Introduction
New Year, Still Winter
2021 shuffled in unceremoniously, wisely keeping its annual head down to avoid all those inevitable comparisons to the last fucker who careened through here.
Like everyone else damned and lucky enough to cast out a fate on the face of this rock, I was both physically and spiritually frigid when I met 2021, still a smidge traumatized by the depths of the previous holiday season—during which time I nearly flunked out of virtual law school and weathered a pre-vaccine COVID-19 quarantine scare. I received terrible but technically passing grades in all of my classes, and ultimately did not get the virus in question—but I was way too depleted to celebrate. I can only speculate nervously about how bad I would’ve felt if something genuinely tragic had happened to me.
I think when the next generation comes for mine, they’ll rightfully accuse us all of having been whiny little nihilistic bitches throughout this whole experience. I certainly don’t claim to be above that categorization. See, for some reason, getting hyped for 2021 felt tiresome before I even tried. Everyone else’s excitement seemed like a pointless insult, even coming from my usually pessimistic compadres. I felt like Charlie Brown on Christmas, in the first part of the flick before Linus starts spouting magic mid-20th century Judeo-Christian propaganda. But somehow the human race decided that it was necessary to look forward to the year—and I guess it’s worth maintaining some semblance of new-year-normalcy, if only so you don’t die bashing your head in against the wall calendar come January second. So, I tried to get into it. After all, 2021 was my year to finish school forever, to finally become a lawyer, and in doing so, hopefully resolve my psychological “if I achieve anything less than a J.D., I am inadequate” complex. I’d weathered months of pandemic-related shenanigans, and vaccines were on the horizon for all. Things were looking up, right?
Obviously, shit quickly got complicated. Things are OK now, but euphemistically, it was a slightly trying process getting here. It was a terrible year, but it was the best year of my life. It just took until mid-November for me to realize.
The Mega Mix Projects
Way back in March 2020, when all of this bullshit started, I made a Spotify playlist titled Sheltering In Place Aesthetics. Later, upon the occurrence of certain objectively hilarious news events, I re-titled that playlist Stem Cells for POTUS.
Featuring as its cover photo the back of my friends’ party house in Charlottesville (the one with the basement where we used to do shows), Stem Cells for POTUS served as a chronicle of every song, new or old, that crossed my listening field throughout the course of what was objectively a very low-partying year. It flouted genres, transcended themes, and did a lot of other shit I’ll use as code for “it had no structure and it made no sense.” Just like I planned. Just like the year itself.
In 2021, I did it again.
Allow me to introduce The Capitol Riot DJ Set., in all its bloated, sanity-spurning glory:
I took this cover photo at four in the morning on the one day in my life that I have ever actually been present for a snowfall at my parents’ house in Palo Cedro—January 27, 2021. At the risk of being corny, it was a special moment. It felt as pure and unspoiled as the last Calvin and Hobbes strip. For a few precious hours, the year held promise. Against every instinct in my burnt-out brain, I felt a sense of optimism. But I didn’t dare acknowledge it, either to my friends or to myself. Like speaking at all, even breathing too hard, would shatter the illusion, and remind me what a shitty, strange year it was going to be.
I’ve always dealt with life’s shittiness and strangeness through prolific pop music consumption. So, in the shitty-strange spirit of nostalgia that grows out of seasonal boredom, this piece is about my year in music. It’s about the sounds that filled my addled brain-space while I:
- Got my COVID-19 vaccine at a Safeway in Redding, California by lying about the severity of my “underlying health condition”;
- Finished virtual (formerly in-person, supposedly, at some point I guess) law school, took some fancy graduation pictures, returned my rental robe, and moved out of my apartment in a week;
- Drove across the country from Virginia back to California;
- Ground my teeth down to popcorn kernels and developed a nasty perique tobacco habit while studying for the bar exam;
- Took and likely nearly failed the bar exam;
- Ventured with my girlfriend through the American Southwest searching for the ghost of Georgia O’Keeffe, and in the process discovered that Flagstaff is actually pretty neat;
- Spent a week recording an incredible rap EP with my best friends;
- Escaped a house fire in Berkeley;
- Got hired to work at a law firm in a small California market;
- Lost my shit freaking out about my pending Bar exam results;
- Found out that I actually passed the Bar exam, and went hunting for mushrooms among the redwoods;
- Got my house fumigated; and
- Got sworn in.
Along with a few other miscellaneous adventures I’m likely forgetting. But this isn’t a traditional year-end music countdown. There will be no corporate Condé Nast-ified enabling of artificial pop media hierarchy. Very few of the songs I write about here were actually released in 2021. Mostly, they came to my attention through a very scientific process of “y’know, just sorta dickin’ around on Spotify.” There are some trends for sure, but mostly I wanted the Capitol Riot DJ Setlist to be as inclusive as possible—no rules but to shuffle it liberally. Probably goes without saying, but it’s all over the place. Your mileage, etc.
The full playlist is about 175 songs long. Run time’s about 11 hours total. Most people are not going to want to go through every song I had on repeat in 2021. Rightly so—I listen to a lot of shit, and most people don’t have time to waste reading about how or why I ever decided to add “If I Only Had a Brain” by MC 900 Ft. Jesus to the set. So I’ve narrowed the list down to the thirty-something songs that are most reflective of where my head was throughout the year. It’s every bit as self-indulgent as any professional music journalist’s list, except I’m not a journalist and I won’t be paid, and this won’t be professionally published, and everything will be fine.
January
Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings – This Land Is Your Land
| GENRE | Soul Revival, Funk, Folk |
| YEAR | 2005 |
| RIYL | James Brown, Woody Guthrie, Kicking Fascists in the Face |
Eventually I was joined in Palo Cedro by my high school media geek bro/former radio co-host Kenny, and a spastic menagerie of drop-in, drop-out nomad-amigos. We kicked off my final semester of education by watching the January 6 Capitol Riot unfold live online, with plenty of Discord-based color commentary:
Well, that about sums it up.
Totally coincidentally, I then jumped into classes on the racial dynamics of the American education system, civil rights litigation, Cold War history, classical rhetoric, and for some reason, commodity futures trading regulation. Y’know—for career preparation.
Maybe it was laughing my libtard ass off at the alt-right’s worst-but-brightest failing miserably to pull off even one measly act of insurrectionary fascism. Maybe it was the fact that I was in Shasta County, surrounded by geriatric, obese, sometimes hooked on meth, painkillers, and/or weed, social conservatives. I’d say they were fiscally conservative too, but I don’t think many of them could define the word “fiscal” even if you repeatedly beat them in the face with a sackful of pennies. Come to think of it, neither could I. But whatever the reason, for the first time in ten years, I caught a whiff of American patriotism.
Yeah, I said it—I’m patriotic now. It’s one of the ways I’m reinventing myself for the 2020s. I’m going to waste less time being ironic and have the audacity to believe in my country, or something. Of course, being a certain kind of counterculture dweeb, I’m unfortunately only allowed to grow into one specific kind of patriot: the “buzzword-leftist.” The crotchety Farm Aid kind who watches The West Wing, drives a hybrid, and still may not even have voted for Bernie Sanders. And honestly, I’m the type of guy who loves the idea of America more than I love a lot of the people who live there. Maybe that’s what makes me an American.
Whatever. In the category of my specific brand of NPR-core patriotism, here’s a song I’ve been playing all year on repeat: “This Land Is Your Land,” the Sharon Jones version of Woody Guthrie’s all-time bleeding heart folkster slap-banger, the toast of summer camps from sea to shining sea. I very sincerely wish that this specific take on the song was our national anthem—purportedly commie lyrics and all. Shit, purportedly commie lyrics especially—they are Woody’s own, after all. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings turn up the heat while refusing to censor the message. Ms. Jones serves up a sultry performance that flips cliché on its ass, reframing a classic to give it new life. She stays so cool and sounds so smooth throughout that you hardly notice the way she slides into the outro—when she goes the fuck off, flinging enough sweat and soul and improvised howling through the speakers to short-circuit the whole house. All the while, the band swings like an Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade pendulum—only the penitent man shall pass. Like the hand of God enforcing judgment upon Babylon, this song commands more than attention—it commands respect.
Sleaford Mods – Shortcummings
| GENRE | Electronic Post-Punk, Spoken Word |
| YEAR | 2021 |
| RIYL | Righteous political rage, working class English accents, pigeon sounds |
Hot off a tip from my girlfriend and an all-too-brief Amy Taylor feature, I finally decided to get into Sleaford Mods in 2021. I was idiotically late to the party—they’d been on my listening periphery since some of their earlier Rough Trade releases, but by 2021, they’d long since become the toast of the European post-punk scene—you know, the one with all that Big Indie Buzz™. So I threw ‘em on, and sure enough, their music inspired me even as it shook me very gently by the throat.
If Sharon Jones covering Woody Guthrie sat at the optimistic, bleeding-heart-patriotic end of my political listening spectrum, then this is the opposite, confrontational, angrier end. The Mods are all over the Capitol Riot DJ Set, actually—I think three or four of their songs made the full list. But the song I’m showcasing here, “Shortcummings,” is taken from their most recent, scathingly current-events-y album Spare Ribs, which dropped back in mid-January. It’s not exactly their most danceable, and I have to admit—it’s way too ponds-away in terms of subject-matter for me to fully understand its lyrics. Someone on the Internet said Mr. Cummings is the name of a Boris Johnson-adjacent suited goon, or something. So, whatever this is really about, I can only assume it’s on-brand for the Mods: a decrepit, menacing take on elected officials’ hypocrisy, international malaise, and economic despair.
Sonic elements to love: First and foremost, that bass line. It’s the sound of you ferociously mumbling, shuffling angrily down a filthy, overcrowded street in the frigid winter wind, hands gripping a fistful of scavenged mixed change in your pocket as you weave in and out of seemingly every slow-walking fucker in your city. You approach the corner store, famished, seeking a couple of tallboys and a pack of smokes. The cashier recognizes you again. He shakes his head in disappointment. He asks you if you’re ever gonna quit. You tell him to shut the fuck up, and you light one up for the walk home.
