2002 Retrospectrum
by Marc Hirsh

1) Sleater-Kinney, One Beat (Kill Rock Stars). A band’s failures sometimes say more about their overall strength than their successes, and with Sleater-Kinney’s punk roots now serving as a starting point rather than a constant reference, One Beat ’s stumblings make a mighty strong case that other artists’ triumphs aren’t worth fighting for. Only the foregone and literal “Prisstina” is entirely disposable, while “Light Rail Coyote” merely treads water until its hurtling second half kicks in like turbo. The addition to that list of “Far Away,” which shudders through its verses on uncomfortably humdrum lyrics about the events of one horrible morning last year before shifting into a probing and remarkable chorus that questions how we ever got to this point, makes a total of one full and two half merely ordinary numbers, leaving the rest of One Beat as one dizzying high point after another. That’s a ratio equal to that of the White Album, and their career track record at this stage is at least as consistent as the Velvet Underground’s. They’re quite possibly the best band in the world, and if “Step Aside” is to be believed, they damn well know it.

2) The Anniversary, Your Majesty (Vagrant/Heroes & Villains). If my experience with seeing the Anniversary live (decked out sartorially, tonsorially and instrumentally like the touring cast of Almost Famous: The Musical) left me profoundly confused as to the overall message the band wants to convey, I can always defer to Your Majesty, which is itself a marvel of clarity. Their second album sees the Anniversary making like Neil Young playing Pink Floyd with Fleetwood Mac harmonies, with a clear Beatles jones hovering just out of frame. They may come off as nerds but that doesn’t mean they can’t strut; Justin Roelof’s vocal, and the band’s support, on “Crooked Crown” is too damn authoritative to believe that the lady being implored to cut a rug wouldn’t want to dance up a storm with the guy asking her. The album’s longest, and best, song is the blatantly prog “Husam Husam,” which takes advantage of the grand themes that recur (monarchy, death and the cosmos) to culminate in a dippy “Turn as the Earth and be free!” chorus delivered with such conviction as to make it utterly resplendent, while the concluding track fittingly sums up everything Your Majesty has to say; start though it does with the gorgeous and downbeat “The Death of the King,” it pauses, reconsiders and then blossoms into “Follow The Sun,” which greets the future with head held high and hopes gleaming in the warm light of day.

3) Beck, Sea Change (Geffen). All the sadness of Nick Drake with none of the despair.

4) Amy Rigby, 18 Again: An Anthology (Koch). Redundant, yes (anthologies always are), but show me an album with cuts as superb as “What I Need,” “All I Want” and “Raising the Bar” and I’ll show you Middlescence , which already made this list in 1998 . Except I can’t do that, because suddenly, inexplicably, Amy’s entire catalog has gone out of print, poof, just like that, leaving only this testament to five years and three albums by a songwriter whose progress as catalogued here shows her rapidly shedding peers by the truckload. Sure, I would have swapped a few (“Stop Showing Up In My Dreams” for “Rode Hard” here, “The Down Side of Love” for “Knapsack” there), but Amy’s programming is more thematically coherent, painting a fuller portrait of the artist as a defiant middle-aged single mother who refuses to abandon her optimism entirely (she does, after all, keep trying). She hooks us longtimes with “Keep It To Yourself,” a we’re-not-talking-about-what-we’re-talking-about revenge samba previously only available on her website , and a demo version of The Sugar Tree ’s “Magicians” that is as spare and gorgeous and heartbreaking as the first time I heard her perform it in 1999, and it still makes me want to cry.

5) Original Cast Album, Buffy The Vampire Slayer: “Once More, With Feeling” (Mutant Enemy/Fox Music/Rounder). Arriving in stores exactly a year too late, the official release of the soundtrack for 2001’s astonishing musical episode of Buffy failed to do two crucial things: capitalize on the initial flush of enthusiasm for the episode and keep the product fresh in the minds of non-fanatics (resulting, probably, in the episode’s failure to get Emmy nominations not only for writing and directing but also, inexplicably, for best original song). Instead, it’s like the cast album for a Broadway (maybe off-Broadway) show that closed before anybody realized how great it was. As a lyricist, writer/show creator/evil genius Joss Whedon is wickedly clever, with more internal rhymes than you can ram a pointy stick through, and his melodies are lovely, but what makes it all come together is the ensemble, who deepen even a go-nowhere pleasantry like “Where Do We Go From Here?” by imbuing it with the same degree of commitment that has made a television show about a teenage demon hunter into a brilliant extended metaphor for adolescence. Emma Caulfield’s terrific “Bunnies” aside is an instant highlight, as is the gorgeous duet by Anthony Stewart Head (a British stage vet and thus a ringer) and Amber Benson, whose sole possession of the best pure song here, “Under Your Spell,” is tacit admission of her MVP status. Even the non-singers fail charmingly with superlative material, so that Sarah Michelle Gellar can drop any R that might be near the end of a word (e.g., “walking through the paht”) and make you never remember how far beyond anything these people were originally hired to do this project was.

