empire State anthem of 2009. It’s partly because I’ve found that I tend to love the songs that sound like Mos was merely messing about: “Fear Not Of Man”, for instance, is a State of the Hip-Hop Nation manifesto delivered, one thinks, almost off the cuff. “Umi Says” features him trying to sing (just barely, actually), over an ambling jazz groove that sounds more like a noodly instrumental coda.
At the end of a decade when the hip-hop charts seemed to consolidate its shift from its funk/soul sample base to European club music — from boom-boom-bap to boomf-boomf-boomf — “Quiet Dog” was a nervy single to release, featuring a stripped-down return to (for lack of a better term) “rap-o clap-o”, and starting off with an excerpt from a Fela Kuti interview (check out David Letterman’s usual nonplussed reaction to hearing his name in the YouTube video above). Mos Def seems infatuated here with that single kids-on-a-Brooklyn-streetcorner, drum-and-handclap rhythm – “The prominent bassness / Zulu arrangement / rockin’ amazement” — simmering down only towards the end.
It has a breathless intensity that the songs mentioned above don’t quite have, as if the thick torrent of words flowing through him and the Sugarhill Gang and everyone else before him can’t be stopped and won’t be stopped, and he needs to talk himself into staying cool. Dare I say it? It’s the dank, primal, musical embodiment of his most beautiful boogie man persona, the opposite of “bright as the A.M.,” the mighty Mos Def stirring a cauldron with strange sonic brew for your favorite nightmare.
The single was released exactly a year ago today, which gives it something of an unfair handicap on my list. It means that it’s been bouncing around in my head for a year now – the music in my headphones and in the streets and in the car and on the train and at work and my favorite song of 2009.
*I was going to cite Kid Cudi’s ubiquitous 2008 single “Day ‘n Nite” as an example, but remembered that Kanye West had already utilized Daft Punk, of all bands, for 2007′s “Stronger”.
I’ve loved the band The Sea and Cake for a long time now, but don’t ask me which of their albums I like the best. They’re a bit of a blur, quite frankly, and not because I haven’t listened to them carefully. It doesn’t help that their words have never made very much sense – all chosen, I think, simply for how they sound and what they evoke, and Sam Prekop’s slurred vocals have always hovered, barely intelligibly, only just a tiny bit over the mix.
So why all this affection? The adjective “tight” in indie rock is usually reserved for music on the faster, chord change-filled range of the spectrum (think Battles, or Don Caballero), and not for music that, for lack of a better word, more or less swings. Car Alarm is the sound of a sleek and efficient ensemble tightly but effortlessly coloring within the lines.
Okay, all this sounds like I’m dealing out backhanded compliments; words like “sleek and efficient” sound like a liability, and make it seem like I’m describing late-period Steely Dan or something. I think it’s indicative of the paradox within their music: the Sea and Cake seem to exemplify both a breezy offhandedness (Prekop’s breathy vocals) and a marvelous, controlled precision.
The Sea and Cake doesn’t exhibit the brawnier athleticism of drummer John McEntire’s other band, Tortoise; instead, it’s a calculated, subdued grace. You can hear it in “On a Letter”, a particularly fine work of musical craftsmanship: the instruments in gentle lockstep, the guitar tentatively teasing out lines to introduce the main theme, one last minimal guitar filigree a minute before the end, and then it’s gone.
3. Pinback, “Loro”
- Official website.
- From the 1999 album Pinback.
Hmmm. I suppose I can continue writing about why it’s so much easier to write about movies than it is to write about music: for the former, the lazy, fallback option is to simply answer the question “So, what is the movie about?” (And yet: writing a movie synopsis is probably the most challenging and quite frankly burdensome part of the process.)
For something like Pinback’s “Loro” –- well, it’s clear that “What’s the song about?” is the wrong question, and even the folks on the bulletin boards have their theories about what “49531” might mean, but again: wrong question. I can tell you, at least, that further listenings don’t exactly reveal much, not that it truly matters: those simple (maybe even simplistic) ascending and descending guitar figures, the electronic twinges that surface in the first minute and are never heard again, the voices mixed just barely above the instruments, a vocal progression from the individual to the collective.
So here’s my fallback option: I can tell you exactly when I first heard it — July 26, 2009, 6:06 pm. (I’m apparently the last person in the world – well, between myself and my brother, anyway – to know about “Loro”; I played it for my brother in the Philippines, who recognized it immediately after the first few notes.) I was driving home from a bar, waiting at a traffic light on Telegraph and 51st in Oakland. It was a warm evening, and still early; the ironing boards were in the process of being folded up in front of Bakesale Betty’s. I had just popped into the stereo a mix CD given to me by my anthropologist concert buddy, who had just taken off for fieldwork in Buenos Aires via Mexico City (hi Xochitl!).
And it was one of those “who is this?” moments, when you punch the eject button on the cassette player and pull out the tape to squint at the label and figure out what the hell you just heard. I don’t know how many times I listened to this mere wisp of a song this year, immersed in something like bliss. Bubbles floating and disappearing in air. Early-morning sunlight winking behind leaves.
