Best albums of the '90s

What I love about these lists, in comparison to a generic "best of so-and-so decade" list, is that I constantly ask the question: really? That's the best? Are people not making great music every day? Or, at the least, are people not making really personal art every day? And because the scope is so diminished - a year is at once a small and large range of time - the easiest way to answer that question is: listen to everything. It's such a wonderful exercise in being wrong.

And it's just as fun to compare-and-contrast how wrong I was, and how much closer to being right I get with each edition of the list. It describes an evolution of thought over time.

So I find this exercise quite fun. At the end of the day, I don't do these to be right, but to 1. record my evolving thoughts on music and 2. expose some great art.

1990

"Doe" is a perfect little description of The Breeders' "Pod". There's the hallucinatory desperation of Kim Deal's "I walk / to where / he's sitting, / it's so salty, Tammy." There's Kim's hypnotic mini-solo from 1:00 to 1:04, where her guitar is layered on Wiggs' smokey bass, the bass being "real" and Kim's guitar being "fake"; the fact that we're not sure, is the point. There's Kim's blurred-eyed, blunt repetition of "Doe. Doe. Doe." then her immediate lift-off, as if nothing happened, to "Dead leave, / we burned / the field / completely." There's the "Ahh hah hah, / ah ha ha ha" with either Donelly or Wiggs full-chest-breathing in the background; this breathing resumes, to complete silence (except for the echo of Walford's powerful drums), at song's end, as if the carnage is complete. Then, at the very end, Kim dictatorially repeats, like bullets, the "Doe. Doe. Doe." to Walford's pummeling the drums like one more fight's left in him.

But the real revelator is, what was the point of the song? Was it just meant to be a scene of color and movement? Well...yeah. Kim and co. are just having fun.

This is "Pod". I fucking love this album to pieces, and I'm so glad nothing else competes with it this year. If I had the choice, this and "Last Splash" (1993) would win every award ever invented.

Beyond loving the album, I think it actually had a major influence in how I perceive art. It was accidental; I didn't deliberately seek out the album to study, nor was I pondering on anything the album happened to answer. The only coincidence I can think of, this was when I really got into jazz and explored the concept of saying the thing the longest way possible. I got addicted to the album, soaking every aspect of it in: every riff, every crescendo, every lyric, every perfectly-planned second. While I was studying flower petals and the waves on the sea, the album always came to mind: you can hear it in the stoner rock of "Glorious", with every beat of the drum by Britt Walford, with Deal or Donelly's guitar unfolding, layering more and more sound upon itself.

In spite of how much emphasis is put on how dark the album is, the album, in my ears, just sounds like a band having fun. It sounds like this supremely gifted artist, Kim Deal, putting as much paint onto a canvas, in the form of music, riffs, melodies, bridges, every trick in a rock n' roller's book. It feels like The Breeders fucking around. It really is like a painting to me. It taught me art doesn't have to mean anything, but it has to convey motion. Such purity of expression is seen in very few; Mozart counts among this few.

Take "Iris", which begins with Deal's slow, crawling monologue: "Four hours in the pod, / one hour out", that "out" perfectly placed, and with Kim ominously ending "It grows and I sleep standing up." The song, for reasons no one can discern, once Kim starts on "What a book she'll wri-i-i-i-te" the song goes from 0 to 100, with the guitars trying to top each, and Britt on drums trying to overpower the both of them; this brief exercise in escalation ends with Kim straining her voice to yell "We tried hour / by hour, / hour by hour, / hour / by hour", varying her word placement each time. It's fucking raw.

Then there's the squealing riff of "Limehouse" and stuttery stop-start of its arrangements, before Deal enters the psychedelic squall of "I'm in a limehouse, I am / in a limehouse / I'm in a limehouse, I am / in a limehouse" before Kim does her best Michael Jackson "hee hee". Eat your hearts, Beatles!

One last thing on The Breeders, as I won't get the opportunity to touch on this again - and this is kinda a dig - for reasons Breeders is compared to Deal's old band The Pixies, and I just see The Pixies as a lesser version. This is, of course, an extreme exaggeration: I think Francis Black's writing is the strongest part of The Pixies, which writing is nearly nonexistent in "Surfer Rosa" (1988) and "Doolittle" (1989) except in "Gigantic", "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Silver". I think "Bossanova" (1990), developed when Kim's relationship with the band was very strained, is very interesting and Francis's "Teenager of the Year" (1994), which is just rock songs, is very good. Francis is the better songwriter, but The Breeders wrote better songs; I used to love The Pixies as a kid, but I agree nowadays with Steve Albini's early assessment of The Pixies being essentially just college rock. The Pixies from hereon will have no mention in this list or any others, I think, which would have been a glaring omission (as many other omissions will be).

This was one of the most artistically fruitful years for rap; this is when rap got weird. I value Public Enemy's "Fear of the Black Planet" and Ice Cube's "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" highly; the latter would be a winner any other year. "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" is aesthetically extremely violent, more than punk, more than metal; when the crowd screams "FUCK YOU ICE CUBE!" in "The Nigga Ya Love to Hate" you actually do empathize with how Ice Cube feels being a target of everyone, the cops, the media, his friends, and understand his perspective as you enter the gross songs, "A Gangsta's Fairytale" and "Get Off My Dick and Tell Yo Bitch to Come Here". Unflinching album.

Another top contender is Happy Mondays' "Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches". It's just a great, danceable, trippy record, starting with the psychedelic swirl of "Kinky Afro". It's also very funny: as Shaun Ryder says in "God's Cop", "I can virtually do anything I read"; later, he would declare, with the passion of a sermon, "God made it easy on me, / God made it easy on me, / God made it easy on me."

Remember that this is the year King Missile said Jesus was way cool. I just wanted to tell you this.

1991

It fascinates me how, when I look at the 2000s or the current 2020s, my brain goes a little fuzzy and I struggle a little to draw up real contenders for every year. That's when I have to dive deep and piece things out.

The 90s are very different. Many entries are obvious. I'm guessing 80% of the reason is that, time having settled, it's very clear what the standout albums are, regardless of genre. 20% of the reason is that this was simply just a revolutionary decade, musically. The social rebelliousness of Gen X really helped to make really weird stuff, that was also accessible. This is the decade of Pavement; I can't think of any band like Pavement, with as much appeal. (Let's see how Geese turns out.) And if we're talking about electronic music, again, this is the time of Daft Punk, before they got predictable.

This is the first truly difficult year where I struggle with figuring out the best album. There's so much good stuff. I feel this would cause a music fan so much pain to choose. This is the year of fucking "Loveless". "Spiderland". Nirvana's fucking "Nevermind".

When I had to think about it, I had to choose this album, if only out of sentimentality. This is the album I discovered when I was in college. This is the album that, in a subtle way, remolded me, taught me that art, even if it is quiet, can still be loud, and ambitious, and visionary.

This is Talk Talk's "Laughing Stock". This album took the wind out of me, and not by force.

The context is, my diet of music when I was younger was fairly typical: punk rock and radio-rap. Some of my tastes weren't embarrassing: I got crazy addicted to The Clash, Elvis Costello and Brian Eno, and acclimated myself to the post-punk scene, things I'm grateful to have heard to this day. The rest is pitiful: Drake, "good kid, m.A.A.d city" (I think this is pretty dated), "Channel Orange" (BRING IT ON, HATERS!), Vampire Weekend (they're not bad), and other stuff I've just totally forgotten. I mean, when you're young, you just want loud, so loud and so fast that the music runs over and flattens your insecurities. And if the music is a teensy bit introspective - or rather, introspective in a way that brings up uncomfortable questions - you reject it, it's too "heady" for you.

At this point, I did not care for ambient music. Classical music and jazz bored me. As far as post-rock, I only liked "F♯ A♯ ∞" (this was when Godspeed! revived). And yet I accepted "Laughing Stock" immediately.

I think, reflecting on it, I always felt the genres I mentioned encompassed a "world", and that world implicitly rejected me. I was not "academic" enough, I was not "thoughtful" enough, I didn't see things "their way". There was a context to the music before I could listen to it. (I would find that context had not been externally imposed and would be provided ultimately by age - as I grew older, I just got the "tempo" of those songs better.)