6) Spoon, Kill The Moonlight (Merge). So what if Britt Daniel sounds like David Garza singing with a cold he got from Lee Mavers of the La’s while listening to Big Star’s Third, or if “Someone Something” and “The Way We Get By” are like Ben Folds Five songs without that pesky virtuosity getting in the way? Kill The Moonlight is what happens when a band recognizes that their pop songs are so strong and clearly identifiable as such that they can fuck around with the arrangements and instrumentation without fear of losing their audience. It’s what Guided By Voices used to be but with a longer attention span, better production values and much less alcohol.

7) Ani DiFranco, So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter (Righteous Babe). Here’s a tip for getting at least one step ahead of this list in the future: the next time Ani DiFranco puts out a live double, buy it. For reasons that elude me (the horn section, maybe?), I keep thinking of this record in terms of Charles Mingus’s Ah Um : while 1997’s Living In Clip was more “Better Git It In Your Soul,” So Much Shouting gets closer to “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” by taking the time to mourn the events of the past year before DiFranco turns over a great deal of the album to “Fables of Faubus”-style anger. So if it’s not as funny as Clip (which I chalk up to the departure of drummer Andy Stochansky, and note the qualifier “as funny”), well, lefty politics rarely ever are. What’s amazing, though, is that even though she’s clearly preaching to the converted, Ani’s never strident in her lyrics or even delivery in the way that, say, Patti Smith can be. Perhaps that’s a result of her uncanny ability to find the connections between the political and the personal, rather than just taking politics personally. When she threatens to move to Canada (“where we’re gonna die of old age”) in “To The Teeth,” those who are rushing to help her pack her bags have already missed the point: an America which prides itself on who it chases out will eventually come for you.

8) You Am I, Deliverance (BMG Australia) [available from http://www.whammo.com.au ]. Tim Rogers could have opted for a solo career by now, but he’s stuck it out with his mates, who’ve shifted their support to suit his ever-changing moods. That means that You Am I are expanding again, just as they do on every other album (cf. Hi-Fi Way and #4 Record ). They may be all over the map, but it looks like interesting terrain: drawing from (rather than simply aping) the rock ‘n’ roll of the 1970s, they make sojourns toward astoundingly pure jangle-pop (“Ribbons And Bows”), Little-Feat-meets-the-Band country funk (“Nifty Lil’ Number Like You” and, I swear, “One Trick Tony”) and one-album-late Doug Sahm-inspired Tex-Mex-fueled r’n’r (“Nuthin’s Ever Gone Be The Same Again,” where the guitar’s so thrilled to be strutting its stuff that the rhythm section can barely keep up). By the end, they’ve namechecked “Dixie Chicken” (having already featured Waiting For Columbus on the back cover) and “Pale Blue Eyes” and Let It Bleed, and by now the band has earned the right so just shut up. Rogers might never get another night’s sleep or clear the vapors from his head, but if Deliverance is the result of neon-charged insomnia, you can’t fault the guy for wanting to light up the darkness.

9) 7 Worlds Collide: Neil Finn & Friends Live at the St. James (Nettwerk America). I only count six worlds, actually, unless you consider Crowded House and Split Enz separately, and you shouldn’t. That and the fact that “Distant Sun,” the song that provides the album with its title, is nowhere to be found is the sum of my griping. Neil Finn has always struck me as one of the most content of all rock musicians. Here’s where he shows himself to be one of the most generous as well. That’s evident when he asks Johnny Marr, “Will you sing us a song, Johnny?” and provides Eddie Vedder, in a stellar version of “I See Red,” with the opportunity to give what will probably be the best vocal performance of his life. Looser and more freewheeling than Neil’s solo One All (also Nettwerk, also this year), 7 Worlds Collide captures the pleasure of a man playing with a bunch of friends in front of a hometown crowd and realizing that his life is pretty great for it. If it must end with “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” well, ask yourself this: if you wrote one song strong enough, and popular enough, to stand behind for an entire career, wouldn’t you want to play it just one more time?

10) Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch). Wilco have now officially matched the album output of Uncle Tupelo (having unofficially bested it somewhere between the first Mermaid Avenue collaboration with Billy Bragg and Summer Teeth ), and Jeff Tweedy has defied all expectations by making his old band the footnote to his current one, rather than vice versa. If there’s any precedent in Wilco’s previous output for what they’re doing here, it comes not from any of their own albums (although Summer Teeth ’s “Via Chicago” points obliquely in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot ’s direction) but from the second, disjointed Mermaid Avenue . But there’s not. Having celebrated the careening towards a breakdown on their masterful Summer Teeth , Wilco follows up with the logical emotional sequel: complete pandemonium. Tweedy is a mess, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a map of his shattered psyche. Beautiful in stretches, its fragmented layers of sound can be utterly impenetrable for extended periods, and it suffers the exact same flaw as 1996’s Being There by peaking during the first song, the appropriately-titled “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.” But it stands as one more manifestation of the vision of an artist who slipped through the cracks in more ways than one.

Interesting side note: according to allmusic.com , there were two albums with a song called “Paper Tiger” that were released this year. Both of them made the list above. Coincidence? While you ponder that, a few widows and orphans for your consideration:

1) Aimee Mann, “It’s Not.” Why is Lost In Space, her first album ever not to be on this list, not on this list? Because Aimee’s being punished, that’s why. Let’s instead focus attention on what guitarist Michael Lockwood calls the saddest song his boss has ever written. No argument here: “It’s Not” is what happens when the desperation of “Save Me” sours into nihilism, painting a picture of someone who, in the process of making a simple romantic gesture, looks deep inside herself and finds only blackness. As the song nears its end and Aimee brings her tale to a devastating conclusion, a void has just begun to open up with the help of the orchestra and muted electric guitars that smother most of the album, a void whose only saving grace is that its utter totality numbs its host of all despair. There’s a reason why this is the last song on Lost In Space, and it’s not because it sums up the themes of the album or because it’s a slow number or because the lyric includes the album’s title or even because it’s the best song. It is quite simply because anything that followed it would be a lie.

2) Freelance Hellraiser, “A Strokes of Genie-ous.” The best song the Motels could never get it together to write, not to mention kinda illegal, this clandestinely traded MP3 combines the vocal line from Christina Aguilera’s “Genie In A Bottle” with the instrumental track from the Strokes’ “Hard To Explain.” And that melody skips so cleanly over that rhythm guitar pulse that you’d swear you want the singer not only to ditch teen-pop and sleazoid hip-hop but to get back in the game as a postmodern Nico (although Nico was pretty postmodern already, wasn’t she?). Aguilera, who has clearly lost her mind, had plenty of makeovers this year. This was the only one that didn’t make her look ridiculous and/or like a whore. Special note should be taken to the fact that this is also the only one she didn’t instigate herself.

3) Sleater-Kinney, “Lions and Tigers.” From the confines of both the EP included with early pressings of One Beat and the world in which we live, new mother Corin Tucker gazes into her baby’s eyes, sees what he sees and takes him outside to play. She knows she can’t get it back for herself, but she’ll be damned if she’s not giving it to him while she still can.

4) Kasey Chambers, “Barricades & Brickwalls.” And I quote: “You can lock me out, you can scream and shout/You can try to change your name/But by the end of the day, I’ll take you away/Like a force 10 hurricane.” To which I can only reply: Yes, ma’am.

5) Nirvana, “You Know You’re Right.” It’s nothing more than typical Nirvana quiet/loud dynamic shifts underneath inconsequential lyrics. But after a decade of baldfaced imitators and ripoff artists, the fact that “You Know You’re Right” sounds fresher than any of them just goes to show you how great they were while they could still be referenced in the present tense. It doesn’t justify anything, it doesn’t excuse anything, it doesn’t even explain a damn thing about what was happening in Kurt’s tortured mind. But it safeguards and expands upon the legacy of a great, irreversibly defunct band in the honorable way that “Free As A Bird” really didn’t.

5) W.I.T., “Ooh, I Like It.” An electroclash come-on that finds that precise spot on the flirtation spectrum between ultra-coy and explicit where sweet and sexy intersect. Part of its genius is in its ability to make a line like “My beeper goes off when you’re around” suit all of the above to a tee without having to commit itself to just one.

6) Kylie Minogue, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” She courted danger with the title and stared down criticism by living up to it. Ignore her at your peril: your mouth may dismiss her, but your dancing ass will betray you.

7) Anna Waronker, “Fortunes of Misfortune.” The unwitting centerpiece of Anna rectifies a long-standing (if mild) injustice by covering the same ground as Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed A Girl” without devolving into giggle fits. Something happened, and for at least one of the parties involved, it was no accident. Waronker doesn’t find easy answers, and she doesn’t quite apologize, either. Whether the story recounted here is real or fiction is as beside the point as the gender of the participants; if you know your heart can be broken, it applies to you.