Next: The teeniest, tiniest guitar part of any arguably “punk” song released in 2021. It’s pretty much the only thing about the instrumental that indicates where the song transitions from verse to chorus. It’s an extremely light touch. It’s almost hard to notice. But it’s also a perfect example of what producer/beatsmith Andrew Fearn does so well—a fucking lot, with very little.
And, of course, Jason Williamson. Take the first time he shouts “when did I get so FUCKING down on my knees?!” Like he’s provoking God. Sure, it’s a good laugh. But the next time it comes around, and you find yourself shouting along to it—at least I did—then it becomes glorious. A middle finger to a civilization kicking dirt in everyone’s face these days.
And that line in the chorus, “He’s gonna miss himself so much, but it’s all gonna come down hard.” It’s a rhythmic, insurrectionist threat. The way he drags out the words “come down hard” sound taunting, cocky. The band stares a politician in the face, daring him to come one step closer so they can knock his fucking teeth in. Yes, it’s punk—but just calling something punk and calling it a day is so obviously reductive that it wasn’t even cool to do in 1976. This isn’t just punk—it’s techno, it’s folk, it’s hip hop, it’s slam poetry. It sounds profoundly contemporary while sounding like everything and nothing else at once. It speaks with the ferocity of Upton Sinclair’s California gubernatorial campaign, if Upton Sinclair was somehow even more of a socialist and half as eloquent. And like Sinclair for governor, it’s likely to place low on many more “sophisticated” year-end lists—or at least those rightfully committed to not writing solely about music made by white dudes. But I think it’s highly intelligent and tight as fuck.
Father – Mirror, Mirror
| GENRE | Trap, Soundcloud Rap, Hipster Hop |
| YEAR | 2018 |
| RIYL | Dirty limericks, recreational drug use at public universities, Boomerang Channel |
I was big into consuming larger-than-life braggadocious hip-hop in the early part of the year. Which brings me, of course, to “Mirror, Mirror” by Father. This song is hilarious. It’s completely adolescent in its irreverence. You can tell from the first fucking couplet that Father is in the music business to have a kickass time at every prudish hater’s expense—and that he’s very proud of his new Gucci belt. The song seeps self-confidence, especially in that completely perfect, demented nursery rhyme of a hook: “Looked in the mirror, fell in love with myself/Started tucking in my shirt just to show off my Gucci belt.” It’s clearly a very nice belt. It’s also a great way to poke fun at a genre trope while still offering up a fun take on that trope. It’s absurd. It’s cheeky. It’s kinda fuckin’ stupid. But the beat hits like a leaned-out ‘90s Cartoon Network bumper—something that would’ve played over clips of I Am Weasel or Dexter’s Laboratory—and as dumb as the verse lyrics can be, the song is over before Father’s trolling gets tiresome. Listening to someone be this animated and self-absorbed (and seemingly having a blast doing it) only inspired me to ham it up in my own writing. I’m serious—I’m fucking great at this shit, man. The people gotta know.
BO-PEEP – Tunnel
| GENRE | J-Rock |
| YEAR | 2003 |
| RIYL | Being murdered by bass guitar, shrieking girl powered rocket engines, cannons |
I don’t give a fuck that I don’t understand a fucking word of this song. It’s just thunderous. That double-time side-steppin’ dance-rock bass grips me by the spine and shakes me like a strand of spaghetti, joyously getting brutalized in the mosh pit of my mind. I cannot headbang hard enough at my desk while I sit here trying to write about the damn song. It’s one of the best pop-noise rock tracks I’ve heard in years, and it’s only the first song on this band’s first mini-album from 2003. Their discography is intimidating in its depth. There’s absolutely no way it’s all as earthquake-kickstarting as this track, but I’ve been repeating this one all year with habitual frequency. It’s at the point of abuse, honestly. It’s like Metz or the early Men had a baby with the Teen Titans theme song. It’s righteously noisy and mercilessly groovy. How fortunate to have it on Spotify in the States. I needed something new in 2021, and this song surprised me in the coolest way a song possibly can. Amazing discovery. I’m stoked.
Tom Waits – Step Right Up
| GENRE | Jazz-Rock, Spoken Word |
| YEAR | 1976 |
| RIYL | Smoking cigarettes outside the bar by yourself, street preachers, saxophone solos |
One of a few corny early-20s radio-bro moves I used to do was to not-so-slyly drop the “I do some writing here and there” line on first dates. As long as I kept it to prose and left poetry to the pros, it worked pretty well at making me seem moderately interesting to hipster girls in exchange for minimal creative effort. It was all peachy until sometime in June 2018, when the girl across the table at Falafel Stop mentioned the disgust with which she regarded a certain caste of self-important, broodingly hyper-intellectual, self-obsessed “writer boys.” About three years later, when I told her I was finally getting into Tom Waits, she laughed, and reminded me of that first conversation.
So maybe Tom Waits’ music suits a certain type of dude, and maybe this was just my year to finally admit that I’m that type of dude. Look—Tom Waits is fucking great, and I don’t have the time or the patience or the full understanding necessary to explain why here. Nobody wants to read that anyway. It made sense that it would happen for me in 2021 though—a year where I really started to study songwriting more seriously, soaking up all the malicious secrets I could from the sludge-dripping quills of classic rock’s most notoriously literate creeps, and rediscovered a love of performing music in character.
That about sums it up, actually—this dude Waits is an exceedingly literate creep with a surgical-implement wit and the satirical subtlety of a bonesaw. Underbelly ideas and scuzz-tacular sounds fly out of “Step Right Up” faster than they can be fully processed. It’s a sleazy, spring-in-a-step flurry of phrases and a flailing sax line, packing all the prickly cuddles of an abusive alcoholic step-uncle who hugs you just a second too long. Tom expertly conveys the capitalist desperation of the song’s gasping, grizzled narrator: A mythical dirtbag, a holy schlockmeisting huckster in a magic two-buck suit, an ancient auctioneer achieving hallucinogenic jazz apotheosis in real time on tape—and even though the whole jittery picture’s barely held together by a day-at-the-office bass line and Tom’s maniacal pill-poppin’ energy, it’s riotously fucking funny and it necessitates your rapt attention. And it’s only a dollar.
February
Mclusky – Collagen Rock
| GENRE | Noise-Rock, Post-Punk, Noise-Pop |
| YEAR | 2002 |
| RIYL | Distorted riffs, thunderous bass, talking shit on everybody else at the indie show |
True to my nature, I didn’t make it very far into the year before I needed to scratch my recurring noise-rock itch. And I’ll be totally honest on this one—the algorithm fed Mclusky’s “Collagen Rock” to me, by the computerized petting-zoo hand. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I hope the PR guy who paid to have it planted in my recommendations knows that it worked. Please pay the band handsomely—these guys seemed pissed, like they maybe aren’t getting their cut: “One of those bands got paid, I heard/One of those bands got fake tits, yeah.”
The rest of the lyrics are about as gleefully juvenile and venomous. The riff is gargantuan, needling and neurotic, and as it tiptoes cutely over a cavernous steamroller bass part, that hyperventilating vocal squawk turns on a dime into a murderous snarl, all of which contributes conspicuously to the constant sense that this whole thing is basically the fucked-up, less pop-friendly, self-effacing edgelord version of Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair.” It’s a hell of a lot riffier, meaner and funnier, if less subtle by a few (European) football field-lengths. But if Pavement was right, and attention and fame is indeed a career (career, career, career), Mclusky’s cult status is well-earned. Maybe these guys didn’t explode state-side because they were too focused on playing dirtier than the California cameras allowed. The Arctic Monkeys are just a bunch of pretty-boy prep schoolers by comparison, as far as I’m concerned—and I’d pick “Collagen Rock” to kick the shit out of “Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” any night of the week, any alley-behind-the-pub in the U.K. Now, if only they could turn a fucking profit doing it.
The B-52’s – Private Idaho
| GENRE | New Wave, Surf, Queercore |
| YEAR | 1980 |
| RIYL | The Ventures, vintage sci-fi, the Beach Boys’ vocal harmonies, looking fabulous |
In the first place, I got into music through classic rock—so there’s always going to be a certain amount of classic rock in my listening arsenal. That’s still a huge musical area to explore, though. And from year to year, I tend to wander into different corners of it. For example, in 2021 I went big on new wave and glam, including classic bangers and deep cuts by some of the seventies’ and eighties’ most aesthetically unique artists, and others who just really knew how to fucking party. So, up until 2021, I’d really only heard of the B-52’s through their radio hit “Love Shack,” a staple of big-budget classic-rock FM where I grew up. But it wasn’t until a particularly intoxicated Blondie “Artist Radio” binge took a southern turn back in January that I fully realized: the B-52’s may know how to fucking party, sure—but they also know how to fucking shred. Ferociously.
Look—I don’t give a fuck who you are or who you think you are—this song is simply the tightest fucking shit ever. Queer kids from Georgia bringing roof-exploding Dick Dale riffage, paranoiedly spastic sci-fi synth lines, and spooky-angelic harmonies to the clueless Morning-in-America masses? Fucking hell yeah. I’m so there that I’m going back in time to get there, just to see the B-52’s play this live without having to sit through fucking “Roam.” The vocal layering here is pristine. It’s genuinely moving. It’s hauntingly pure, and the dialogue-style juxtaposition with those desperate, military-march “get outta the state” shouts make the whole thing feel like a party-til-oblivion Go-Go club right before the smoldering wreckage comes crashing down, before the fallout hits. Neon and fire. That’s what this sounds like. Glitter and gas masks. Drag queens with assault rifles. Yeah, that’s it. “Private Idaho” brings together an incredible arsenal of rocket-age retro Americana elements, each of which exemplify the raddest, kookiest relics of our common pop historiography. But the band wields them with enough post-punk energy, straight-up musical prowess, and boundless style to make them feel fresh, all without beating their own nostalgia to death. Gun ‘em down, girls.