"Laughing Stock" let me in. There was no condescension. There was no background. There was no message. It just Is, and what it is is gentle and beautiful and forgiving.

I think a lot about what ambition means. For a lot of musicians, to make music is a joy and a gift itself (and I look up to this belief). But ambition rejects this premise. To be ambitious in terms of art, one needs to stand out. When you're young, you're ambitious, and therefore reject a great many forms of music.

And what ambition ultimately is, is vision. It's the audacity and the power to create a completely new world.

That's the other element that made me welcome "Laughing Stock" so completely: it is, indeed, ambitious as hell. Ambition, as it turns out, can be very quiet and modest.

Take opening track "Myrrhman", which begins with 20 seconds of ambient noise, and then, Mark Hollis on guitar gives a big ripple of a note, reverberating through the canvas of the music. The song, now, formally begins, with the wind instruments and drums (Lee Harris) entering in. When one thinks about it, this is rock; that contrast between silence and Hollis's guitar is loud, explosive and rude, and yet Hollis's beef isn't with a person or society or a rigid set of ideas - there is an argument against sound itself, against silence, against music. "Laughing Stock" is arrogant, but its central beef is against the very concept of making music itself.

The instruments move along, stopping and starting like the shuffling dead. Hollis mumbles, barely audible at places, "Place my chair at the backroom door, / help me up, I can't ..." before mumbling himself into a mess. "Blessed love," he continues, before falling into mush mouth, his words indiscernible. Meanwhile the wind and string instruments (the guitar and bass) finally cohere into a meditative, nearly mournful, and yet somehow hopeful melody.

It's hard to say just what exactly I saw in "Myrrhman". Perhaps the best way of putting it, that makes the most sense to me, is that I was watching a man try to assemble himself from fragments, the titular "laughing stock" trying to find sense at the end of the world, or at the beginning of life. You can point to the possible influences of "Laughing Stock": jazz, prog rock, ambient music, and yet nothing explains why the ears don't hear the music's elements individually and instead hear them as a harmony, where the parts blend together and make a clear sonic narrative.

A minor note on this: I have put "Ascension Day" in a playlist with jazz fusion and free jazz, and yet the abrasiveness and the aggressiveness of the guitars always makes the track stand out; there is a rock star mentality, of the music being louder than life, and yet that obsession with power is instead directed to the singer's desire for salvation, not necessarily a Christian one, which is key to this analysis. It's like the ideas are broken down to their essence.

Rather than talk about "After the Flood", "Taphead", and "New Grass", all highlights of the album, I'll instead direct attention to the end of the album, "Runeii", the final highlight in an album of only highlights. Where "Myrrhman" is the singer re-piecing himself after collapse, "Runeii" is the singer collapsing again - all that's left, after the triumph of "New Grass", is Hollis's guitar, playing that elliptical riff, in that weird rusty recording environment. Over and over he loops; and if Hollis wasn't audible before, he is literally muttering under his breath the lyrics, as if he is on his deathbed (rest in peace, Mark). When Hollis leaves the loop, it's like he's smirking, remarking, with some serenity, the setting of the sun. And so, this is "Laughing Stock": resurrection, the ascent up the mountain, mastery, seeing all of the colors of the world, then rest, as if Talk Talk were the Biblical God, creating all that is beautiful and sleeping unto the rest of eternity. "Laughing Stock" is so many things it's hard to pick one.

Christ, this album doesn't age, huh?

A very close contender for the year was Sonny Sharrock's "Ask the Ages". Sharrock's guitar was wild, man. He did not care for Hendrix's fuzz and squalls. Sharrock, a Coltrane acolyte, wanted to make the guitar wail as Coltrane's sax, and, uhh, he achieved it, as one can hear "Who Does She Hope To Be?" It's notable that, no matter how heavy the music gets, Sharrock always manages to restrain his guitar to hum instead of purr; take "Many Mansions", which really shows how he felt about the spirituality of electric guitar. Really weird, and therefore great, artist.

Is there anything to say about "Loveless"? I didn't get "Loveless" when I was younger; I thought nothing happened in the music. But that, indeed, was the point; chill the fuck out, seriously, pump up the volume - crank it up to 11 if you need to - and submerge yourself in the songs, as "To Here Knows When" or "Blown a Wish"; let Bilinda's coos reach you in the astral realm, let Shields mold mountains out of the feedback of his guitars. Just let it wash over you. This is a winner in any other decade, man.

1992

I think it's Annie Lennox's "Diva".

I might as well receive the backlash early.

I don't know, I just love this one.

I always give a lot of points to an album that "reveals" the artist, where, in my viewpoint, the artist is not trying to be showy, not trying to impress, not trying to work their problems out on the record nor trying to paint a picture of themselves, and is, simply, being. Maybe they're not being themselves, but they're trying to inhabit the moment that they're in. I like these time capsules: they show a specific period in a person's life, and they say something about all life. Combine this with an artist who goes into the studio with an extremely strong vision of what they want to put on record - not a set of songs, but a set of ideas guiding the development of the tracklist - and I go gaga over it.

Annie Lennox was 37 when "Diva" was released. Two years ago, she publicly broke from her most famous band, the Eurythmics. At the same time, she had her first child, Lola. Almost from the start, she had been working on a solo album, but nothing came out.

And then, "Why" comes out, descending from the heavens.

I don't know if "Why" is directed at anyone. Is it about her bandmate in the Eurythmics, Dave Stewart? What about her husband, Uri Fruchtman? What about her previous husband, Radha Raman? What about herself? Here's what I know: Annie Lennox, at the time of release, was a mother of a one-year-old. She was almost 40, which, as far as a woman in the music industry goes, is dinosaur-age. This is an environment where she would most likely be asking, "What am I doing? Where am I going? Am I capable of going where I want to go?"

How do I know this? By that opening, hazy, confused, light, forgiving "Why?" that starts the track. This is the voice describing everything the music needs to say, by being itself.

How many times do I have to tell you that I'm sorry for the things I've done,
but when I start to try to tell you, that's when you have to tell me, Hey, this kind of trouble's just begun.

Then Lennox, allowing herself frustration, musters up:

I tell myself too many times, Why don't you ever learn to keep your big mouth shut,
that's why it hurts so bad to hear the words that keep on falling from your mouth.
Falling from your mouth... falling from your mouth, tell me, why?

And then, one of my favorite verses:

I may be mad, I may be blind, I may be viciously unkind, but I can still read what you're thinking.

I don't know why, it's in the way she disarms herself; there's a brutality to her honesty, that mirrors my own way of thinking when I wonder, "Why can't you just do what people want you to?" I don't know how, but Lennox perfectly captured the pain that comes with being yourself and being forced to be yourself.

Let's turn aside from "Walking on Broken Glass", which I wrote about in an "okay, just okay" essay years ago. "Walking on Broken Glass", as it turns out, is the most radio-friendly song on the album by a fair margin; the rest of the album can be called "pop-soul" a la Roxy Music's "Avalon". I mean, cripes, this write-up is already getting long, and I want to talk about "Precious", "Legend in My Living Room", "Cold", "Little Bird", ugh, so much, let's talk about "Primitive":

Sweetheart, the sun has set all red and primitive above our heads, bloodstained on an ageless sky, wipe your tears and let the salt stains dry, let them all run dry, all run dry...

she sings, with a tone of liberation in her voice. This is "Diva" - it's not about actually being a diva, it's about the perception of being a diva; it's being a diva in the eyes of other people and failing their standards, and it's being a diva in one's own eyes and being unable to get one wants and not really knowing what one wants. And then, admitting she is a diva, Lennox lets it all go, she gives up on holding things, as grudges and fame, so tightly and accepts the world as it is. Funnily enough, the CD release of "Diva" ends with a cover of "Keep Young and Beautiful", where Lennox satirizes the public's obsession with beautiful young girls; it's her final "Did I do that? smirk.

It's not a profound album, but that's kinda the point: it's an album about a person, and there's something about the portrait of that person that resonates with me. That's enough. Fantastic album.