8) Sahara Hotnights, “Alright Alright (Here’s My Fist Where’s The Fight?)” and Avril Lavigne, “Sk8er Boi.” One has far and away the best title of any song this year, the other has far and away the worst. Both have been misidentified as punk. Both are pretty dumb. And both fire up like a propane tank hitting the ground at 100 mph.

9) Andrew W.K., either “It’s Time To Party” or “Party Hard” (your pick). Whatever your opinion of ultra-zippy, loud-at-any-volume party metal, I Get Wet is unquestionably the product of an artist’s uncompromised vision, and there’s a part of me that seriously considered bumping Wilco from the #10 spot to make room for it. I mean, when you’re being accosted by an aggressively benevolent drunk (take a good hard look at the message sent by “Hey, you! Let’s party!”), it really is safer just to go along with him.

10) Kelley Osbourne, “Papa Don’t Preach” (live at the MTV Movie Awards). Yeah, I know. But you won’t handle your big put-up-or-shut-up first impression with half of what she gave. If she came across as simultaneously self-absorbed and terrified, then ask yourself this: didn’t she pick the perfect song, no matter how accidental that may have been?

It is the rare live album indeed whose appeal rests not on the performers but on what is happening offstage. With that in mind, this year’s Better Late Than Never Award goes to Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison (Columbia/Legacy, 1968/1999), a stellar collection of sad and hilarious country songs (sometimes both at once, as in the last-minute-call-from-the-governor nightmare of “Joe Bean”) made absolutely indispensable by his reception from the crowd. When Krusty the Klown declared, “Prison audiences are the best audiences in the world” (just after ensuring that I can’t listen to the kickoff track without hearing, “I slugged some jerk in Tahoe, they gave me one to three/My high-priced lawyer sprung me on a teck-ni-cal-i-tee”), he wasn’t kidding: the hooting, cheering, hissing and general atmosphere of utter chaos reined in solely out of respect for possibly the only man who’s showed them any in God knows how long make At Folsom Prison indispensable not only as music but as anthropology. It has to be heard to be believed.

As for the not-always-obligatory movie rundown, let’s take a look at some of my options. Signs? A brilliant, first-class, Oscar-worthy directing job, grafted onto a screenplay that begged to be rewritten at least twice. 24 Hour Party People? No, but kudos to a movie that not only makes mythological references but directly castigates its audience for not understanding them. Minority Report? A fine, entertaining film that was, it occurred to me later, crammed to the gills with special effects that I never noticed because Spielberg was (take note, George Lucas!) too involved in telling a story to call attention to them. Far From Heaven? About Schmidt ? Adaptation? Road To Perdition? No, no, sadly no and good lord, no. Bowling For Columbine? Michael Moore’s tactics can be a touch heavy-handed at times (which makes me nervous to be more or less on his side), but the film was invaluable in both looking for tough answers to tough questions (for liberals) and explaining why the opposition thinks the way it does (for conservatives), which means it needs to be seen by anyone who has an opinion, no matter how casual, on gun control. Punch-Drunk Love ? Good, I guess, but I wonder how much exposition and character motivation was left on the cutting-room floor in the interest of bringing it in at a Sandler-friendly 90 minutes. Gangs of New York? Left me with too many niggling complaints, but there is one astonishing moment, which is the single unbroken shot showing immigrants being transferred from one boat arriving from Ireland to another that will take them to the battlefields of the Civil War as the latter unloads coffins onto the dock. Plus, you’ve gotta hand it to Martin Scorsese for somehow crafting a love letter to his favorite city out of the story of 19th century anti-immigrant violence (he’s against it, incidentally), not to mention respect the guy for releasing it during today’s political climate. That sort of assumes your love of allegory, though.

My choice is instead the fantastic Chicago, which instantly becomes the best thing that Catherine Zeta-Jones has ever been in. If it doesn’t spark a revival of movie musicals, it won’t be for lack of trying; the only viable ones in the past decade have been animated, and Chicago’s got more boundless energy than even South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut . Neatly sidestepping the most common complaint voiced by musical-haters, newbie (!) director Rob Marshall turns each character’s desire (nay, need ) to burst out into song into a sort of retreat to a fantasy world where they step into the spotlight of a stage set just for them. The result is that each number serves as a metaphor for whatever turn the plot is taking (commenting on it without forcing the characters to literally break into song in the middle of the action), as well as for the movie’s larger theme of our desperate love not just of celebrities but for celebrity itself. If you still think you hate musicals by the end of the opening “All That Jazz,” do yourself and the people around you a favor: quietly leave the theatre at once and politely request your money back, because the next 100 minutes are gonna kill you.

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