Ghost of Vroom – I Hear the Ax Swinging
| GENRE | Hip-Hop, Post-Blues, Alternative, Ambient Soundscape |
| YEAR | 2021 |
| RIYL | Deep slacker jazz, the Blakroc project, early Beck, the Oracle at Delphi |
This Ghost of Vroom album, the first offering from Mike Doughty and Andrew Livingston’s new-but-explicitly-throwback collab project, slaps and rips. It rip-slaps. It crossed my feed because I’ve listened to a frightening amount of Soul Coughing in the last few years, and at the end of 2020, I started listening to some of Mike’s solo material. All of this has taught me mainly one thing about Mike Doughty, which is that Mike Doughty is one freaky, shifty, brilliant dude. Anybody who comes up with music this dementedly eclectic, sample-twisted, bad-trip-psychedelic and railroad blues spike-driving all at once must be ruminating hard on the hieroglyphs lining his darker mental corridors. Doughty’s longtime collaborator Andrew Livingston adds a lush, cinematic, ambient flair to the Ghost of Vroom sound, creating the sense that the floor of the track might fall out at any moment, sending the listener plummeting from space to earth.
Doughty flows effortlessly between the spike-walled booby-trap snares and cymbals of the beat, a routinely heavy Mario C percussion pyramid. He moves like a hard-boiled snoop through some nameless post-apocalyptic city underbelly, murmuring prophecies in rhythms and riddles that rival Aesop Rock’s in their utter inaccessibility. Attempting to decipher what any of these lyrics actually mean is probably fruitless, but they are extremely good lyrics in that they are extremely fun to hear. They fit the instrumental components like pieces of Yugi’s Millennium Puzzle. And it’s great to know that all these years later, Mike Doughty still knows how to land a line like “She wore high-waist, boot-cut, thirty-four, thirty-two” without falling out of step with the rest of the nightmare-landscape vision that constitutes this song.
Detours into absurdist silliness aside (check the shimmying chipmunk in the music vid), doom is nigh for sure here—whether it’s from the impact at the end of the “oh, you missed your plane” line plummet, the song’s namesake instrument of death, or whatever whispering demons are tormenting Mike into writing incredible nonsense on any given day. It may be cursed, and it’s certainly some kind of extraterrestrial—but this ax swings heavily, and I’m glad I can hear it.
March
Todd Rundgren – Wolfman Jack
| GENRE | Classic rock, glam rock, soul |
| YEAR | 1972 |
| RIYL | Elton John, Harry Nilsson, dancing all night long in makeup |
This song is an utter Bacchanalia. The whole thing is earnestly steeped in some indescribably bombastic, fuckin’ Artful Dodger-ass, broadway musical-ass, divinely boisterous antihero character entrance swag syrup. Wolfman Jack is the seventies St. Jimmy., the dad-rock Tyler Durden or something, singing this spectacular pinnacle of the high-fidelity studio rock auteurist theory. Or maybe it’s just maximalist seventies rock. Whatever you want to call it, Wolfman Jack is undisputedly the coolest guy at the glam club.
Didn’t Todd Rundgren produce the first New York Dolls album? Listening to this, I can see why someone thought that was an appropriate pairing. But at the same time, I can tell why it wasn’t. This is polished as fuck, whereas the Dolls were much more the dumpster-salvaged glitter variety of glam. Similarly though, they both pack a lot of androgynous big dick energy into a very tightly wound sonic package.
An Elton John comparison also seems appropriate, but imagine Elton singing with the affectation of a howling, pugnacious degenerate, rendered in riotously hedonistic falsetto yelps. Every instrument here—bass, piano, brass, percussion, all of it—is blaring like the first chair gunner in the air raid symphony orchestra, swinging ferociously and mercilessly—like an amusement park ride designed to make you puke. But it’s way too much fucking fun to care how fast you’re spinning. To reiterate, Todd’s vocal performance here is incredible. The backing vocals are similarly unstoppable—way too soulful to keep this song confined to one genre tag. Far from static, relentlessly throughout its just-under-three-minutes run time, this song plays like a diesel train, gunning down a moonlit midnight track while the glitzy-hip socialite guests aboard groove in the bustling dining car. Jack walks in, and the place erupts in cheering applause. Somebody get this man a drink or twelve. He does a card trick. He does a dance. He’s the life of this and every gathering until the end of the line. This song is the perfect length, featuring excellent use of a fade-out to convey the sense this party is going all night long, hours after we exit the scene. ‘Til next month, Wolfman.
Steve Earle – Satellite Radio
| GENRE | Alternative Outlaw Country, Fusion |
| YEAR | 2007 |
| RIYL | The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Sirius XM, That One College Elective You Took on the History of Rap Music, Excessively Romanticizing New York. |
At long last, 2021 was my formative post-punk Americana enthusiast dude-bro year of alt-country immersion. That took a few different forms for me—several of which are represented on my various playlists. Some of my friends seem to think it came out of nowhere, but in reality, it was only a matter of time before I got into Wilco and Drive-By Truckers, and finally developed a nuanced appreciation of the Chicks. Which brings me, by extension of the streaming code, to this song: “Satellite Radio.”
So, choke on this obligatory college radio nostalgia: I used to do a show like this Steve Earle song. It was on FM, admittedly—but this song has “Radio” in the title, so it’s forever relatable to me as a reminder of an amazing, long-missed opportunity. I did two shows, technically: My first, Jungle Juice, was a snot-nosed clusterfuck of loud, spastic, and in retrospect kind of embarrassing throwback psych and garage-punk. Its next iteration, The Floor, was a little more eclectic. And every year on The Floor, as close as possible to February 26, I would do a special broadcast called CASH BASH: The Original Country-Punk Birthday Party. It was a good excuse to pay tribute to Johnny Cash, one of the undisputed all-time punkest rockers to ever live, and play all of my favorite songs at a very specific, rite-of-passage “getting bored of skate punk” time of my life. I was listening to a lot of Uncle Tupelo’s first album, No Depression, but only for the amped-up, frantic, bucking bronco distortion-heavy tracks. Still, it was a gateway back to Johnny Cash, and more broadly, a reconciliation with the country music I’d rejected as a closed-minded teenager. Normally, the show wasn’t all that country—it was a college radio slacker rock show by a college slacker in the second heyday of 90s-fetishist ironic post-ironic indie slacker college pop-rock-core. But it had a little outlaw in its DNA—I think.
Every night that I did The Floor—which was late, often after midnight—I would imagine myself hurtling forward through the cosmos in a teeny tiny intergalactic cruiser, armed only with a thermos of kick-you-in-the-dick coffee and an arsenal of mixed CDs. Like some drugged-out grown-up version of Spaceman Spiff, speakers blasting at 3 a.m. on the spice route trucker commute. It’s why my radio name was Spaceman. Similarly, on this song, Steve Earle really does seem to be transmitting from somewhere in the underground heartland part of the interstellar interstate, ass-deep in the second term of the Bush administration, sinking deeper and deeper into the despair of a levitating office chair at the nuclear-powered mixing board, spinning future throwback hip hop-outlaw fusion forward in time to 2021 in the hopes that someone receives the signal and gives alt-country the revival it deserves. The throwback beat on this track pairs hypnotically with Steve’s acoustic guitar to create a trip-folk whirlpool that compels the eyes closed and commands the head to nod. The lyrics are just sounds drifting through the static—it’s either all in code, or we’re just stuck split somewhere between two broadcasts.
For the most part, Uncle Tupelo was the only alt-country in my roster until the end of 2020, when I started listening to Steve Earle after watching him do “Union, God, & Country” on the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass stream. I deepened that listening over the next few months, winding my way from his early classics (Guitar Town and Copperhead Road) to his heavier electric rock (Jerusalem) to his bluegrass (Ghosts of West Virginia) and everything else impossible to categorize in between—namely, “Satellite Radio.” In a lot of ways, this song feels like home. It’s the natural progression of my listening, the full arc of my journey back to Shasta County via Virginia, and it feels genuinely good to be back from space.
Marvin Gaye – I’ll Be Doggone
| GENRE | Classic Soul |
| YEAR | 1965 |
| RIYL | Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Walking out on your ex (because you deserve better, bro) |
This song came to my attention as part of an exercise where I made a playlist for my dad’s 60th birthday, with one Billboard-charting song from each year of his life. This was also my introduction to Marvin Gaye, chosen basically on a whim. Turned out to be one of my better ideas of the year. This song is fantastic. On top of the fact that Marvin’s vocals are wild and firmly controlled at once, allowed to crest like a swirling soul-wave in bursts of bright “BAY-BEE’s” and “Mm-hmm-hm’s.” He walks a compelling line between tenderly romantic and a stone cold no-fucks-given bravado. He loves you, baby—and he’ll sing it so sweet it’ll make your heart melt—but if you step out of line, you lose it all. And the way the backing vocals come in with the “I’ll be long gone” sounds so strangely happy for the severity of the message being delivered: I swear to God I’ll leave you if you ever do me wrong. It’s kind of fucked up, actually. Or maybe it’s empowering. Maybe it depends on who’s singing. But the song is so fucking pretty that it’s easy to ignore these questions and just dance.
UGK – Diamonds & Wood
| GENRE | Texas Hip Hop |
| YEAR | 1996 |
| RIYL | G-Funk, the Dirty South, Self-medicating your trauma with badly rolled blunts |
In late January, reunited at last with my old radio co-host Kenny-O, the two of us decided to develop an extended hyper-hipster game show together. Tentatively titled Great Rates, we would solicit a specific genre- or vibe-themed playlist from a friend well-versed in that musical category. They’d put together about 20-30 tracks for us. Kenny and I would each then listen to those songs in full, assigning each one a numerical score from 1-10 (sometimes 0-11) delineating whether it sucked or was fucking awesome. Next, Kenny would run the numbers to identify the averages of our various scores. Finally, we’d gather everyone together in the living room and record ourselves doing a countdown of all the songs from worst to best, each of us reciting his notes on why he gave each song the score he did, often while getting plastered on themed drinks. Any friends in attendance were invited to provide color commentary on what huge dweebs we are. Entertainingly, it usually devolved into arguments about whose taste was worse.