I have a great affection for k.d. lang's "Ingénue"; it's hard not to be swooned by "Miss Chatelaine", and to not fall into tears as lang wails in "Wash Me Clean".

How is it I'm still writing about albums...? Why are there so many noteworthy albums? Why is Babes in Toyland the hardest band ever? The percussive stomp of "Bruise Violet" can blow your head off, and there are so many songs where it feels like the band is about to fall apart, as in "Handsome and Gretel".

I unfortunately haven't had a Neil Young phase...yet. There's something wonderfully tender about "Harvest Moon", that I think actually intimidates me from approaching him; I feel if I start, I'm going to get really obsessed with him. Leonard Cohen also released "The Future" this year, which continued the funkiness of "I'm Your Man" (spoilers: "I'm Your Man" wins 1988) but is somehow more bitter, as seen in the title track. But, back to "Harvest Moon": I can see that winning some time in the future. I do love the themes of "Diva" deeply, though. We'll see if Annie wins this out.

1993

I hate the fact that I can't give this to "Last Splash", and I hate the Pet Shop Boys for putting me in this predicament. "Last Splash" begins with FUCKING "New Year", THE GREATEST OPENER EVER.

"Very", instead, begins with "Can You Forgive Her?" But what really contests "Last Splash" is the second song, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing". When you hear Neil Tennant sing,

Ask me why: I'll say it's most unusual
How can I even try to explain
Why today, I feel like dancing, singing like lovers sing, when I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing?

you don't think he's putting you on, you don't think he's lying to you for the sake of a dance track, he's ... just telling the truth. Coupled with Chris Lowe's propulsive but melancholic track, you really get the feeling of someone who is undressing themself in front of you, in order to tell you: I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life.

That's "Very". It has been called the Boys' "coming-out" album. It is euphoric, and it bought all of its euphoria through a lot of pain. See: "Being Boring".

But beyond the content, Neil Tennant has always had an angelic voice: a bored angel, sure, but an angel all the same, someone of impeccable observation, caution and wisdom. When he sings, "For right now, I think I'm running / a race I know I'm gonna win," you hear within it a lifetime of sighs. In my eyes, it's such powerful music, of true, genuine liberation.

And the following song, is "Liberation". And if I was gushing over "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing", then I'm swooned entirely by Neil's "Take my hand; / I've changed my hand. / Really I believed it true, / that all who fell in love were foolish." In my ears, I feel that quiver, that twitch of the lips as he disarms himself; and then the emotions placed heavily on "But I...was wrong." At the end of the song, Tennant is so moved by belief that he falls in the arms of his lover at midnight; loved finally, and finally accepting love for himself, he is rocked to sleep. Lowe's instrumentals paint a romantic picture superior to that of any Broadway play's. (To those who love Broadway musicals: I don't really like them at all. I might as well be honest.)

Expression has been a persistent theme of the Boys' oeuvre, beginning with the repression implied in "It's a Sin" to their failure to express themselves in their cover of Carson, Christopher and James' "Always on my Mind". Freedom to express is, then, the theme of "Very", and it's almost impossible not to feel one's heart soar as the Boys' do; take, for example, Tennant's "ooooo-oooo-oooo" starting "One in a Million", which is striking as the song is about struggling to love someone, but enduring all the same. Then, of course, there's the campy-as-fuck cover of "Go West"; I legitimately think it's impossible to fist-pump to the Village People's triumphant "Gooooo west!" You don't have to be gay to understand; honestly, if you don't get what the Boys are trying to express, how are you even human?

So, yeah, it's "Very". Dance music in particular has a freeing effect, and this is the best of the best, created not for hedonistic cynicism but for the very optimism that comes from relating to someone else on the dancefloor.

(I'm genuinely impressed by the number of views these music videos have.)

This, by no means, is an easy year. I already mentioned "Last Splash". Let's get this out of the way: "New Year" is a great song, "Cannonball" is one of the greatest songs of the 20th century, easy (why isn't it in National Recording Registry when "Daydream Nation" (1988) is?), you can also count "Divine Hammer" among the greatest songs ever, and then the descent from there is gradual, it's a really good album. The issue is I love the psychology of the Pet Shop Boys; no, it seriously isn't fair this had to come out this year, because I do think this is a must-listen album.

It really is not a fair year. De La Soul's "Buhloone Mindstate" is one of my favorite rap albums of all time. Never mind "Eye Patch" or "Patti Dooke" - or, do, and learn what actual rhythm-keeping and rhyme-making look like - and consider how intimate "Ego Trippin', Pt. 2" and "I Am I Be" are to understand how much soul De La truly had. And then they were true emcees, able to uplift the mood of a party in a tip of the hat: see, "Area" and "I re-wiiind, / I re-wiiind" "Stone Age".

Nope, not a fair year at all. "Siamese Dream" comes out this year, which omission would surely give someone grief. It's an incredible shoegaze album; let's leave it at that, as it's worthy of discussion.

And, yo, "I NEVER, EVER CALL AND ASK YOU TO PLAY SOMETHING, RIGHT? I WANNA HEAR THAT WU-TANG JOINT, AGAIN AND AGAIN!" I did it! The spell has been cast, "Protect Ya Neck" is playing in your head, and I know you know every lyric in the song! I think the Wu Tang Clan are the greatest rap group ever, and no matter how juvenile "Enter The Wu-Tang" is it still remains such an incredible document of rap. Never mind "C.R.E.A.M"; listen to The Chef on "Can It All Be So Simple":

Yo, started off on the island, AKA Shaolin, nigga wilin', gun shots thrown, the phone dialin', back in the days, I'm eight now, makin' a tape now, Rae gotta get a plate now,

Rae is so young; he's 23 when this album comes out, and he's painting full pictures. The myth starts here, deservedly.

Besides the obvious contenders, an album that has carved a place in my heart is the Spinanes' "Manos". Rebecca Gates builds and builds in "Entire": "You're never watching, / you're always walking, / you're always walking, / you're always walking, / you never listen", before unfurling her long, wistful, "Entire", remarking on days past, on the unchangeability of man. Later, Gates observes with a furrowed eyebrow in "Uneasy": "You simple stutter at everyone you see, / and play it superior to give you room to leave", before exhorting her subject "Try, try a little tenderness."

Wait, how is there more to write about? Let me make this easy for me - listen to Townes Van Zandt's "At My Window". I am pretty sure every quality of the Zandt's songwriting reveals itself on a listen, as the music unravels like a river.

1994

Let's not pussyfoot on this: it's Hole's "Live Through This". This is pretty clear, because I wrote about "Asking For It" in 2024. And that's not even the best song on the album; it's just the one I wanted to talk about at the time.

There was a surprising amount of great, "album of the year"-worthy albums released this year, but I love, and love, and love "Live Through This". Before plunging into it, Courtney Love was Kurt Cobain's wife; after, Kurt Cobain was Courtney Love's husband. Of the grunge rockers - and I haven't heard that many, so take this with a grain of salt - she had the biggest balls; she had the incisiveness and aggression of Joe Strummer, and she had the vision and emotion of John Lennon. She's seriously underrated as a rock front...person?

The Joe Strummer comparison: take "Plump":

Shakes his dick like a rattle, spittle on his bib, and I don't do the dishes, I throw them in the crib,

has the sneer of Strummer yelling "My baby drove up in a brand new cadillac, / she said, "Hey come here daddy! / I ain't ever coming back!" or barking "They offered me the office, offered me the shop, / they said I'd better take anything they'd got." But as far as ferocity, Courtney on this song screams, in the second verse,

NOW I'VE STUMBLED HERE, FAILED TO MAKE IT MINE, THEY SAY I'M PLUMP BUT I THROW UP ALL THE TIME

the contempt thick in her roar. I'll chalk one up for Hole.

And then ... well let's not talk about "Doll Parts" and leave some surprise for new listeners, let's look at a lesser known song with the softness of "Doll Parts"; let's take a crack at "Softer, Softest", which I think is one of the best songs on the album.

