Ah, the year-end essay, every fledgling critic’s dream. My first published attempt here is a little less shapely than I’d like, but it does touch on the cultural issues that music brushed against at the end of the century. Whatever you thought “the ’90s” were, they were over before Y2K didn’t plunge us back into the age of analog.
As for the two lists here, they ain’t bad. I’d make some changes in 2023, but I’d still listen to everything I ranked then happily, which is the only test of time I can hope to pass.
1999: The Year of the White Man
City Pages, January 5, 2000
In music as everywhere else, 1999 was a great year to be a white man. Granted, our unprecedented umptillion-year hegemonic streak can make it hard to notice when we're in ascendance. But there's nothing like several thousand pounds of frothing, pyromaniacal mosh-pit mayhem to get your attention. The battle of the sexes is over.
We won.
The golden age of alternative rock was never quite as gender-egalitarian as it left on. Sure, kids on both sides of the chromosomal divide meant well, but the road to Alice in Chains is paved with good intentions. Then again, I never thought I'd look back at Anthony Kiedis as a paragon of progressive manhood. So let me tell you something about my particular demographic—we really start showing our teeth when our power starts eroding.
Let's start with Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit leading his hordes in the inverted Take Back the Night rally known as Woodstock '99. This should challenge our liberal assumption that violence is always rooted in fear and insecurity. Sometimes it's just rooted in the fact that you're a big dumb jerkoff.
Whether or not Limp Bizkit is “to blame” for Woodstock is ultimately irrelevant. (After all, no one's holding Dave Matthews accountable for the white riot that fans staged outside his Connecticut show later last summer.) There's something insulting about attributing such a simple Pavlovian response to rock fans. When it comes down to the bottom line (and there's nowhere Durst is more comfortable), Limp Bizkit are guilty only of selling more copies of their mediocre funk-metal record than any of their mediocre funk-metal competition.
Still, success does have certain cultural ramifications, and Limp Bizkit have become the epicenter for the rage of a far-from-oppressed class that seems less likely to topple the pop machine than to lash out at the easiest target. At Woodstock we caught that rare glimpse of anarchy as something more than a symbol carved into a study-hall desk and the women in attendance got trampled, groped, and discarded. Strange how much that sounds like the reigning ethos of any consumption-based economic system.
But the myth of guitar as instrument of liberation dies hard, and so pundits were more likely to identify rampant transglobal capitalism with the more “disposable,” “lightweight” teenybop. The argument that the replacement of guitar bands with well-groomed harmony lads is an insidious Disney-Imagineered plot was helped along this summer by one particular pro-punk, anti-corporate screed in the liberal-left Nation magazine. The author was the far-from-disinterested Johnny Temple of Girls Against Boys (as telling a name as Limp Bizkit, no?), a far-from-uninteresting alt-rock band who've parlayed being dropped from their major label into a career as sadder-but-wiser elder spokesmen vis-à-vis the Industry. Call them the Jimmy Carters of modern rock.
Temple's thesis is intriguing, but, if you'll pardon my debased, commercial language, I don't buy it. First off, the GVSB flop in question, Freakonica, was not a misunderstood work of art, as sources from MTV to the New York Times have dutifully reported. It was, in fact, a bad work of art. Second, how many of those who protest that the Backstreet Boys are watering down black harmony stylings actually dig Boyz II Men or Jodeci? And third, what's with the way biological impulses are being categorized and divvied up here? Sensitivity is fake and commercial, but violence and aggression are real and transgressive? Three guesses as to which gender gets to claim which mode of expression.
Personally, I don't plan on sublimating my libido to anyone's political program. Back-pats are certainly owed to Rage Against the Machine for trying to put the latent, misdirected unrest to progressive use, with a huzzah for their genuinely useful website. And if Rager Tom Morello's ability to make a guitar sound like virtually anything--a buzz saw, an air-raid siren, a turntable, bombs bursting in air--could be put to the service of one killer riff, I'd follow Rage onto the parade ground. But entreaty to “raise your fists and march around” isn't much of a platform, even if there are a greater number of incipient Zapatistas among the RATM faithful than I suspect. Not only is the assertion that Americans have nothing to lose but our retail chains a half-truth at best, but I'd like my revolution to be a little looser in the hips.