That’s how I first heard “Diamonds & Wood” by UGK—it was prominently featured on a particularly excellent Great Rates playlist that my good friend (and musical contemporary) Eli put together: Sounds of a Diaspora, a journey through some of the most legendary performances by hip hop’s most notorious (no pun intended) personalities. From early T.I. to Kendrick Lamar, this playlist was all over the place in the best way. But more than any other, this song stood out for me for one major reason:
Kenny was laughably wrong about it.
So, in the interest of spite, I am republishing (with Kenny’s permission, maybe) my Great Rates co-host’s notes on the song:
“This is both sexy and drugged the fuck out. The latter too much so—this shit is slow, and none of it is exceptional enough to reward the attention that slowness permits. The lyrics are unimpressive, basic, and predictable. I was bored halfway through. Way, way, way too long. This is like when some rich dude takes you on a date, but you aren’t really into it, but he decides to cruise with you with the top down in the night air at like a 15 mile an hour crawl, hoping for an opening to make a move, and it just feels so LONG as you wait for it to be over as he tries to flex.”
Hilarious, right? What a dolt. I love the guy, but if there’s one genre he most certainly does not understand, it’s throwback raps. This has classic theming, with expertly written minimalist braggadocio. “Fuck ‘em,” he spits, and then the beat hits hard, in sharp contrast to the slower, suspensful spoken intro. It just hits you with that fucking vocal hook, just to tease you, because it’s gone too soon.
Suddenly you’re realizing that Pimp C knows how to end a rap bar better than almost anyone. Notice the way he uses his full vocal range, switches up his cadence, his rhyme scheme. But he doesn’t have to play motormouth fast-rapper to achieve that. He’s working with a classic popular music theme here: “glitter and gleam ain’t all what it look like.” And then the hook returns, this time with the whisper-sung vocals, adding an interesting, sinister new element to the motif you were introduced to earlier, but had forgotten while you were being impressed by the first verse. When Pimp C comes back in for verse three, he’s still dead fucking serious, with bars about being “lost children, praising paper, smoking our life away.” In between, Bun B flexes his mythically continent-jostling voice. He’s so brutal but cool in his delivery that it almost distracts from his verbal painting: a somber picture of a man haunted by “all the victims of the game,” smoking shittily rolled blunts to cope.
This whole “let me tell you about the dark side of the party, but let’s fucking party” theme is such a classic in popular music, it’s basically a cliché. But the reason it works well here is as much because of Pimp C’s beat as these guys’ prowess as rappers. The hook’s vocal interplay is undeniably buttery, the instrumental sparkles—but there’s that juxtaposition of menace and shine to keep it really, really interesting and engaging.
April
Howlin Rain – The Wild Boys
| GENRE | Post-Jam Americana, Noise Rock |
| YEAR | 2018 |
| RIYL | Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Comets on Fire, Walt Whitman worship, getting wasted near campfires and tripping through the night |
I added “The Wild Boys” by Howlin Rain to the playlist in April. I was an Ethan Miller fan by way of Feral Ohms and Comets on Fire, but I’d pretty much ignored everything else of his before 2021. Then, of course, I got into Crazy Horse, Richard Brautigan, and alt-country, and suddenly I found myself interested in Howlin Rain. But I started with Magnificent Fiend and Russian Wilds, and didn’t fully move on to 2018’s Alligator Bride until late in the month, as I took my last law school exams ever.
Picture me, driving down from Denver to the Colorado desert, listening to this song. I just moved out of my place in Virginia, and I’m piloting my dangerously overpacked Honda CR-V west to California to begin studying for the Bar exam. I skipped my graduation. I told myself I’d keep a journal of the trip, but writing my thoughts is proving difficult. I tried reading Steve Earle’s Doghouse Roses, but I got stuck three or four stories deep. The weather is incredible. Ethan Miller sings, “So long, old corona,” and it feels like coming home when the lead guitar hits my eardrums. I immediately start crying in my car. No shit.
There’s something profoundly comfortable about Howlin Rain. Their heart-on-sleeve seventies noise-jam enthusiasm is so earnest and pure as to be almost saccharine at times. But it just works, god dammit, if you close your eyes and just sort of let it carry you over the mountains and far away, “sailing off the edge of the Earth.”
This song feels to me like it has always existed. There is simply no way something like this has only been out for a few years. Is that partly a reflection of its raw, cut-and-dry genre categorization as “contemporary classic rock” or some such horseshit? Maybe. Or maybe it’s because the feeling it evokes in me is the feeling all great Americana rock ought to inspire: the righteous, chest-beating, patriotic lust for freedom, justice, opportunity and decency for all people. And maybe in equal part, it’s about the awful din of hypocrisy and empire, lurking in the past but casting its shadow over the present, and it’s the wild abandon necessary to make sense of the whole psychotic fucking thing.
Don’t laugh, asshole. I’m serious. Remember what I said about Sharon Jones. I’m a headbanging patriot now. This song has the same explosive American-ness in its sonic DNA. And it’s like parades and fireworks, like Hendrix doing the Star Spangled Banner, like fuck the police and O Captain My Captain all at fucking once. Allen Ginsberg performing Howl and Orson Welles doing War of the Worlds. It’s the Big Bang of what American rock music should sound like, and when it ends, there is a gaping void where it once was. It has an undeniable presence and a noisy legacy. It’s that kind of song. It’s that kind of nation.
Open Mike Eagle – Death Parade
| GENRE | Alternative Hip Hop |
| YEAR | 2020 |
| RIYL | Crying over Gift of Gab’s death, wondering where it all went wrong with your ex-wife, your vintage Yu-Yu Hakusho t-shirt. |
The computer said this was my most-played song of the entire year. It makes sense—Open Mike Eagle is one of my favorite artists, and his album Brick Body Kids Still Daydream was probably my favorite record of the 2010s. There, like here, Michael Eagle demonstrated that nobody else in the alternative hip hop world consistently makes entire albums this whimsical, catchy, personal, voyeuristic, and transparently sad all at once. It’s so fucking funny, it makes you want to cry. And “Death Parade” exemplifies all of these attributes that make Anime, Trauma, and Divorce a humble-but-excellent addition to Mike’s notoriously sincere, ingeniously self-aware catalog. It doesn’t simmer with the same cynical-tender political heat as Brick Body Kids, except in the sense that the personal and interpersonal inner worlds are always partly shaped by political realities, or the sense that navigating anxiety and (buzzword) trauma is like playing social politics with your own thoughts and feelings. Mike’s music has meditated similarly before, but not really in the context of something as personally chaotic and destabilizing as his own literal divorce. It’s not a civics-class-project about tragedy on a massive scale, unlike the government-sanctioned societal corrosion detailed in Brick Body Kids—but it’s about the corrosion of personal relationships, and reckoning with the fact that sometimes there’s just everybody (and, by extension, nobody) to blame.
For me, the beauty of “Death Parade” is in the way it manages to convey narrative with almost no words. This song travels through generations of time with its methodically delivered, repeated lyrics and its fragile, almost nursery-rhyme-like melody. Mike’s voice sounds brokenhearted, but it also sounds broken. Shards and fragments of feelings litter the floor of the track. The sampled backing vocals go there, too—but the conveyance is never hackneyed. The “Shoulda been cool” line drop alone carries an entire postmodern tragedy in itself. The sentence’s unspoken end: It ain’t. The response: Why not? And his explanation of why it ain’t cool is delivered in vague references to nameless characters who may or may not even exist outside of the explanatory cycle Mike describes. The dual thrust of comedy and pity that he baits his listener to feel with that “it’ll never happen again” interlude hits that much harder when the song emergency siren-spirals into free-associated phrases and flashes of memory seconds later, because of course we pick up on Mike’s wink to the camera—we know it is gonna happen again. And he can’t stop it. Neither can we.
Powerlessness. It’s a feeling many of us have been bludgeoned with in the last two years, either from time to time or constantly. Nothing sucks more than uncertainty, and being powerless creates an awful lot of it. Been there. Seriously, been there. But try as we might to retreat into the marinating bowels of our work-from-home office-coffins—which for me is a pile of blankets and a coffee table—we’re all still strapped into this apocalyptic pandemic carousel together, and odds are, we’ll all be taking it out on each other long after the ride ends. Expect me to be one of the guys hurling into the trash can—this whole planet’s giving me motion sickness.
Lucinda Williams – Pyramid of Tears
| GENRE | Alternative Outlaw Country |
| YEAR | 2004 |
| RIYL | Samantha Fish, Paula Nelson covering Kenny Rogers, getting sultry behind the dive bar. |
Remember what I said? 2021 was my year of alt-country—how could this songnot make an appearance? Granted, “Pyramid of Tears” isn’t her original—It’s Alejandro Escovedo’s. This version is from a compilation of Escovedo covers by the bane of my early iTunes libraries, my nemesis, the dreaded “Various Artists” tag. And granted, these sorts of “match-made-in-marketing” tribute things are often pretty hit-or-miss. But after many more than a few spins of this track, I genuinely can’t hear the original anymore. It’s as if this song was written specifically for Lucinda, whose lascivious, sneering, sandpaper take drags the song down into the mud behind the saloon in a truly spectacular way. The guitar solos lurch, drag, and groan as they stumble home, heads-and-lips busted open and bleeding, asses conclusively kicked after throwing a few too many shit-eating, snot-nosed insults around at the local watering hole.
Or maybe that’s the sound of dusty country-western lust, turned seductively sinister by a too-heavy dose of sludgy punk rock heroin. In my imagination, it’s overwhelmingly cinematic—a scene from a slimy outlaw flick. Antagonist chokes to death in a frontier brothel bedroom, naked and carelessly poisoned by the nice young lady who brought him there. He sure as hell expected the night to go differently—but little did he know, she remembers when he killed her Ma and Pa in cold, muddy delta blood all those years ago—and as the camera pans from his bulging eyes and foaming mouth to the overturned, spilled whisky glass on the nightstand, we see her shadow cock a pistol against the stained wallpaper. Bang. Cut to the stable, moonlit. She steals his horse and rides away.