I tell you everything, I hope that you won't tell on me, and I'd give you anything, I know that you won't tell on me

then the music builds and builds, with Love softly unfurling,

Pee girl gets the belt, your milk makes me mind, your milk is so sour, and I can only cry, and I can only cower, and I can only cry, you have all the power.

That's "Live Through This" at its heart: it's about a woman who was denied everything because she had the arrogance to be herself, her flawed, obnoxious, assholish self but herself all the same. And what can you do when everyone points their fingers at you for being yourself? You begin to throw their own shit back at them. You fight back. You claw out of hell. Not really what Love did, but the sentiment is there.

I think the album closest to taking the year, after "Live Through This", is Soul Coughing's "Ruby Vroom". I don't know why, but I like the soft satire of "Sugar Free Jazz" and the psychedelic nature of "Blueeyed Devil". Underrated and underlistened album.

Other rave albums are louder, other rave albums are faster, other rave albums are more intense, but Underworld's "Dubnobasswithmyheadman" just feels more depraved somehow. It's like "Funhouse" (1970) with drum machines. "Surfboy" haunts my dreams, and you can go sick listening to "Mmm...Skyscraper I Love You".

I used to listen to Guided By Voices' "Bee Thousand" so much as a kid. I'm a bit over its angst now, but it's hard not to travel back into my younger self when listening to the jangliness of "Tractor Rape Chain" and "Echos Myron"; there's an innocence dusting the whole album, even though it's quite dark.

It's super weird to me that there are so many noteworthy, best-of albums in the '90s; usually there's only one or two mentions for anything 2000s onward. This article is already getting too long! But I have to mention the slinky post-rock of Shudder to Think's "Pony Express Record"; Craig is downright creepy with his stretched vocals in "Sweet Year Old". Not to go too topical, but it's like if The Island (The E Island) had a soundtrack. Alright, last one, another post-rock-esque record: Thinking Fellers Union Local 282's "Strangers from the Universe" (mouthful); it's no Captain Beefheart, but there's plenty of disdain for form in "Socket".

1995

I went through a long, fortunate journey through rap. I began listening to Kanye West and "good kid, m.A.A.d city", man. Whatever there is to say about the music, has been said, but it's undoubted this is when rap became "pop", incorporating choruses and more danceable forms of music. I used to be bewildered by "Liquid Swords"; the beats were awful, it don't go hard, and GZA doesn't express any emotions or sense of drama.

It wasn't until I got really into jazz and classical music in 2021 that it all came together for me. Up until that point, art was always about how one felt; I was at a certain point in my artistic journey where I realized this was a shallow way of looking at art. You don't absorb any nutrients from the music by simply listening to it and emoting with it. The other way to look at it, which is closer to how the artists look at it and how we ultimately benefit from art, is to see the attributes of art of "paint", asking the what, why, and how something is made. In short: it's all about technique. At the end of the day, the canvas is blank; the recorder replays noise; the page is empty. Rather than searching for something one hungers, you're supposed to just see, and then maybe think about it.

Rap is one of music's great genres; the 2010s popularization of rap (or the 2000s or the 1990s, depending on how you want to look at Bad Boy or Death Row Records, or the relationship of gangster rap with music proper) did not confirm rap was great, in fact the mainstreaming of rap only worked because of rap's sheer greatness.

We live in a divided world. Unavoidable cliche to say, honestly. The honored verse-chorus-verse of The Beatles is not enough to express a generation's angst. Rap is conversational; it does not try to elevate the listener as pop music would (well, not old school rap, anyway), but it tries to console, educate, warn, as many great black literature preceding does. Pop conquers; rap soothes. It borrowed these qualities from gospel, soul, the blues. And yet, it borrows another crucial quality from a different, venerable, gigantic genre: it takes from jazz the concept of vision.

Jazz is a painterly form of music. Rock favors The Battle Hymn of the Republic: the voices and music enter a unity and harmony. (I fucking love The Battle Hymn of the Republic, that's not a diss at it.) Jazz attempts at harmony while respecting and appreciating the differences between its members, and it encourages, nay, is passionate for one of its members to "go off", to find new avenues beyond itself through the riff. It was in comprehending Charlie Parker that I comprehended rap.

This element of finding harmony in disharmony is crucial to rap, and it's particularly crucial to how the Wu-Tang approached rap; these artists, nonpareil honestly, the best of the best (maybe not nowadays but whatever), tried to find beauty in ugliness, and they fucking found it. "C.R.E.A.M" describes this dynamic perfectly, with Inspectah Deck's verse:

Though I don't know why I chose to smoke sess, I guess that's the time when I'm not depressed; but I'm still depressed, and I ask what's it worth? Ready to give up so I seek the Old Earth who explained working hard may help you maintain to learn to overcome the heartaches and pain.

I love "Protect Ya Neck" so much, but this is what the Wu-Tang really is: dense lyrcisim, multiple clauses, philosophical matter, and powerful visual imagery, all for the purpose of relating to young men who felt they never had a day in their lives.

(Another powerful representation is in Rae's side of the song: "I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side, / stayin' alive was no jive. / At second hands, moms bounced on old men, / so then we moved to Shaolin land" attempts to put Raekwon's difficult childhood into the frame of a fantasy.)

Apologies for this ... winded discussion, but this is really important to explain why I love "Liquid Swords" so much. If music has an intellectual side, this, and the Wu-Tang's other albums, are pinnacles. You will not find men who have thought as hard about music's impact on society while obsessing on how it should feel and sound. This balance is very, very important and extremely delicate. These guys are next to Gil-Scott Heron, of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" fame.

Take "Swordsman":

Yo, I'm not caught up in politics, I'm no Black activist on a so-called scholar's dick, I come through with the Wu and drop math and versatile freestyle bombs on phonographs

(I'll give you the time to soak in the juicy consonants of "versatile freestyle bombs on phonographs")

and deliver all things in number and weight, searched to death on how living things relate

all to RZA's extremely dark, woozy, positively violent instrumentals.

The Wu-Tang were empiricists; they were not scholars and did not deal in the abstract, as GZA says. They were consistent in that they did not believe in happy endings as from wealth or from God. Take "Gold", where GZA elaborates on the Wu's grandiose life trajectory:

The plan was to expand, catch seven figures, release triggers and live large and bigger than my nigga who promised his moms a mansion with mad room; she died, and he still put a hundred grand in her tomb.

It's so hard not to marvel at how effortless GZA is at stringing the clauses within his sentences; he has the gift of a storyteller, using and's and who's strategically to move the story along, beginning with the sexy details of getting loot and weapons all for the sake of living bigger than someone whose mom died before he saw his success. Which, by the way, that "he still put a hundred grand in her tomb" - GZA doesn't hint at this, but you wonder, What's even the point of getting so much money for dead people?

You get some of the answer in the opening sample of "4th Chamber", from the film "Shogun Assassin": the titular assassin asks his infant son, "Choose the sword, and you will join me; choose the ball, and you join your mother in death. You don't understand my words, but you must choose." This is the Wu-Tang at their core: all of the world was out to get us when we were born, so we have to fight like hell to survive. Overdramatic, sure, but it allows Ghostface to rage, "Why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? / Why did Judas rat to the Romans while Jesus slept?" There's no purity in the world; there's only evil, which we, the Wu, have to contend with. (Of course, Ironman raps about drinking from Stanley Cups later, but, whatever.)

GZA has mentioned in passing "Liquid Swords" does not contain his strongest lyrics. First of all, he's the great one, so it's better to take his word on it. But if we unpack that thought a little - and I'm not entirely sure what he means - I think, as I get older, there is a gulf between the execution of art and art itself, as expression. The details and delivery in lyrics are important, of course, but at the end of the day music is sound, nothing more and nothing less; it is the energy that passes from the artist to the audience, and there's something indefinable as to how that energy is formed, whether it comes from the artist's background and hunger at the time of recording. In truth, all art is is a record of people having lived, and the greatness of music, and therefore the greatness of a lyric, come from expressing that living.