Yes, I'm placing more of an emphasis on the male half of the Great American Overclass than the white half. While an undeniable convenience if you're looking to secure a bank loan or hail a cab or land a job, whiteness remains a slight embarrassment on video. When it comes to flaunting the teenage trappings of the phallus—the attack cars, the gilded goblets, the 23rd-century bachelor pads—Black men are still more male, and mainstream hip hop grabbed that phantasmal privilege with one hand and its nuts with the other. Since hip hop has reached the supersaturation point, it has remained vital subculturally, regardless of the quality of its best-selling exemplars. Case in point: genuine wunderkinder such as Prince Paul or overrated oddballs such as Kool Keith, and the many bohemian practitioners flourishing as abundantly as negligible Wu Tang spinoffs.
Which is hardly to say that whiteness is a commercial handicap. Kid Rock and Eminem demonstrated that whiteface is quite a flexible mask, that cracking wise doesn't cut down on your groupie quotient, that white kids identify with rappers' dysfunction as much as their machismo. And in another genre universe altogether, Moby scored off a bunch of dead Black folks who never saw a royalty check to begin with—like so many rhythmically adept types before him, he went looking among the Other for spirituality.
But here's the rub: Moby found that spirituality with Play. That all three of my fellow ghostfaces in the above graph made good music (as in exciting, galvanizing, epochal) merely demonstrates the range of aesthetic devices white artists have at their disposal. And one of those constructs happens to be the full-length CD—which leads me to close with a quartet of what I'm afraid I'll have to call, well, masterworks.
Or proposed, supposed masterworks. Cue gloomy drum 'n' bass, stage lights to half, enter Spin's Man of the Year Trent Reznor, in black, alone. Listen closely, children, and learn the harrowing secrets Trent gleaned from his descent into rock stardom. Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile certainly has the heft, length, and ponderous self-absorption of an objet d'art, and it is a nifty sound-effects sampler at that. But anyone who thinks these qualities make it a great album deserves to be forcibly dosed on four tabs of bad acid and locked in an all-night basement screening of The Wall. Trent Reznor is the beleaguered white dude as pessimistic modernist. Like T.S. Eliot, but with stodgier lyrics, he projects his malaise onto the sum total of Western culture.
I suppose you could say the same about Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. But the former is so nice about it, the latter so ambivalent about it, and they're both so obscure, that you're barking up a tree that could fall in the forest without anyone hearing it. The Lips' The Soft Bulletin is the most humane art rock in recent memory, placing a truly fragile cracked-white-guy tenor into a cosmos so hostile, so pitiless, so unreliable that even Superman drops the ball when he's lyrically called upon. But instead of collapsing into self-loathing, Coyne stands up and says yeah.
For all his vaunted sourness, though, Merritt hangs in there, too. There's something Sisyphean about his three-disc encyclopedia of romance tropes, something doomed in his quest to achieve completeness while eschewing mastery. But nobody pens 69 Love Songs because he thinks the subject is stupid, no matter how he gets off on those oral implications or how priapically keen he is on proving his songwriting stamina. Merritt wants it to work out, and he hits it, baby, one more time. And then again.
Of the 16 romances that constitute John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves, however, only four qualify as happy endings. Some of the others are hopeful, some resigned, some perplexed. Like Merritt, Prine searches for truth in product: Instead of the punny ironies of romance, he plows the clichés of music row, breathing new life into the venerable copyrights he exhumes. And like Merritt, he invites women to sing some of the words, dueting with everyone from Iris DeMent to Trisha Yearwood.
The songs, and the singers, revel in the idiosyncrasies that wary grown-ups bring to a relationship—exactly those quirks of character that cultural overviews like the one you're reading are designed to miss when they generalize about gender. His album falls plop between pop and art.
Meanwhile, bubble gum's pinups mouth generalities about eternal affection, then sulk when affairs fall apart: I'm a boy, you're a girl, how could we not be in love? Nihilist auteurs like Trent Reznor cry, “My labyrinthine pain is too idiosyncratic for another human to comprehend!” And ideologues like Rage Against the Machine can't be bothered with the home front—such inessentials can be worried about after the revolution. Yet some people want to fill the world with bitter, contradictory, dirty, funny, keen, silly love songs. What's wrong with that, I'd like to know.
Yes, yes, love is a bourgeois fantasy and a utopian pipe dream and a meaningless abstraction and a distraction. Not only isn't love the answer. It isn't even always the right question. And nonetheless, records like Prine's suggest that this most overrated and maligned of emotions just might await lucky backstreet girls when they outgrow airbrushed ideals and plunge into messy specifics. Or it may be in the future for fortunate frat boys and gangstas should they ever decide to shrug off the privilege of hating women. Maybe it'll happen because of our best intentions. But more likely it'll blossom in spite of ourselves.