The bass and drums play like a slow, late-afternoon trudge across the Arizona desert, the only respite being the water mirages on the blazing horizon. They melt their retreat into each other, falling back to the stone-brown mountains like every note of this song, each washing its despair back into the next one, creating a stoned desperado roll-and-tumble sound. Like smoking too much weed atop a canyon wall, and smiling in bliss while falling down, down, down.
May
R.L. Burnside – Shake ‘Em On Down
| GENRE | Electric Blues |
| YEAR | 1996 |
| RIYL | Crunchy jams, using empty whiskey bottles for target practice in the desert |
Hell fucking yeah, it’s the Burnside album where Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion backed the old man. Look at the cover—look at the title—this might be the most (buzzword) toxic match ever made in garage-blues-headbanger-dude-bro heaven, and it sounds so goddamn good it’s not fair.
Honestly, it’s not the most complex thing, musically. It’s a noisy, lurching electric blues jam with Burnside serving up a bellowing, boisterous vocal showing while the Blues Explosion thunders its way merrily along. So, with nothing being invented, it of course becomes much more about that indescribably muscle-flexin’ feeling it fires up. It’s the engine it fuels in me. This thing scrapes and drags at a stench-face-inducing chug-a-chug-a-choo-choo pace. Ideal for driving across long stretches of Kansas highway, which is exactly how I used it. Hitting a juul furiously, cranking my speakers, drinking gallons of caffeinated sludge, as my car flew forward, taking turns behind a Prius with a bicycle strapped to its back. Once, somewhere around the Colorado border (funny enough, now, I can’t remember which side) we had to duct tape the Prius’ front bumper so it could make the drive to Denver. This song felt like prime road warrior shit when it hit somewhere across that wildly windswept plain: I was alive, I was thrilled to be done with law school, and I was furiously high on nicotine, petrified but only vaguely aware of what was to come. Game the fuck on.
Fountains of Wayne – Troubled Times
| GENRE | Power Pop, Alternative Rock |
| YEAR | 1999 |
| RIYL | The Cars, melodic perfection, swooning sentimentalism, suburban New Jersey |
It took Adam Schlesigner’s death in April 2020 to finally get me to admit how absolutely fucking incredible Fountains of Wayne were in the 90s. All it took was those few seconds of “Radiation Vibe” where he sings, “baby, baby, baby,” and I spent the rest of that year combing through every other instant of their self-titled debut from 1996. In 2021 I turned to its successor, Utopia Parkway, a concept album about—no shit—life in suburban New Jersey. Catch that whiff of mundanity? Admittedly, some critics have written it off as such. And to the extent that Fountains of Wayne helped invent this sort of FM worship, with its power-pop affectation pinned brazenly to its sleeve, it sounds like a band in prime fighting form. But to me, in practice, it doesn’t sound schlocky or generic. Well, maybe a little schlocky and generic—instrumentally, structurally, at least—but there’s no denying that, melodically, it also sounds perfect. It sounds like love in the most incredible, classic way.
Ever since I first heard Pet Sounds, I’ve had this strange listening obsession, almost antithetical to the rest of my listening, with “perfect” pop songs. Mostly, when I say that, I’m talking about the presence of a vocal or other melody that seems so sublime as to be almost eternal, or even spiritual. Note that the vocals don’t have to be perfect. No single musical element of it has to be perfect. The rest of it’s just about a feeling. Summer of ‘69 innocence-type shit. And this track has it all, down to the chorus where he rhymes “times” with “times.”
This band gets it. There is something eternal and human and transcendentally beautiful that they capture here. There’s a fuckload of bitterness, scorn, condescension in these lyrics—but the melody, man. Jesus Christ, it’s heartbreaking. How anyone can listen to this gut punch of a track and think, “Yeah man, that’s just some trite suburban schlock,” is…well, honestly, I get it. I don’t disagree. I just don’t care. And maybe that’s the bottom line for me.
I can’t run from the suburbs forever. I’m suburban. I am pathetically, obviously suburban. It’s kind of a silly, stupid thing to be. Where I come from, it’s like starting life culturally blank, but ludicrously fulfilled in every mundane, pragmatic sense. Our music, like our lives, was mundane. So there is a part of me that has to root for music like this. It’s trite. I get it. I know that it’s pandering. But it makes me nostalgic for a time I can barely remember, before the towers fell, when the world still held promise or some shit. For me, the days of Pokemon on GameBoy and pizza parties. I drew comics with my friends. Shut up and let me enjoy the comfort food of my unresolved childhood psycho-scars—the mac and cheese smeared across my haunted, cut short before it started second grade, with the notes radiating sunshine as the sick-skin syrup caramelizes.Wait, what was I talking about? American angst aside, it’s a pristine song.
Tom Petty – Saving Grace
| GENRE | Contemporary Classic Rock |
| YEAR | 2006 |
| RIYL | Tom Petty, you idiot |
Thank the Wildflowers reissue press tour for this one—and more specifically, thank Rick Rubin for being such a compelling interviewee. 2021 saw me revisit Tom Petty: one of the first classic rockers who I ever loved, a dude whose catalog of hits is so stacked that, in writing about him, it’s impossible to avoid cliché. Arguably, writing about classic rock at all is a cliché. And Tom is one of the classic-est of all. There is very little new to say about Tom. That’s not gonna stop me, though. I don’t have that much pride.
The older I get, the more the old identifiers and descriptions of Tom Petty hold true. He’s still got a badass vocal tone, his chorus melodies are still mercilessly triumphant, and he remains one of the best goddamn writers of pop song lyrics that I have ever heard and likely ever will. And as I took shelter in the Palo Cedro attic again in late May, this time to study for the bar exam, I had a bizarrely religious experience listening to this creepy little intro track from a 2006 solo album with kickass cover art.
I first heard this song from my Dad—there’s another cliché. I was about eleven, and at the time, I was fully into the Ramones. Along came this song, and suddenly I was hooked on Tom. Not sure why exactly it first connected, aside from the fact that my dad played it a lot. But I know why it reconnected: It’s a perfectly sinister little ripper from a summer that felt sinister to me. Embedded in the bar prep trenches, I sought comfort in things that were familiar—and I tapped my foot to “Saving Grace,” sweating my undeniable fear into the dry Shasta County air.
On an album called Highway Companion, from a guy like Petty, whose audience knew what they liked and was sitting comfortably fat and firmly middle-aged in 2006, you’d think this track might be a little more welcoming or friendly. Instead, we get bizarre codes and symbols: the carpet of your father’s two-room mansion, sleeping cities, country homes and ranches, guards on every door. He’s going somewhere, without a doubt. But we have no clue where or why, really. There’s a haunted directionlessness. Wandering, lost, “past statues that atone for my sins,” Petty greets us from somewhere twisted up in his existential highway. Milo in the little toy car, wondering how to get out of the Doldrums.
By the 2000s, Petty had marked every square of his rock star bingo card. He’d made iconic album after iconic album, had hits, misses, and made questionable music video choices, been divorced, quit smoking, started again, dumped a drummer, hired another, and reportedly drank a fuckload of shitty coffee in the process. His biographer said he liked Maxwell House. And still, it wouldn’t surprise me if none of that shit brought him contentedness. A guy this dedicated to going, moving forward, doing more—there’s no such thing as rest for a guy like that. Petty played it cool, disaffected, and even lazy a lot of the time—but it was clearly part of the performance. Writing shit this good, and making it sound this effortless, takes fucking practice. It’s work.
Every instrument here comes in at the exact perfect moment. The little percussion accent in the intro—the tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap—the bass, a clapping sound, the synth, and finally the drums, each individually layered like classic rock cake tiers. Maybe it’s a coffee cake, because to some extent, the song tastes like a cup of Tom’s favorite Maxwell House: basic, derivative, what some would consider a stale or bland flavor-sound.
It’s contemporary, but it’s still classic rock. Nothing is being invented here. But that’s the thing about Petty: it was he who invented the Maxwell House sound. This is just a day at the fucking office for him. And it really draws attention to those cryptic lyrics and the song’s propulsive energy. Those hammered guitar notes in between the “Don’tcha, Baby” lyric and the subsequent verse sounds like a car peeling out, off to the next adventure. It ain’t exactly “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” but it’s still a hell of a ride—and besides, I happen to think the ride’s a lot more fun with the devil sitting shotgun.
June
Camper Van Beethoven – Pictures of Matchstick Men
| GENRE | Alternative Psych-Rock; College Rock |
| YEAR | 1989 |
| RIYL | Violin shredding; running screaming down a moonlit beach on acid |
I know, I know—real fans of Camper Van Beethoven will quickly remind me that this track’s not even the band’s original lineup. It’s a forward-thinking group on the verge of breaking up, busting out a niche cover with maybe some inclination to snag college radio play. I don’t know. I could be inventing history. I casually skimmed the Wiki. But this triumphant little alternative psych-folk rock ripper of a track crossed my path when I was searching for the perfect soundtrack to what was about to be two months of rigorous bar exam preparation. Of course, for the first week or so, I probably spent a little too much time picking a soundtrack, and not enough time making flash cards for Civil Procedure. But this is one that I’m glad stuck with me.
It’s got an edge that I know the original version of the song lacked—and it’s not just that freaky, spastick, post-hardcore jazz-punk fiddle part. It’s the greasy, wet drums. It’s the damn electric guitar tone. It’s the Shire-pub drinking song vibe that acoustic strumming is giving off. It’s a party, and it’s not just a bunch of burners and wooks sprawled out around the living room, each trying to summon the willpower to order pizza. Something that’s always bugged me about certain early hippie bands is that a lot of them lacked any real garage-rock dirt. For me, that’s the best part of listening to rock. I can get behind what’s pretty, but if it’s going to trip me out, I need it to resonate a little bit with that part of me that gets down to rock that bares its fangs. This take on what’s today a sixties deep cut, with its raucous shouted chorus vocals and its thrown-into-orbit outro, is a testament to sloppy, sweaty weirdness and eclectic open-mindedness in pop media. It’s self-aware and it also straight up fucking rocks. Ideal for a casually harder than average head nod. Drinking a little harder than your average pregame. Maybe not quite a bang, but a deep nod. Your trip sitter is clearly going to take good care of you. Have fun.