And so we end with "I Gotcha Back", which was written for GZA's nephew while his father, GZA's brother, was in jail. The Wu being about survival, there was no way GZA didn't feel for his nephew. And so GZA wrote a chorus for his nephew, for his brother, and for himself:

I gotcha back, but you best to watch your front 'cause it's the niggas that front, they be pulling stunts,

whose message is, "I got you, but put your heart into wisdom." GZA, with a fiery urgency hitherto unseen in the album, launches into,

I was always taught my do's and don'ts, for do's I did, and for don'ts, I said I won't, I'm from Brooklyn, a place where stars are born, streets is shot up, apartment buildings are torn and ripped up, stripped up, shacked up and backed up from fiends, 'cause the bosses on the scene, they got it cracked up.

He never succumbs. He never says, "I'm giving up." Brooklyn, where stars are born. Nevermind the guns and fiends: kid, you're a star in the making.

And that's the Wu-Tang: not one, not two, not three, but an entire posse full of stars, no A&R, no label, just sheer audacity and talent; when they were at their height they were invincible, telling people, "What, you think we have nothing, you think we're one-hit wonders, BAM, another classic album, three hundred and sixty degrees of perfected styles." I think the issue with them is that they, rightfully, assumed they were superheroes, and lost the scrappy underdog status of the kung-fu films they so loved; but whatever. Wu-Tang forever.

I think the closest contender for 1995 is Oval's "94diskont." I'm always fascinated with Eno's "as interesting as it is ignorable comment"; as with many things Eno says, it's not an attribute you can anticipate, you just know. I love the swirl of burbles and clicks dusting of "Do While", which denotes the classic programming loop. "Do While" is so crusty and dissonant that it's hard to ignore, and yet you ... just do. "94diskont." is a masterpiece of texture in electronic music; notice how "Cross Selling" pops in your ear and how choppy "Shop In Store". You're never entirely comfortable in Oval's digital world, and yet you sink in, for whatever reason, which may be Oval's satirical intent for all we know.

1996

I think I wrote about Weezer's "Pinkerton" here or somewhere in my old blog. The writing was shit, so let's start anew.

This is one of the weirdest albums ever.

I'm trying to think on the history of loathing music. Generally speaking, you could probably point to its origins from the "Dies irae" and move upward from there, through gospel to the blues and then finally landing into personal, specific loathing with rock and the Beatles' brand of psychological lyricism. In the '70s, the concept congealed around a set of ideas and styles: punk music. There was finally standardized expression for how much life fucking sucks.

The problem with hating yourself is that there's always one piece of ground you cannot dig through: the very fact that you're living. By merely living, you are promoting yourself, and your ability to eat and see and observe and be. On this one ground, every defensive layer is built: the violence you want to commit to yourself is eventually redirected to hate and anger at other people. Not saying this is good or bad, this is just how people work.

Generally speaking, in the process of making art, an artist has a number of defensive layers before they can really hate themselves. The logic behind this is, if you really hated yourself so much, you wouldn't have the energy or motivation to make music. That's why punk music is perfect: by hating other people - politicians, attractive women, conformist losers - you get around to hating yourself, in the fear that the people you hate hate you. And, of course, through punk music we discover one of the fundamental human urges is to hate something, anything. Perhaps, in some sense, it is healthy. I mean, hey, look at Fugazi.

This is all to say, I've never seen a musician completely rip themselves to shreds in their own music.

I don't know how "Pinkerton" got made. I don't mean in a technical sense; I don't mean in a lyrical sense; I mean, I don't know how Rivers Cuomo got himself into the studio. Cuomo, in his letter to Harvard University, described how much he hated the shallowness of the rock n' roll lifestyle. Years after "Pinkerton", he was evidently in such a state of mind that he painted the walls of his home black and tried to prevent as much sunlight as possible from entering in. This depression, which I've never read in any another artist, ever, goes into "Pinkerton". And then, the last thing that confuses me: why did no one stop him from making this kind of music?

This is in the context that, for DECADES, Cuomo hated "Pinkerton", calling it a "diseased" album. This is also in the context that bandmates Patrick Wilson, Brian Bell, and Matt Sharp don't talk about this or their lives AT ALL. They let Rivers do all the talking.

If you've never heard "Pinkerton" and you're baffled on how baffled I am, let me introduce you to the lyrics of opener "Tired of Sex":

I'm tired, so tired, I'm tired of having sex (so tired), I'm spread so thin, I don't know who I am (who I am).
Monday night I'm making Jen, Tuesday night I'm making Lyn, Wednesday night I'm making Catherine,
Oh why can't I be making love come true?

then, screaming,

I'm beat, beet red, ashamed of what I said (what I said), I'm sorry to that girl, I know I'm a sinner but I can't say no.

Dude. This is a guy having a nervous breakdown on record. Yes, in art you are acting, but who the fuck wants to pretend to be this kind of guy?

Then there's just, frankly, EMBARRASSING, cringe-inducing lyrics, as in "No Other One":

Though I would, now I never could with one, all of the drugs she does scare me real good; she's got a tattoo and two pet snakes.

As far as I know, this girl does not exist. Rivers Cuomo made her up. Why the fuck would you make this up and tell this to people?

Yeah, Rivers is fucking right: this is a diseased album, released by a big label.

Jesus Christ, and we haven't even gotten to the pervert song, "Across the Sea". One of the greatest songs ever.

This album is so hard to talk about because it breaks so many rules. Critics like me will blather on and on about the intimacy of art and art's ability to connect with people, and yet we still see art as metaphor. We don't care much for artist's figuring out their problems in the process of making their art, nor do we care about their problems appearing in the final substance of the work. Therefore, when we hear an artist saying something like "I wonder how you touch yourself / and curse myself for being across the sea," we revile the artist, and say "Where's the subtext, bro? This is fetish shit, bro, leave it to yourself."

And this is the reason why "Pinkerton" is such a truly great album: I've never seen such an incredible statement on self-loathing and loneliness before. It opens a huge window on people who hate themselves and are lonely because they hate themselves, and they hate themselves because they are lonely. It's so uncomfortable seeing Cuomo eviscerate himself in the course of the album, and yet he does it so artfully.

A great example is in the aforementioned "Tired of Sex": no matter how uncomfortable or irritated one gets from hearing about Cuomo's sexual exploits, your skin jolts when he enters that heavy-metal screaming "I know I'm a sinner but I CAAAAAAAAAAN'T SAY NO". The strange madness too is that the song follows the familiar pop-rock pattern: verse-chorus-verse, build-up, guitar solo, etc.

And with the aforementioned "No Other One", the insanity of inventing a girl just to sing about her just to sing about how uncomfortable you are around her and thereby showing your audience all of your neuroses concerning your fear of sexuality and intimacy and self-esteem is ... audacious.

I don't even want to talk about "Across the Sea". Cuomo crying over a girl he's never met, as giving him the only shred of intimacy he's felt in forever, and then wanting to see her masturbate, and then blaming his mother for his faults... just... what an incredible movement of emotion.

Because of the sheer unusualness of the lyrics, I haven't talked at all about the music itself: Patrick Wilson, Brian Bell and Matt Sharp do a great job. It's basically excellent rock music set to the most self-deprecating, spiteful, hateful, disgusting lyrics ever - in turn, mocking rock music.

I don't even know how to end this. I think this goes into an uncomfortable fact about me picking this one, out of the many great albums released in 1996: yes, a large part of the appeal is how weird the music is. It's arguable that the music is great in terms of its creativity or its restrait or its message; it is most definitely noticeable because of how ... unaware it is. I do think the music is great, but you are, indeed, watching a freak show. My picking a freak show and exalting it above other expressions of art is a bit of an insult to art itself.

But, when I first heard "Pinkerton", I thought, "This is what art is supposed to be." It's supposed to be expression. It's supposed to say things that we typically blush to say. The artist is supposed to be the person they often aren't in the act of making the art. Even if Weezer had no idea what the fuck they were making, their boldness is not only extraordinary, it's a requirement for making great art. We should, in fact, commend them for being so daring, even if they don't know what the dare was. The mere fact that, 25 years later, all of the pain and shame in the album still connects now, is an achievement.

I don't know, this is the one. Maybe I'll change my mind later. Maybe.