Single Life
City Pages, January 5, 2000
To paraphrase Fat Albert's friend Russell, contemporary American cultural debate is like a teacher during the summertime: “No class.” And I'm not bemoaning any supposed lack of discursive civility; I'm talking about filling in the rhetorical blank that follows 'race, gender, and _____.”
Fortunately, we have the radio to smooth over, if not entirely fil l, such gaps in the official record. Here young upstarts suddenly come into more money than they expected, then watch sexy folks on the other side of the gender and color line eye them with anticipation. Nowhere more than in some of the juiciest radio hits of 1999 was the intersection of lust and economics—the spot left politely uncharted elsewhere—crisscrossed with such enthusiasm. And so let's count 'em down: a fantasy jukebox of what we used to call 45s, complete with mated A-sides and B-sides.
10. “Back That Azz Up,” Juvenile Featuring Mannie Fresh & Lil' Wayne (Cash Money/Universal) b/w “Watch For the Hook,” Cool Breeze Featuring Outkast, Goodie Mob & Witchdoctor (Organized Noize/A&M/Interscope)
Dirty South beatsmanship at its most rudimentary (Cash Money's accountants watch out for the bottom line) and complex (Atlanta's most notorious connoisseurs polish their wares). Both titles are self-explanatory, and reversible: Cool Breeze provides plenty of bounce for that azz—excuse me, thang—and Juvenile has got a hook to watch out for.
9. “Mambo No. 5,” Lou Bega (RCA) b/w “Beautiful Stranger,” Madonna (Maverick/Warner Bros.)
Q: What do Ricky Martin and Mike Myers have in common?
A: An irritating, self-possessed smirk.
Q: What do these concessions to the two trends I ducked most deliberately in 1999 (corporate-approved Latin pop and Austin Powers, respectively) have in common?
A: Both understand how much craft goes into the most deceptively expedient pop.
P.S.: Madonna's sexier than Ricky; Louie's funnier than Mike.
8. “I Want It That Way,” Backstreet Boys (Jive) b/w “Give it to You,” Jordan Knight (Interscope)
Backstreet’s is-that-a-double-entendre-or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me masterpiece is teenpop longing at its Swedish sweetest: as sentiment, as tune, as harmony. With a breathy gulp that would’ve scandalized parents during the Bush Administration, teenybopper emeritus Knight means what he says. For his grope in the dark, Jam & Lewis not only one-up the standard issue Max Martin teenybop, but ace Timbaland, too.
7. “My Name Is,” Eminem (Aftermath/Interscope) b/w “Bawditiba,” Kid Rock (Lava/Atlantic)
If hip hop is in fact the new rock and roll (and has Time magazine ever been wrong before?), Marshall Mathers and Elvis Presley differ in far more than simply their pharmaceutical preferences. (Though Em's radio edit, which forces him to sing about Primus rather than violence, is as sloppy a bowdlerization as filming El from the waist up.)
Rock, meanwhile, shouts what his name is, then adds, “You could look for answers/But that ain't fun.” That's no call to know-nothingism: It's a suggestion that questions matter more than conclusions. Yipes--he may follow the Beasties into Buddhism yet.
6. “Ex Factor,” Lauryn Hill (Ruffhouse/Columbia) b/w “...Baby, One More Time,” Britney Spears (Jive)
Poor Britney makes the mistake of begging her sweetie for a hit on the one year when guys were more likely to slug her than hump her. Her reward: the eternal debate about artistic “authenticity” gets displaced onto her boobs. Hill fleshes out Brit's ellipses with a violent romance of her own and lets you know why every time you walk away Britney hurts herself to make you stay. This, both agree, is crazy.
5. “Believe,” Cher (Warner Bros.) b/w “Red Alert,” Basement Jaxx (Astralwerks)
The No. 1 single of 1999 (according to Billboard itself) features not a single Latino or teenybopper or Will Smith—just a voice so anonymous and huge and plastic and inhuman it could belong to anyone and, paradoxically, could only belong to Cher. It's the best thing to happen in 1999 to gay men who have considered Ricky Martin when the Pet Shop Boys are enuf. In other words, disco. Meanwhile, from the U.K., in a year house music returned to glory apropos of nothing at all, we heard the sound of “nothin' going on but history” to an insistent 4/4 thump. In other words, disco.
4. “Can I Get a …” Jay-Z featuring Amil (of Major Coinz) & Ja (Def Jam/IDJMG) b/w “Who Dat,” J.T. Money Featuring Solé (Mercedes/Freeworld/Priority)
A dialogue, I suppose, and a dialectic if you say so, “Can I Get a…” proves that pimps of all colors and hos of all hues can bounce to the same beat even if they wanna slit each other's throat. Not quite “Dancing in the Street,” with a clipped “bitch” is all the colder for being so casually tossed off. As for Money, he turns the paranoia that pervades hip hop into a chant of doomy fun.