Teenage Cool Kids – Landlocked State
| GENRE | Slacker rock, alt-country |
| YEAR | 2011 |
| RIYL | Early Parquet Courts, nostalgia for your small desert hometown, public university bands playing in garages and basements |
Country-tinged slacker pop for the literate college crowd sounds like a potentially really bad idea, until you realize that this sounds a lot like Silver Jews, or if you want to be really kind, a snottier, sweeter “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” with messier-than-Beach Boys (but still a good try) pop harmonies—and that’s OK, honestly. It wears a warm little smile. It’s honest without giving away too much, and the backing vocals on the bridge are hilariously triumphant, if cheesy. Makes for a gloriously weird disconnect when he sings “they’re gonna watch you die of starvation, and your scars will all have names.” Unclear who they are, why exactly you’re starving, where you got the scars, what their names will be—but it sounds good.
Yeah, it’s Andrew Savage from, eventually, Parquet Courts. And you could talk about how this song represents a unique point in his trajectory as a songwriter, or something—maybe the apogee—but that shit’s always true to some extent. And it’s all basically code for “I’m a fan of the dude’s music.” So, hey—I admit it, I’m a fan of the dude’s music. Like a lot of his other best songs, this one has a way of making the mundane sound beautiful. “Stealing groceries to stay awake” is the best kind of adolescent relatable. And it’s totally a crime.
Blackalicious – Do This My Way
| GENRE | Conscious Hip Hop, Indie Rap |
| YEAR | 1999 |
| RIYL | Lyrical miracle flexing, abstract originality, comically squeaky clean brag-raps |
I was not looking forward to writing this review, because Gift of Gab’s death in June was the reason I revisited the early Blackalicious albums, along with his solo work. It’s the worst reason to revisit an artist, honestly. Open Mike Eagle tweeted something when it happened about giving artists the credit they deserve for being independent icons while they’re alive. And honestly, sincerely, it was Gab’s music in the first place that got me to start listening to indie rap, conscious hip hop, backpack rap—whatever you want to call it. Anything remotely outside the mainstream within this genre. That means something. I really believe it does.
I could go tremendously in-depth on my relationship with Timothy Parker’s music. I started with his solo album, 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up, and moved quickly to the Blackalicious classic Blazing Arrow from there—like a lot of people who loved his technically unreal, bombastically playful, genuinely uplifting approach to writing rhymes. And if you’re paying attention to how fully realized a vision he expresses with the bar “gotta handle chores now and discuss all of that with God afterwards,” back-to-back with calling himself the “venomous instrumentalist, syllable, mystic man, traveller, skippin’ through the bricks on a Wednesday into a city plaza, tryna make a 20 out of 15 pennies on the avenue, the cold-hearted world creepin’ on my destiny like salamanders,” then know this: Very few artists have so consistently conveyed a message and a vibe across the entirety of their discography.
This is my favorite Blackalicious song. Here, Gab and guest Lyrics Born sound like they’re simply having an old school blast from the second they start, picking up speed and power and bombast as they go. They half-rap, half-sing, hundred-percent-bounce their ways across Chief Xcel’s nuclear schoolyard hopscotch funk beat. That kick drum is interstellar. It’s a kickball booted over the fence, and everyone in the fourth grade cheers. The hook plays like a jump rope poem. Gab’s vocal melody in the last verse is way too catchy for this world. Chief Xcel conducts this “learning is fun” rap show theme song like some sort of indie hip hop Ms. Frizzle, issuing instructions to the classroom to get messy. It’s a relentlessly fun, goofy tribute to making music however the fuck you want. Rest in peace, you positivity-peddling Shakespeare from Sacramento. Sad to see that your fourth dimensional rocketship went up too soon. I’ll keep your shit bumping on earth in the meantime. See you in a minute, sir.
Common – Cold Blooded (feat. Rahzel, Roy Hargrove)
| GENRE | Classic Alternative Hip Hop |
| YEAR | 2000 |
| RIYL | Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Obama’s annual summer Spotify playlists, Talib Kweli’s podcast, bashing posers in the head with a backpack full of good times |
Another “should’ve been studying” song inspired by something my friend Kimmy asked unironically back in March during an extended discussion of hip-hop history:
“Is Common a legend?”
We were talking about another song from this album, “The Light,” and my co-host had thrown out the assertion that Common was (1) corny, and (2) a sellout. I knew the answer to Kimmy’s question instinctively, though: “Yeah,” I said. “This album was critically acclaimed as fuck at the time.” And that’s how I suddenly found myself sort of defending Common, an artist who I frankly didn’t really listen to. But there I was, talking about how Common was an early Kanye collaborator, how he had performed with everyone from a certain incredibly influential scene, and influenced a lot of other artists’ work that we enjoy. And I realized I’d convinced myself. I listened to the rest of Like Water for Chocolate. And I’m glad I did.
This song is like vibing and bouncing down a psych-funk train track on a sweltering summer afternoon. Everyone on this song brought his best. Engineer Dilla piles coal higher and hotter into that furnace. It keeps Thomas-the-Dank-Engine’s blunt billowing, horns blaring while a Conductor Common at the peak of his consciously charismatic power level casually and respectfully levels the playing field. Fuzzed-the-fuck-out Rahzel, beat boxing and ad-libbing frantically, contributes a seen-it-all veteran’s conspicuous cool to the tapestry. And from the roof of the train, Roy Hargrove lights the hillsides adjacent to the tracks ablaze, spewing flame from his horn with no mercy. It’s just fun to listen to. A heavy-hitting track from an incredible album.
The Dirtbombs – The Sharpest Claws
| GENRE | Contemporary Garage Rock |
| YEAR | 2005 |
| RIYL | Headbanging like Wayne and Garth in the Drive-Thru line on a Saturday night. |
Still stuck in the “should’ve been studying” song swamp. I had a blues phase this summer, and that included a lot of listening to the Gories and the Dirtbombs. I know, the band’s “two bass guitars, two drummers, and Mick Collins at the tempo of a runaway locomotive” approach threatens to bring a little too much thunder to what would otherwise be a pretty down-the-middle garage-rock hand grenade of a song. And it does. From the beginning, it’s like getting thrown against a concrete wall and decked in the fucking face a few good times with the kind of rock music that terrified your grandparents. In a good way, because Mick shakes the picture up with a shmear of sickeningly not-seductive falsetto crooning to make the beatdown at least feel intimate. When he hits you, it’s like he cares. This is obviously the best of Mick’s post-Gories projects, and this song’s heightened production value hints at an alternate universe where Mick got to cash in on a little more of Jack White’s explosion, or Ty Segall’s, or anyone’s who he enabled by making music like this—in the garage, in the trenches, for years. It was a great song for that exact moment in the afternoon when I didn’t want to study one iota more. Every single day. All summer long. Thrashing in my desk chair.
July
A Special Tribute to Simulated Library Ambience
This one’s not about a song. I just want to express appreciation for people who made ambient university library noise videos for me to play on repeat while I studied for the bar exam. Helpful.
For the first three weeks of this month, I listened to basically nothing but simulated library ambience.
Back to the music.
Harry Nilsson – Jump Into The Fire
| GENRE | Classic Rock |
| YEAR | 1971 |
| RIYL | Feverish rock ‘n’ soul grandstanding, getting about as oiled as a diesel train, crying euphorically |
I credit my career to Harry Nilsson. The morning I woke up to take the Bar exam, I had zero gas left in my tank. Emotionally, intellectually, and physically, I was exhausted. I was certain I’d fail, and I wasn’t sure I could summon the strength to actually take the damn test after months of preparation. This is the song that propelled me through the final hours. I listened to it shatter the skies with its profound emotional highs and all its soaring desperate howling, its relentless riff and its undeniable danceability, while I spat out blood, massaged my beat-to-shit brain and sprayed water on its face ringside during breaks between rounds. The vocal performance is the obvious standout. But for me, it’s that bass line that really makes the whole thing feel like an unstoppable one-way rocket cruise to planet Burnin’ Love, where the parties go all night and there’s plenty of swirling, psychedelic soul-rock to go around. It’s noisy, full-bodied, warm, and immersive, and it goes on and on and on without ever getting tiresome to me. The piano pounds out chords like a percussion instrument, the guitar burns like jet fuel, and the welcome abuse of echo effect drips sticky like a melting ice cream cone.
I very, very nearly lost my shit on test day. I was centimeters away from losing focus, getting discouraged, and totally blowing it. I needed a song that would scream some sense directly into my face: You’ve come too far to fuck this up now. Knock this fucker out so we can go home. Somehow, with the help of this song, I did. Maybe that’s why it resonates deep within a part of my brain that earnestly wants to experience sensations and feel emotions, so badly sometimes that it could scream. And then it literally fucking screams. It takes the “I love you, I want you, baby” pop song paradigm and burns it to the ground, leaving the dance floor in smithereens, lit with satanic, hedonistic rock ‘n’ roll lust. It’s a powerful jam. This one brings me to life. It resuscitated me when I needed very, very badly to come back to life. Now I get to be an attorney. Hooray?
Diners – Cup of Coffee
| GENRE | Indie Pop-Rock |
| YEAR | 2020 |
| RIYL | Early Paul McCartney songs, holding hands, getting by one day at a time. |
Tyler from Diners makes music that’s melodically perfect—like early Paul McCartney, if he sang like Kermit the Frog and came up in southwest DIY venues. This song is hopelessly gentle. It’s almost suspiciously friendly. It sounds like a 90s sitcom intro. Everything in it shimmers, from that lightest touch of saxophone to the assortment of quirky synths and that “it’s a walk through your graveyard, like baseball in your backyard” lyric. Those moonlit beach party funk guitar harmonies light up the song’s ending, sending the whole thing skyward as it comes to a close. It was profoundly comforting to me in the month after I took the test. It rocked me gently to sleep and it kept my girlfriend and me company on the long days of driving to New Mexico. It sounds like someone whispering in my ear, mid-hug, the secret solidarity of “It’s OK, dude—I’m fucking exhausted, too.”