I would be remiss, though, if I failed to talk about another dearly-beloved album, just as interesting and strange, "The Richard D. James Album".

I enjoy the ferocity of electronic music. I crave the texture or "weight" of the music. It's not so much that the music is building toward something, but that the music is describing a completely distinct state of mind. That's why, interestingly, I don't take too well to all kinds of dance. I don't care much for the Chemical Brothers, I'm so-so on Stereolab, I've never gotten into Ryuichi Sakamoto, and dubstep completely passed me by - except for Skrillex's current phase, where he seems to have formed a coherent vision for what the future looks like.

"The Richard D. James Album" does not have that ferocity I enjoy. It's certainly very fast. Never minding the meditative "fore" melody of opener "4", the drum track has a mind of its own and defies the beat of the song, skittering and crashing out at an impossibly danceable beat.

But I think that says it all: you can't dance, nod, or head-bang to "The Richard D. James Album". If art serves strongly through metaphor, there is no connection to your feet or your hips, and without that connection we don't perceive it as "real". Footwork and techno, for example, mimic the violent patter of feet; house typically moves at the beat of the heart; but Aphex Twin just ... doesn't make music for humans.

And yet it's this trait that makes his music oddly relaxing.

I don't recall where, but someone had described Aphex Twin's music perfect for "working" - for programming, for writing, for whatever. I understand this. If I'm listening to the Pet Shop Boys, I want to sing; if I'm listening to Parliament, I want to dance; if I'm listening to Brian Eno, I want to read; but when it comes to Aphex Twin, I don't mind sitting and, simply, listening.

When you come to think on these qualities, you think of this guy as one of the fucking weirdest electronic artists, ever.

Earlier this year a love for ambient music kindled; I then tried to get into "Selected Ambient Works 85-92" (1992). What a misnomer. If ambient works by Eno's "Interesting as it is ignorable", "Selected Ambient Works" fails completely. Unlike Eno's "Discreet Music" (1975) and "Ambient 1: Music For Airports" (1978), which, I believe, were designed to "interact" with the space one was in, "Selected Ambient Works" is far too abrasive to one's environment to do so. But you can play it in the background. It's fast like techno, but by no means is it as aggressive. When the music shifts it does so suddenly, like dance music does, and not gradually as is common to ambient music.

So what the hell is Aphex Twins' music?

I think one of the reasons why the music - all of it! from "Selected Ambient Works" to "Come to Daddy (1997) (my favorite) to "Drukqs" (2001) to comeback "Syro" (2014) - is so addicting is because the drums don't keep track of time, but they keep track of Richard's time. Again, by no means do they operate on a human's pace, but they operate in James' own interior world, that he is sharing to you. Perhaps this world is closer to how the creative process actually works. Notice how the drums work in highlight - on an album of only highlights! - "To Cure a Weakling Child". Again, the "fore" melody is actually quite pondering and meditative, but the drums are insane; from 2:09 - 2:38 they have a panic attack. And yet you're not filled with anxiety, that's just ... them. That's just how it's supposed to go. That's just how logic works in Richard D. James' world. It's not a world of fear, nor a world of doubt, nor a world of excitement; it's merely a world of movement, of holding one's breath and seeing one place to the next. In that sense, the Mozart comparison is quite apt, as it's rare for a musician's work to be so entirely itself.

Anyway, that's all I'll talk about it. This is getting way too long.

...And yet I would be remiss if I didn't mention DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing...", which I listened to fanatically as a kid. "Endtroducing..." is someone else's best album. It's like a trip through the fog of purgatory: voices repeat, drained of life, music plays to no audience, and one gets the sense, with the murky sound quality, the album is in a constant sense of mourning. But that's the thing: that's the aesthetic of the album, and not the substance; there's not much of a development of these ideas. I no longer indulge in its angst, but this singular album deserves notice.

Oh, and I need to mention one of my favorite techno EPs, something I heard by random: Psychic Warfare's "Race Riot". It begins with "Tensions" which very quickly pummels you with its chanting voices and it somehow gets wilder from there, entering the hallucinatory, almost zealous "Techno Gods", with the synths near-skittering off the track as if space and time were warped by the violence of the music.

Umm, but we're not done yet. What a cracked year. I also want to highlight George Michael's "Older". One track will do: "It Doesn't Really Matter", wherein Michael sings, "It doesn't really that I loved you, / how many reasons call, / it doesn't really matter at all." He then hits you with: "It doesn't matter that I failed to / break down your father's wall, / it really doesn't matter at all." Yes, Michael is the chiseled guy with terrible helmet hair in "Last Christmas", and he's still smooth as butter on "Older", which all the more elevates his melancholy material. He doesn't buckle against the pain, but, Frank Sinatra-like, he lets it go. This is a strong contender for winner any other year, I love dwelling on its emotions so much.

1997

It seems like someone like me, who really admires songwriting, would be fanatical with Elliott Smith. And yet, I'm not. Reflecting on it, I think the songwriters I truly admire - Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello - contrast their own stories with the external world; there's an inherent tension between the individual and the world they were born and raised in. Elliott Smith is self-absorbed - he doesn't necessarily tell third-person stories as he tells stories that inevitably return back to him, to his ego, to his faults, to his insecurities. And to those who would dispute this - how does one look at the thematic consistencies between "Alameda", "Ballad of Big Nothing", "Between the Bars", "Pictures of Me" and "Punch and Judy"? A story is a story, but several stories with the same emotional engine is a pattern. There's Tom Waits, there's Kurt Cobain and then there's Elliott Smith, who writes, from the highest level of abstraction, similar first-person perspective stories in comparison.

But this is where it gets tricky for me to talk about this, because I first heard "Either/Or" when I was relatively young, and naive concerning my own faults. It took me a painfully long road to recognize I shared a lot of Smith's faults and bigheadedness, that it was okay to be flawed and sift through your emotional garbage in real-time, and that, if there was a medium where it was ideal to be flawed, it would be art.

And so, 1997 goes to Elliott Smith's "Either/Or". It's not a perfect album. It's not even an album I even relate to, emotionally (again, see above: I have a fatal attraction to bile and disdain). As a fan of loudness, I'm not infatuated with how muffled Smith's voice can be. But now that I can see the album at the right angle, it's hard to deny how singular and how poignant it is; and when I see Smith's vocals for what they are, a sonic aesthetic and not intended to be a convenient vehicle for his lyrics, I see how the gears in his head worked and how brilliantly it results in the work.

Let's take "Speed Trials"; in my younger brain, I would have compared this to, say, Joni Mitchell's "Just Like This Train", where Smith sets up the scene:

He's pleased to meet you, underneath the horse, in the cathedral with the glass-stained black, singing sweet high notes that echo back to destroy their master.

And yet every element in Joni's picture matters, they contribute to the mood or funk she has found herself in; in "Speed Trials", these are just details, and that's fine. This is where my ultra-literate mind has to leap off - what Smith is trying to depict is the moment itself, which doesn't have to resolve to anything, it's just a moment in his endlessly shitty life. Which is what makes the following guttural expression so vivid:

You're such a pinball, yeah, you know it's true, there's always something you go back running to, to follow the path of no resistance.

What the song is ultimately about is hard to say, but what's important is what Smith is trying to evoke, and that's being stuck in the same place, doing the same thing over and over again, being jerked around and forced to do "speed trials", same as in the song "Angeles". It's easy to hear, through the recording, the trace of frustration and weariness in Elliott's voice; every inhalation and sigh is audible on the track, and that is, indeed, an intended part of the album's sonic identity.

"Angeles", by the way, happens to be one of my favorite songs from a songwriting perspective, beginning with that ethereal pulse then Smith's spidery guitar-playing. His voice seems to crack with cigarette smoke and twilight insomnia:

Someone's always coming around here, trailing some new kill, says "I've seen your picture on a hundred-dollar bill",
What's a game of chance to you to him is one of real skill, so glad to meet you, Angeles.

