Before compiling the best-CD list for EL Magazine, which this year will be published on Christmas Day, I usually shut myself in for a weekend in late November and bathe in those albums that have intrigued me over the past eleven months. With each year it becomes a little more difficult. Sometime after my 22nd birthday I lost the ability to absorb music with all my being; and since I started writing about music and, more significantly, getting paid to do so (not very much, mind you) the professional obligation to hear as much of it as possible made it hard to give the appropriate level of attention to even stuff I really liked. Time, of course, is the main constraint, but distractions are everywhere, especially in a media environment where everyone has an opinion and those opinions are almost impossible to ignore. When I was in college, there were only a handful of music writers whose ideas I turned to on a regular basis for guidance, not just in terms of what I might enjoy but also in terms of how to refine my critical faculties. Nowadays the static is unavoidable, and often precedes the arrival of the music itself in my home. The critical faculties are thus overwhelmed, and tend to break down as a result.
I’ve always maintained that the only criterion for judging music is how much you like it and how often you want to listen to it. That’s a good, simple means of assessment as far as it goes (and, in truth, has little to do with “judging”), but it doesn’t always help when you get to the problem of describing why you like a particular song or album; because once you start doing that the cognitive dissonance becomes deafening. Tokenism is the great bugbear of list-making, and so during that lost weekend in November I listened to an inordinate amount of hip-hop, not because I liked the albums I listened to so much, but rather because I didn’t like them that much. A certain prominent critic declared in 2009 that hip-hop was dead, and though I hardly agree there was little this year that brought me out of myself. Due to the delayed release schedules that major labels in Japan often follow, I have yet to hear what is shaping up as the year’s best album according to Western critical consensus, the Kanye West thing; but I was underwhelmed by the Drake album, the Rick Ross album, even The Roots, which I count as one of the three or four best groups in the world, regardless of genre. The closest I got was Big Boi’s solo turn, mainly because it mirrored the qualities I appreciated most on my album of the year: craft in the service of spontaneity. And while I rarely cite punk or metal on my lists due to their self-imposed stylistic conventions, I felt that I should find some hard rock to put on the list, some representation of the popular will that was close to my own middle-class American white-boy sensibility. The closest I got was a pop album by a female Colombian superstar. (Some will find it suspect that I have no Japanese artists on the list since I live in Japan and make part of my living writing about Japanese pop; it’s a valid accusation and one that I feel more comfortable addressing in my Best Movies list next week.) Continue reading
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