Pigeon John – So Gangster
| GENRE | Indie rap |
| YEAR | 2010 |
| RIYL | Hipster hop, internet cyphers, feeling really good about getting some chores done. |
Ironic goofballin’, possibly Jesus-freak raps for the suburbs? Perhaps, perhaps. And I admit, a lot of what makes this song fun for me is the weirdass lyrics. The Depeche Mode and Nintendo references in the bridge are a little heavy-handed, sure—but that’s part of the appeal. John’s just having a good time on an above-average day in his middle-aged life. And hey—that “watch the young Duke Ellington make the place gelatin” part is actually pretty lit. But it’s that synth line on the hook, that punchy little bass line, and John’s carefree charisma that hit like free waffles at the Denny’s on Vermont. This little number soothed my weary noggin in the few weeks after I took that stupid exam. I related to the weekend vacation sentiment. I really badly needed a vacation.
This took me back to the days when viral rap stars capitalized on their sudden success by scoring interviews and collaborations with their favorite iconic indie veterans. I remember when Dumbfoundead interviewed Pigeon John on The Hotbox about being in L.A. Symphony, and John performed “Buttersoft Seats.” Months later, John sang the hook on one of Dumb’s songs. It’s the shit that got me into digging deeper into music history and scenes in the first place. It’s fun to get back to that.
August
Grinderman – Get It On
| GENRE | Noise-Blues |
| YEAR | 2007 |
| RIYL | Funhouse by the Stooges, Licking Nick Cave’s sweat, furiously masturbating to Motorhead tapes. |
This was a Band Camp song. By that, I mean that it’s one I overplayed in the weeks leading up to my friend Mike’s visit to NorCal in late August to record a rap EP. Mike was the one who introduced me to Grinderman—and Nick Cave more broadly—several months earlier. I tossed this song onto a playlist designed to inspire us as we fastball pitched musical concepts at the walls of our various makeshift studios. As the proceedings got more chaotic, it quickly became apparent that this was the one destined to stick with me all year long. We split time between my friends TK and Emma’s living room in South San Francisco, Ali, Kenny, and Kimmy’s loft in Berkeley, and my parents’ place in Palo Cedro, making a stupid amount of noise all the way. Armed with an arsenal of cheapish gear, piled carefully but anti-carefully in the back of my CR-V, and backed by a posse of tight-knit artsy fartsy amigos, we accomplished our goal—although we might have done it more sloppily intoxicated than we planned. It was a shitload of fun though. And in the process, Kenny even discovered his affinity for the MPC.
This song is my vote for the most incredibly mythic (buzzword) toxic biopic ever committed to digital sound. Nick Cave’s writing hits what I have to figure is almost a career best with “he drank panther piss and fucked the girls you’re probably married to—he’s got some words of wisdom.” It’s a testament to this guy’s titanic power as a writer that it’s even a question. The amount of bondage-and-heroin-fucked Elvis energy on this track shatters the scouter. “Get It On” plays like a bar fight exploding into existence after a stray smartass joke goes a smidge too far. The bass part is devastatingly fuzzed–out, and the sense of foreboding it creates as the song builds menacingly around it is second only to Nick Cave’s whiskey-drunk Baptist-preacher-on-bad-speed affectation in terms of ferocity and spit-in-your-fucking-face confrontationality. This thing stinks like sex and sweat, and it hits like hastily gummed dexedrine powder on an empty stomach. Caveman drums. War chants. This is the Grinderman theme song, and it needs to play over a scene in some antichrist HBO drama where unspeakably violent acts are committed on camera with wanton, irresponsible detail. God help us all as we lick our lips at the sight and the sound. And God forbid the tax man get ‘em.
Liz Phair – Johnny Feelgood
| GENRE | Alternative Rock, Classic Alternative |
| YEAR | 1998 |
| RIYL | Lighting flowers on fire, sticking gum in the queen bee’s pigtails, talking dirty. |
A lot of the time, I can’t help but think that Liz Phair channels enormous “Cool Older Sister” energy. Seriously. She’s witty, she sounds like she’d give good advice on dating, probably throws cool parties, and she might even take the heat when mom and dad get pissed at me. See, as cool as my younger sisters are, I don’t necessarily want to grow up to be just like them. But I definitely want to grow up to be just like Liz Phair. I need to know whatever it is that makes Liz such a genius writer, with such a perfectly actualized sense of humor and voice. It’s something I wish I could emulate. And sure, is this song upside-down and kind of (buzzword) toxic? Maybe, but it’s so self-aware that you have to kind of appreciate the joke. Young though she was when she wrote this, I can’t help but feel like this is how smarter, frankly adult musicians write about doin’ it. She acknowledges her own feelings of hypocrisy in wanting to spend so much time with a guy whose sexual proclivities border on abusive, but hey—she “really, really liked it.” And as she explains, it might not be just lust alone: “Johnny makes me feel strangely good about myself,” she sings. It’s a set of lyrics that sets us reeling—girl, are you OK? Are you stable enough for this? But she’s firmly in control—and you can tell, because meanwhile, she’s throwing a kickass little Keith Richards riff down through the floor of that dry drum part, where every slam of the snare hits like a slap to the face—but a very sexy slap to the face, like I’m tied to something. That’s the coolest thing about this song, to me. It’s the juxtaposition of the lyrics’ tone with the instrumental’s. It’s coyly submissive and rock ‘n’ roll dominant at the same time. Great encapsulation of female sexuality—it’s nuanced. Go fucking figure, you asshole.
L’Orange, Jeremiah Jae – Cool Hand (feat. Chester Watson)
| GENRE | Alternative Hip Hop |
| YEAR | 2019 |
| RIYL | The Holes Soundtrack, documentaries about the sixties, impeccably flipped blues and soul samples. |
Sometimes it’s just a fucking blast to listen to a hip hop song where the rappers propound righteous Clash-level sociopolitical truths with the undeniable cool of Dead Prez or Rage Against the Machine. Am I a huge fucking nerd? Sure, but fuck yourself. This is a great concept album about our Call of Duty generation. Lyricist/brooding beat poet Jeremiah Jae and beatsmith producer L’Orange have teamed up before, but they’ve never sounded more post-apocalyptic together than here. This is the soap box song for the whole project, where the message is most directly delivered. I think I fucking hear it, man—it’s all too convenient for me and my lip service liberal chums to look abroad, cast judgement, flip the finger to the flag and spit, “Fuck your war. I don’t want to fight it.” And yet, then we cower in the face of the war at home—the violence in our own communities, the degradation we’re facing here, on our own soil, in the soul of our own decaying empire. We realize there’s no choice. We fight one, or we fight the other. Or we sit on our asses, and sit we do. That’s the reality of our age. This is the song playing as I watch the city of San Francisco sink into the sea in my wildest hallucinations.
Chester Watson takes to this beat like a gopher to an unguarded garden. He devours it with that bar, “they destroyed the Panthers, but the KKK lives—summed it up and I barely had to say shit.” And the simple throwaway of “speak less than you listen” suggests a couple of rappers who aren’t fucking around with that basic bro clout chasing, backed by a producer with the cinematic vision to accommodate them. This is your political philosophy rap, kids. This is your new school thought-provoking shit. If it doesn’t sound fun, it’s because sometimes lessons aren’t. That Elmore James sample ain’t fun, son. It’s the blues, god dammit. This whole album pulls samples from old radio dramas and films about soldiers, war, death. The dudes with the verses on this one are on point with the message and the presentation alike. They’re soldiers, staying underground for now, studying and preparing for the ascent to the surface. But for now, it’s “standing on the conquered land, dust where the columns stand, where atoms turn rocks into sand, where scrolls rewritten.” It’s a communication in code for those willing to dig, maybe willing to listen to the message buried in the ancient library, hidden underneath that guitar and that understatedly assertive vintage percussion pulse. Keep your head down, kids. It’s only a matter of time now. Your day will come, and when it does, the people will heed your message as gospel. Truth is relative, but wisdom is eternal. Heed the prophecy—remain a warrior. But still, the hook, the coldly isolated pseudo-sentence “You Salute,” takes on a fearsome double meaning. You salute these musicians, these artists. You salute the institution. You salute the idea, not the real men. Keep your wits about you. Shit gets weirder.
September
Alejandro Escovedo – Cuantas Veces
| GENRE | Alt Country, Spanish Rock |
| YEAR | 2021 |
| RIYL | Los Lonely Boys, Danny Glover’s character in the film Silverado, John Doe from X, Robert Rodriguez movies |
Is it too on-the-nose to call Alejandro Escovedo the undisputed (because fuck you if you disagree) king of alt-country? What about its (another way of saying “undisputed king”) godfather? Its truest outlaw spirit among a fleet of wannabes? Its diversity hire? Shit, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve only really been listening to Alejandro Escovedo for a year. This album wasn’t even my introduction to his music, but I think that this Spanish language version of 2018’s The Crossing, featuring translated lyrics and guest vocalists, was a cool idea for a (press kit summary buzzwords alert) project about Alejandro’s heritage and his personal journey through punk rock. This adaptation of “How Many Times” is no exception to the album’s general operating instructions: Piles of motorcyclin’ across West Texas guitar power, leveled with righteous indignance at a decades-old pile of racist indignities, their bigoted perpetrators, and the sold-out, somehow still standing cultural institutions that dine with the pigs.
Escovedo may have written the English version of these lyrics—and in either language, they’re a certain clear kind of post-beat poetic, starkly confrontational and apparently close to that old “been kicked around for far too long” edge—but in terms of delivery, it’s guest singer Alex Ruiz who amplifies them with a native-language fervor to bolster their country/blues-rockin’ cool. That way he wails (translated) “I try and I try, I carry the load,” manages to sound like the last, desperate gasps of a dying damned soul, begging for a morsel and some decency, and the start of a geopolitical war cry at the same time. The backing ooh’s and aah’s are tantalizingly subdued, building oodles of smoky southwestern soul tension for that ripper of a (translated) “Hey you! Call me the stranger—I’ve crossed this line before” chorus. Stranger he may be, but he sure as shit ain’t going to be the background character in some moronic wannabe fantasy western. It’s his country now, you fucking hicks.