It's that last line that gets me. I'm pretty sure the song is about how the music industry in LA is ass. But Elliott is soft and so polite in his dismissal of Angeles. Instead of forging a song based around his anger, he instead develops a story where the city is personified as a con-man, who coos to its victims:

I can make you satisfied in everything you do, all your secret wishes could right now be coming true,
and be forever with my poison arms around you

which seduction can be seen in "Between the Bars":

Drink up baby, stay up all night with the things you could do, you won't but you might, the potential you'll be, that you'll never see, the promise you'll only make,

which soliloquy, of a man beating himself up, recalls "Punch and Judy",

Wallflower Punch talks to Judy in a crowded corner where anybody can listen in,
they don't read page to page, or speak easy, now they're gonna go say the words in the wrong order again.

That's "Either/Or": it's a failure to communicate to other people, it's a failure to relate to other people, it's a failure to relate to one's self, and it's watching one's failure as if a stranger to oneself. And yet the album is molded in silence and echoes that it's somehow forgiving, particularly as Elliott ends "Punch and Judy" with "I'm gonna make the same mistake twice." Well, alright; you're human, and life has no happy endings, anyway, except for the hopeful one of "Say Yes", where our singer is happy because he hasn't arrived at his next mistake yet.

It really is one of those albums I don't love and yet the more I talk about it the more I just want to listen to it. This is as good of a sign as any. "Either/Or" it is, no choosing an alternative.

And now to talk about Bill Hicks' "Rant in E-Minor" - just kidding, but you do enter a weird flow state with Bill's half-absurd, half-raging shtick.

I have shed my love for the angst of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "F♯ A♯ ∞", but it's still fantastic, flowing music, with something of the quality of Beethoven. I also have a soft spot for Faust's "Wakes Nosferatu"; I love the fields of silence of "Telepathia".

Oh, Christoph de Babalon's "If You're Into It, I'm Out of It" came out this year! Okay, I have not outgrown this angst yet. When Emperor draws out it's "the car is on fire" speech, you know it's for dramatic effect, you know Emperor wants you to think that's bad. Babalon does not care and resorts to the brutality of the dancefloor, quoting Charles Manson in "What You Call a Life"; the drum machine goes wild as Manson growls that he was disallowed any normal life as a child. The track dehumanizes Manson, reducing him into a machine whose only purpose is to rage. Babalon starts the record slow with "Opium" before entering the relentless, foaming "Nostep", and the drum machine doesn't rest for quite a while. Violence is the message of "If You're Into It", the violence in the act and the violence building in the mind before it.

1998

It's "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea". Let's not be coy.

What's most important to me is expression; the artist is someone who expresses something unusual and in unusual ways. A lot of great albums came out in 1998, and I don't mean to throw shade on them by being so blunt about 1998's pick. But of all of the albums I have heard, I have never, ever, ever heard, ever, anything like "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea". It is so itself an attempt to describe it is almost defeated, largely because whenever we talk about music, we inevitably compare it to other forms of music.

For this reason, it was a mistake to start my dive into music with this album. I remember listening to it when I was 18, wanting to write like Jeff Mangum. I wanted to imitate his trance-like state, his elevating commonplace things into a psychedelic revelry. But, of every artist I have heard, that's Jeff's voice, and there's no imitating it, and there's no taking any cues from it. I think if any music really resembles "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea", it's probably the music of Beat Happening.

And yet, as much as we can compare "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" to Calvin Johnson's drawl, his Dada-esque jamming, his aspiration to be innocent, the most obvious difference between this particular album and the music of Beat Happening is ambition. There are of course major differences in sound and content, and yet what is presented to our face first and foremost is the flowing, sculpted, conscious effort Mangum has put into the ideas of the music; and what I mean by "conscious" is, it is extremely difficult to believe the cohesion and coherence of "Aeroplane" does not originate from some idea or mood or funk Mangum was in. Yes, you can argue the songs have an individual character apart from one another, and yet the music is dripping with a very specific melancholy.

This is the difficult thing to talk about. Mangum has said he was influenced by "The Diary of Anne Frank"; in particular, he said he wanted to travel back in time to save her. I don't think the album is about Anne Frank, nor do I think she necessarily figures in it, though "Holland, 1945" is a bit on the nose concerning that. Instead, look no further than the first lyrics of the album, in "The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1":

When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers, and how you built a tower tumbling into the trees, in holy rattlesnakes that fell around your feet,
and your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulders, and dad would throw the garbage all across the floor as we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for.

You can live a lifetime trying to figure out what the lyrics depict and mean. I have spent a decade pondering on them. Let's set aside the concept of reality and examine the lyrics for what the narrator is doing: recalling, memorializing, emphasizing, empathizing, embellishing (what is garbage?), and, then, romanticizing.

This is the connection to Anne Frank: there is a point where Anne Frank is not real; that is, no one really knows who she is beyond her writing. For good or bad, she is an outline we fill color and text onto. This isn't denying Frank her share of truth and emotion, of course; what I mean is, there is a point when you are looking into old photographs and the story is less about the subject within the frame and more about yourself, how you view time, how you view looking backwards into the past, how you project your own memories into the frame, how you feel about people and how you feel about yourself in the wide history of the world.

This is "Aeroplane" to a T: it is Mangum struggling to understand how he feels about his own childhood, about his relationship with the world, about good and evil and existence. He inspects children and how they think and how they act because he sees in them the atoms of living. Because he cannot cope with the complexity of the world, he invents strange apparatuses and stories to cover up the evils of the world, as in "Holland, 1945":

The only girl I ever loved was born with roses in her eyes but then they buried her alive
one evening, 1945, with just her sister at her side and only weeks before the guns all came and rained on everyone,
now she's a little boy in Spain playing pianos filled with flames on empty rings around the sun; all sing to say "My dream has come".

Then, as Mangum arrives at the album's end in "Two-Headed Boy, Pt. Two", he sighs, heartbroken,

Two-headed boy, she is all you could need, she will feed you tomatoes and radio wire, and retire to sheets, safe and clean... but don't hate her, when she gets up, to leave.

Consequently, Mangum himself leaves, as if finally moving past his obsession, the fantasy he has built, and accepted the very reality of death and depature itself.

(I'll sneak this in here: I remember the first short story I wrote in high school was based on Mangum's "Two-Headed Boy". It's interesting how I deleted this from my memory until writing this up.)

And if you've never listened to this album before, or you have listened to it before and are thinking "There's no way any of this is true": this is true. This is the album. It's a lot of things at once. It's fucking incredible.

You should listen to it. I'm not going to talk about it anymore, because there's a gazillion goddamn things to say about it. I haven't talked about its production, how Jeremy Barnes is fiery on the drums in "Holland, 1945", how great Scott Spillane is on the wind instruments, how amazing Mangum's guitar-playing is on "Oh Comely", HOW GOOD OF A SONG "OH COMELY" IS ... I would have to be here all day. This is one of those "this is so obvious", unbudgeable picks; other listeners will say, "Uhh, Moon Pix, Aquemini and Miseducation came out this year, are you fucking stupid?" but this is my pick, this is my rock, this is one of those weird rare pieces of music where I nor a biographer nor the artist themself can tell you how the music was assembled, it just Came.

I would be remiss, however, in not saying, very briefly, how much I love Duster's "Stratosphere". I love how casual it is, I love how hazy it is, I love how jammy it can be, I love how meditative it is. There is another timeline where Phish's "Siket Disc" is my 2000 pick.

1999

"What a fucking garbage take. I've endured a lot reading this list, but this just takes the cake.

"Not only did this motherfucker ignore all the other releases in 1999 - Things Fall Apart, Ágætis byrjun, 69 Love Songs - not only did he ignore Pavement thus far, he chose the worst Pavement album, their last one, to end the list."

Well, you're not wrong.

This is a weird one and it absolutely comes down to my peeves. At one point, I was seriously considering The Roots' "Things Fall Apart". "69 Love Songs" was also a top contender. Then there's Moby's "Play", whose concept I find interesting, and Olivia Tremor Control's "Black Foliage" which I loved in college. This was actually a pretty good year for music; as I rummaged through the list, I kept thinking, "Oh, this is weird - oh, this one's weird too."