3. “All Star,” Smash Mouth (Interscope) b/w “Spit on a Stranger,” Pavement (Matador)
If 1999 was the Year of the Clod, it makes sense that the ultimate anthem of striving should be bestowed on the uncoolest of the uncool--I bet even Duncan Sheik could clock SM frontman Steve Harwell. Blessed from birth with oodles of cool, Steve Malkmus lands a gooey loogey on us unwashed masses to prove to his sweetie the depths of his emotion. Is that the indie equivalent of shoving a cookie up your yeah?
2. “No Scrubs,” TLC (LaFace/Arista) b/w “No Pigeons,” Sporty Thievz Featuring Mr. Woods (Rok-a-Blok/Ruffhouse/Columbia)
Got no money, got no car, got no woman—there I are. Did I take “No Scrubs” personally? Nah, give TLC credit for calling knuckleheads on their crap, and remember that the best cure for an excess of free speech remains more free speech. With more bounce in their checkbooks than their basslines, da boyz respond with better jokes and esprit. But something's changed since “Roxanne's Revenge”—not only are men cutting the answer records, but they sound like they're at a financial and cultural disadvantage. Susan Faludi, please advise.
1. “Gotta Man,” Eve (Ruff Ryders/Interscope) b/w “All That I Can Say,” Mary J. Blige (MCA)
Eve's double-dutch rhyme skitters across swish beats more pan-African than Santana's. Mary's “do do do do do do” does indeed say it all—a better Sting cop than either Puffy or Clef have managed, and so subtle it may even be unconscious. Both sing about, you know, boys. And suggest that there may just be a reason to believe in life after love after all.
The Year in Music - The Sound of Music, 2001: Our Favorite Things
January 2, 2002
At its most utopian, pop music offers up a cheerily inclusive “we” for all to join. All fans, no matter how knowing or aware, yearn at some point to be swallowed into something greater than their tiny lives. This blob of desire we immerse ourselves in can be as benign as true love (manifested in the ethereal harmonies of adolescence), or as churlish as hating your parents (emerging through the Wagnerian punishment of guitar thud).
Either way, in good times, behind this yearning is a decent yen: to realize one's true self within an imaginary community of others, and as a way of imagining more real forms of permanent community.
But now “we” is a loaded word, meaning '”not you” with a vengeance. And the nature of that amorphous mass sensibility has shifted to knee-jerk patriotism or unlicensed group therapy. Whether “we” prefer Creed or Aaron Tippin, Enya or Celine Dion, there are plenty of big vacuous places being prepared for us to lose ourselves in and feel like good, spiritual people who'll never need to think about what our group participation means. Suddenly, the mere escapism of a Britney extravaganza seems like an almost noble pursuit.
So please excuse me for opting out of the first-person plural this twelve-month. Thank you Beyoncé and Ja Rule and Petey Pablo and J to the Izzo V to the Izzay for all you've done to try to convince me otherwise. But the steep decline in the quality of black pop, teen pop, and dolt rock meant the real pleasures this year were less publicized. So here, in all their shameful subjectivity, are my thoughts on ten aural realities I found worth visiting repeatedly over the past year. Each is idiosyncratic, the product of sharp brains and industrious little fingers. Not coincidentally, even the most “commercial” of these sold less than projected. None is likely to seriously affect the pop world I still love from a distance.
Maybe next year will be different. God bless whoever.
1. BOB DYLAN
Love and Theft
Columbia
Forget all that talk about Bob's rasping parables prefiguring 9/11. That's just desperate Dylanologists bestowing belated cultural relevance upon a wily pro whose end-time prophecies are no longer necessarily more acute than the millennial divinations of Thom Yorke or Busta Rhymes. 'Course, Bob's apocalypse is much funnier, as punchy with epigrammatic non sequiturs as when it seemed he could reel off fractured couplets over 12-bar slash-and-stagger like this in perpetuity. Now that we know the coot can't keep it up, his fallibility lends him a previously unappreciated vulnerability. Who knows—if his next two records stink up the joint, this may even sound, um, prophetic. Well, prescient, maybe. Forward-thinking, anyway.
2. BASEMENT JAXX
RootyAstralwerks
Lurching where trance glides, leering where house winks, overheating where techno chills, vulgar beatmen Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe jostle their way across a crowded dance floor crotch-first, make new friends as they slink into an Erotic City grind, spill your drink leaping to a sudden football cheer, and promulgate their timeless message of utopian hedonism.