R.E.M. – Circus Envy
| GENRE | Alternative Rock |
| YEAR | 1994 |
| RIYL | Ferocious guitar distortion, the angry Michael Stipe, Finally digging through that box of tapes in your parents’ garage, the Dollar CD bin. |
For some reason, this was my song for driving through storms in 2021. My girlfriend’s house in Berkeley caught fire in August, just a few days after our Band Camp ended. She sifted through the debris and moved back in with her Aunt and Uncle in San Rafael, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was based in the South Bay at the time, preparing for my “big” move south, but I drove up through the city to visit her when I could.
I’d recently been hired for an office job in a regional market—the exact sort of thing I did before law school, but in a smaller scene and for much more money than before. I had friends in Monterey County already, but they lived out on the peninsula, about 20 minutes from where I’d be living. Still, I frequently crashed on their couch in the months where I searched for housing and toured the County, asking myself, “Could I make this work for now?” and praying for a backup plan.
On one of those existential housing search trips to Monterey, I stopped at a touristy little record store on Lighthouse Ave with a surprisingly strong “Dollar CD” shoebox. There, amid such dollar CD shoebox staples as Counting Crows and Sheryl Crow and Putumayo compilations, was this R.E.M. album, Monster. Released in the year I was born, it’s (appropriately, I guess) one of their louder, more distorted albums. I’d already heard “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” on some digital radio shuffle years ago, and I know a certain gentleman in the “old family friend” category who’s obsessed with this band. I also remember reading somewhere about how the Minutemen once opened for them on tour. So, it seemed like a good grab to round out the alternative dad rock corner of my CD collection.
I listened to Monster for the first time on a drive north to see Ali. As I crossed the bridge in the pouring rain to get to San Rafael, the sickly yellow lights of the cars on the other side scrambling my on-the-fritz visual sensors through the bay’s heavy rinse cycle, I heard “Circus Envy” for the first time, and I nearly careened over the ledge. The distortion, the cryptically sinister lyrics, and the nastiness of that “mean, mean, mean, tease, tease, tease” bridge, all of it boiling over in that moment where he grittily whisper-shouts “bark on command” and everything else falls out, leaves the listener bewildered and unprepared for the gut-punch of the riff-return. And meanwhile, I can barely see the fucking bridge.
Yeah—I was kind of fucking scared. And it seemed like R.E.M. was mocking me for it. But as any fan of this band will tell you, it was a deeply satisfying kind of fear—the same kind of sickly scared I felt when I first heard The OOZ by King Krule. That kind of fear that you learn to accept and embrace and wrestle with in the dark for the rest of your adult life, like your innermost corruptions and the ugliness of life itself. And still, the melody on that chorus, the way it somehow manages to push steadily back against the hazy noise, erupting into a paradoxically defiance-streaked power-chord military march, keeps it sweetly fresh and juicy enough to genuinely enjoy. Enough to make it fun. And no one can beat the way Stipe screams “JEALOUSY” in the outro. Terrifying.
October
Big Hongry – Early One Morning
| GENRE | Alternative Hip Hop |
| YEAR | 2020 |
| RIYL | Blackalicious, Dub, sugar coated hooks, cheeseburgers, venmo requests, Daveed Diggs being on Sesame Street. |
I stumbled across Big Hongry’s music through his work with Lyrics Born, a Blackalicious collaborator known to assemble all-star rap casts for his endless list of projects. After I heard Hongry feature on “Just 2 Swift,” a track with Lyrics Born and producer Cutso, I knew I had to check out his other stuff.
This is Hongry’s most popular song by a longshot—suspiciously so. Makes me wonder what TikTok I missed that blew this particular one up, leaving the rest of his impressive-but-condensed catalogue criminally untouched. But still, this one’s just too much fun to be legal. It probably isn’t, honestly—as he mentions, he’s in Switzerland to record the project with producer Quest Beatz. And goddammit, the man’s still eating at McDeezy’s. He’s really emphasizing how much he bleeds the block, but he’s still passing this absolutely candy-coated, aggressively groovy weekend bike ride joint around the circle, and meanwhile absolutely crushing the cypher, casually as fuck. The hook is relentlessly goofy and catchy and bottom-line fun—especially the way he drags out “gas, grass, and lots of cash,” and climbs cheesily, unrepentantly into Elmo-level falsetto for “nobody rides for free.”.
I can’t think of a single complaint I have with this song. It’s not exactly revolutionary, but the beat’s effortless, like the chorus from “If I Only Had a Brain” by MC 900 Ft. Jesus got thrown in a blender with Jonwayne’s brain and a Reggae band. And the flow’s solidly above average—classically Bay Area, feet firmly planted somewhere between Shorty the Pimp and Two Minute Drills. If Willy Wonka was a weed farmer instead of a Chocolate Robber Baron, this would be the song his Danka-Lanka servants sing as they haul away the naughty young stoners who violate the rules of his Magnificent Indoor Grow Op tour. And in that sense, it’s the best song it could possibly be.
Sheryl Crow – Subway Ride
| GENRE | New School Dad Rock |
| YEAR | 1998 |
| RIYL | The Wine Moms for Bernie Newsletter, Courtney Barnett (seriously). |
I mentioned Sheryl Crow earlier, in that this CD was in the same Dollar CD shoebox as Monster by R.E.M. But “Subway Ride” was not the only Sheryl Crow song that I had on repeat in 2021—the other was “Gasoline” from 2008’s Detours. Ali had it tucked away on her phone from years ago, and when we listened to it in Santa Fe, I think a switch flipped in my brain. Both songs are rambly, spoken word-y rock tracks about politics from your recently-more-liberal dad’s perspective—you know, assuming your dad, like some I could mention, is one who really mellowed out quite a bit when weed got legalized and Trump got elected back in 2016. Strange how times change—in more ways than one, because there I was, in October 2021, listening to Sheryl Crow, who my Dad thinks is cool, and who he once compared to Courtney Barnett.
I remember being irrationally annoyed when he said that. I definitely burned him for listening to Sheryl Crow. No way. His shit: uncool. My shit: cool. My shit is ironic and trendy, yours is old and earnest. I know what “Soak Up the Sun” sounds like, man. I know what “If it Makes You Happy” sounds like, Dad. Don’t insult me like that. But you know what? Rambly, spoken word-y rock tracks. He was right. And as soon as I took the risk, bought this album from the dollar CD shoebox, and mustered up the audacity to listen to it, I knew it.
This song grooves in kind of a straightforward, tight-banded rock-jam way musically, but it’s carried by her personality and ability to tell a story. It’s political soap-boxing, but delivered with the candor and cadence of your drunk aunt at Thanksgiving. Plus, that piano is being played into the ground. It’s a fun-time, big budget garage-band lighting up a big budget studio. It’s got muscle, sass, and chops. Fun for the whole family. And what does that say about me? Am I coming to terms with my culture? Or am I just selling out as hard as humanly possible? My guess is that it’s both, and that there are good and bad things about that. Who knows—maybe this CD will find its way back to a dollar CD shoebox somewhere, someday. In the meantime, I’m going to keep trying to figure this shit out: Do I like Sheryl Crow?
November
Rolling Stones – I’m Free
| GENRE | Classic Rock |
| YEAR | 1965 |
| RIYL | British Invasion, the Byrds |
I admit it. This is the one I played when I found out I passed the California Bar. It’s a complete sonic candy cane from 1965. Sugar-coated, lackadaisical, lightly druggy British Invasion blues-pop. What else is there in a celebration song? This classic of slightly cool graduation proceedings felt like an old friend when it popped back into my brain upon reading my results. To all the teachers and professors who hated my guts, the preppies at my law school who thought I was a burnout, the punks who thought I was a sellout and every law firm job interviewer who had no idea what I was on: I did it. I’m free. Kind of.
BRNDA – Perfect World
| GENRE | Art Punk, Indie Rock |
| YEAR | 2021 |
| RIYL | New Wave, The Breeders, The weird Parquet Courts tracks, not-so-playfully roasting your friends in front of their dates |
This was a bandcamp mailing list recommendation. Kill me if you want, typecasters of the world. Just leave me to my cripplingly self-aware, intelligent-to-death sax-punk about idealized individual existence and the hubris of acting entitled to happiness. If this one helps me unhealthily justify my self-loathing and stagnancy as a person, so be it. I’ll deal with the negative consequences just so I get to keep listening to that weird percussion part after they sing “doin’ OK” in the hook of this song.
This track imagines you, the listener, as the guest on a life’s path game show. Three options for your future, and it’s up to you to pick a door. Options range from academic prestige to “a life of poetry.” It’s cutely cynical—like the painting of Hello Kitty holding a shotgun that was on the wall of the Sports Basement, a tiny practice studio in San Diego where some friends and I recorded garage-blues demos back in summer 2019. Like that painting, this song aims an adorable tiny shotgun at my sense of individuality, and demands that it put the goods in the bag.
And the way its lyrics roast those of us in pursuit of prestige along with those of us with no ambition whatsoever, those of us who just want to be OK and not worry about the future too much every day—it’s tough love, but this song’s for us. Because, seriously—the moment they hit that weird percussion thing, I really am in the perfect world for a second. And the spastic, reeling-from-bad-acid saxophone solo rattles around my brain like the pace of current events in this aggressively over-connected age, where I can be stuck at home on a weekend from a possible virus contact, and still somehow at the office. It’s a beautiful day outside though, and at least I can hang out on my back porch. All things considered, maybe I really am, as this song says, “Doin’ OK.” Hit the weird percussion thing.
Closing Thoughts
Holy shit, writing all of that was exhausting. I don’t think I’m ever doing this again. Happy New Year. There’s a version of this piece with footnotes—email me if you’re interested. The 2022 playlist is called Omi-Chron Kenobi (for now). Happy listening.
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