The only issue is, all of the albums I listed are long. Like, more than 60 minutes long. But that doesn't stop me if I really resonate with an album.

The other issue is, when the reissue of "Terror Twilight" came out in 2022, with Nigel Godrich's preferred tracklist, I listened to it at the time. I hadn't thought much of it. When I stared at "Terror Twilight" in the list of 1999 albums, I remembered all the warm, fuzzy feelings I had while listening to it a long time ago - and just went with my gut.

I mean, "Carrot Rope" is awesome.

But the other thing is, revealing something about me, I get quite fidgety if music doesn't engage me in the first five minutes or so, and I recalled just listening to "Terror Twilight", not remarking on any particular quality, but listening to it all the same. I didn't realize then it was a good sign.

I should probably explain the horrible omission of Pavement in this list so far. I would agree with many people that Pavement is one of the greatest American bands ever. They are just so weird. It's not that the music itself is weird, but their vibe is weird. Greatness generally looks like trying hard; all of the Pavement records look easy. Pavement looks like expression coming out fully, freely, easily. There's no angst on the record whatsoever.

And yet, I think the second half of "Slanted and Enchanted" (1992) is weak; "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" (1994), the first Pavement album I really loved, is not beating "Live Through This"; and I'm generally okay on "Wowee Zowee" (1995) and "Brighten the Corners" (1997), for which, in their respective years, there was always something stronger. 1999 is a case of relatively muted competition allowing "Terror Twilight" to push through.

But also ... "Terror Twilight" found Pavement at a weird time. "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" is already crazy loose, and Pavement became sloppier, looser and jammier post "Crooked", which I liked more. Simultaneously, Pavement was working with Nigel Godrich of "OK Computer" (1997) fame, who wanted take after take after take. The band were also getting quite tired of each other; Malkmus, hilariously, put on handcuffs attached to his microphone stand for a concert and said "These symbolize what it's like being in a band all these years." The band admitted it was a pretty hard record to make.

This mixture, of the famously laid-back band put into the crucible of tension and tiredness, contributes to "Terror Twilight", which has the tightness, the "songy-ness" of "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain", and the jamminess of "Wowee Zowee". And I fucking love it.

What's incredible to me too is that I listened to both the original and Godrich's tracklist and I like both of them. The songs themselves are not bulletproof, but they're all strong songs.

However, as Godrich had said, the original puts the more radio-friendly, "softer" songs first, and then ramps up the difficulty for the listener i.e. spaces out the rewards further, as far as riffs and choruses. "Spit on a Stranger", in which Malkmus somehow makes the chorus "I could spit on a stranger" gentle, kicks it off; right after "Major Leagues", a perfect radio song on par with - actually, better than - "Range Life", are the slow-burn "Platform Blues" and "Ann Don't Cry". The slow, pondering "The Hexx" is at album's end, though Pavement leaves a treat a la "...And Carrot Rope". To be fair to Pavement, "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" is exactly the same way, with "Newark Wilder" and "Unfair" forming the album's center.

In contrast, Godrich kicks off the album with "Platform Blues" and "The Hexx", showing right off the bat the dark, meditative side of Pavement, the "stoner" side, alluding to his own words. He then backends "Major Leagues", "Carrot Rope" and "Spit on a Stranger" to the album's end.

It's not a perfect listing but I frankly understand and would have agreed with him at the time. It is completely logical for a band to put their strongest songs out first, as a means to bait the audience and to not waste their time. But Pavement's a good band, and they should have more faith in themselves. "Platform Blues" and "The Hexx" are great songs, but they're so heavy after some relatively light, hooky songs. They show the album's themes - the very color and shade the title "Terror Twilight" implies - much more strongly and immediately; what unfolds is, after the jammy, slowburn stuff, the figurative terror of twilight, the album's softer side, as the fear subsides and the listener becomes more comfortable with the music. In short, Godrich gave the album a thematic order, not one it desperately needed but one that makes listening to it sequentially more rewarding, giving the listener a closer view into how the band themselves conceived the music.

Well, anyway. This section is already getting very long, but a discussion on the music itself is needed.

One of the most unexpected joys of spending the time to write about music is finding more reasons to love the music. In the months-long quest to write this list, I have not heard music as beatific, as relaxing, as calming, as accepting as "Major Leagues". "Spit on a Stranger" has such a violent chorus - really, spitting on someone, Stephen - and yet it has such a gentle descent ending the song, with Malkmus crooning "I see the sunshine in your eyes, / I'll try the things you'll never try, / I'll be the one that leaves you high, high, high." As I replayed "You Are a Light" fifty times in a row, I audibly shouted out loud "Oh this is awesome" as Stephen lullabied, "You are the l-hi-hi-hi-ight, / the calm in the day." And kicking off that song is, "Tangled in the midst / of all the trust the way you pissed / inside the brain file technology drives, / show me your dots now" (cue that sinewy guitar, a la Malkmus or Kannberg).

The album is Pavement at their most slippery - where "Slanted and Enchanted" is very angsty and near-punk, "Crooked Rain" suburban, and "Wowee" and "Brighten" shaggy, it's actually quite hard to pinpoint what the band was trying to express. I think that's the best thing for a band of this caliber: it's a bit boring sometimes when an artist knows what they are trying to say. You enjoy watching the band - especially when they're this talented - figuring themselves out in real time. Sometimes Malkmus will have all the charm in the world in one part of a song, and then he'll get extremely pissy in another part. Sometimes he's just painting scenes, trapped in his navel-gazing.

Sometimes I wonder a lot what it means when an artist does not like their own music. Malkmus has been vocal that he doesn't like this one. That makes me question my taste, and yet Rivers Cuomo as famously hates "Pinkerton". That, alternately, makes me think I could be right.

I know this is an insane thing to say, but I do think some artists are so brilliant they have no idea how their music sounds like to mere mortals. For Cuomo, it's reasonable to assume he has such strong emotional associations to that specific frame of mind he can't come to appreciate it from an outsider's perspective, as we can. Malkmus is in a different position: having heard his music with the Jicks, the guy's still got it. He's a great artist, period, in Pavement or out. Again this is all baseless extrapolation, but I think Malkmus may look at this album and not see himself in it, in a process that he disliked; and yet, to an outsider, his and his bandmates' powers come out beautifully and harmoniously.

And, if it makes sense to speak for myself - and, to be clear, I'm not an artist anywhere close to Malkmus - there are things I've written that took years and things I've written that took months, things I've written where I stumbled at every step and things I've written where the path was almost always clear, beginning to end. I always feel, no matter how much I like the work, I "compromised" the creative process by doing it so-and-so way.

I think artists by nature are insecure because artists are simultaneously makers and audience members. As Rilke said to Kappus, "That is one of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence!" It's almost as if one of the sadnesses of being an artist is never really knowing how good or bad your work is. But that's why there are listeners, and that's why we listen: to spread the artist's good works, because they are so helpless in this.

The decade

This decade is awesome. You keep finding treasures here.

I think the reason for the 90s having so many gems is because, with time, all the really weird stuff is revealed. But I also think the music industry kinda calcified in the 2000s, strangling the weird, problematic artists out. The '90s are, hey, we don't get it, but let the freaks run the show; we're all familiar with Steve Albini's trench of shit, and yet the industry became even more enamored with manufacturing acts than fostering them. But that's just speculation, so feel free to ignore it.

Still, the creators of the '90s were very problematic, to say the least. I mean, Hole. Babes in Toyland. The Breeders. Nirvana. Weezer would be canceled today for saying the things they said. And how could you sell "Laughing Stock"? And how do you look at Annie Lennox shitting on the music industry in "Diva"? It was just a different time.

The 2000s, in my view, were the perfection of several artforms: DOOM would refine the Wu-Tang's rugged flows, and Fugazi would clean up the fuzz in "The Argument". The 2000s is the end of charisma; only technique remained. And then music would get kinda boring, relying entirely on individual charisma for the 2010s, which kinda worked, honestly.

And... I think that caps the '90s. I didn't live through it, so I can't really say more. It was an exuberant, energetic era. It was my jam. Wouldn't want to live it, but, musically, it was my thing.