3. THE WHITE STRIPES
White Blood Cells
Sympathy For the Record Industry
Even back when trashy teen protopunks ruled the garage, they were lucky to haul off with one just-right hook. So these 16 riff-tunes are such a miracle of primitive wonderment that the accompanying hysterical rants (about being a sane and decent fella who likes you a lot) are just frosting on the beater. Jack White quotes Charles Foster Kane out of context, he finds it “harder to be a gentleman every day,” he counts to seven and demands, “If I'm the man you love the most/You could say 'I do' at least.” Meanwhile, Meg White, who apparently did once say “I do” to her guitarist before deciding she didn't and masquerading instead as his sis, mutely bashes more cymbals than any drummer since Ringo—as if to shrug and say, “Boys.”
4. THE COUP
Party Music
75 Ark
Let's pretend, just for a moment, that we live in a country where civil liberties are being curtailed by a shady regime intent on siphoning government funds to bloated corporations. Sure is one way of looking at things, huh? And it calls for some response greater than turning “What's Goin' On” into an all-star “Kumbaya.” The righteousness of Boots Riley’s rage never dull the incision of his wit; the buzzing electrodetails of this mix never distract from the lope of its P-Funk bump-and-shimmy. And if the disenfranchised won't dance to homicidal fantasies about offing the shiftless rich, then the terrorists have already won.
5. BLACK BOX RECORDER
The Facts of Life
Jetset
Right as rain and just as damp, Luke Haines's synth patterns trickle past spare drumbeats in a languid contest to see which can seem the most innocuous. Call it drip hop--aural drizzle as an indicator of romantic malaise, of the Brit variant, natch. But just because Sarah Nixey coos with the calm tenderness of a latent sociopath doesn't mean she wants to hurt you. It's just the facts of life, that's the way love goes, and anyway, it's not her, it's you.
6. NEW ORDER
Get Ready
Reprise
Bernard Sumner may be the only British mouthpiece of the past two decades I might consider taking home to meet my sister. Okay, maybe Polly Jean Harvey too, and okay, I don't really have a sister, and okay, I wouldn't let Barney bring his new pals Billy Corgan and Primal Scream along. But when Sumner's modest dreams of nonconformity (“I don't wanna be/Like other people are” rhymes with “Don't wanna wash my car”) lounge atop the U.K.'s sturdiest rhythmic infrastructure, you'll think you've been waiting your whole life for a disco record so perfectly suited to doing the dishes.
7. THE MOLDY PEACHES
The Moldy Peaches
Rough Trade
Here's the amateurish, lo-fi rendition of “Twee to Be You and Me” that every college kid who owned a Beat Happening cassette and a four-track recorder in the late Eighties foisted on his friends—at long last rendered listenable and with wisdom and pathos, too. And jokes. Like “I'm just an ass in the crack of humanity/I'm just a huge manatee.” “Who mistook this steak for chicken?/ Who'm I gonna stick my dick in?” “I wanted to be a hippie but I forgot how to love.” “Don Quixote was a steel-drivin' man/My name is Adam, I'm your biggest fan.” “I'm just your average Thundercats ho.” And much, much more!
8. OLD 97S
Satellite Rides
Elektra
Alt country? Them? Nah, that was just a phase—you know how impressionable kids are. This is power pop about women (not girls), erected from stretches of guitar finesse doubling as hooks. Rhett Miller specializes in the amorous gawk—the kind of lunging verbal advances that seduce and dazzle on disc but will guarantee real-life males plenty of empty bed space in bed unless they’re as dishy as Rhett himself. (If “Do you wanna mess around?” or “I'd be lyin'/If I said I didn't have designs/On you” get you any play, drop me a line.) Whaddaya know, a down-home guy who doesn't really want to be free as a bird. Go back to sleep, Ryan Adams.
9. MACY GRAY
The Id
Epic
She still mewls like a cat that deserves to be trapped in a washing machine and isn't half as nuts as she fronts. But before you quip that her title omits the '-iot,' groove to the misbegotten lusts and petty resentments of a nutmeg abuser who pulls an AK on a gentleman who prefers blondes. Back when “I'll Try” settled into the Eagle-Eye Cherry Memorial Programming Slot—the airtime reserved by adult-rock program directors to disprove charges of radio apartheid—I'd pegged this kook as a harmless neo-soul token. But now Gray is something else entirely, with Rick Rubin's studio perfectionism acting as superego to her professed lunacy. Couldn't tell you what that “something else” is, though. A Warren Zevon for black gals?
10. BLINK-182
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
MCA
Sympathetic as I am to a generation of Slipknot fans who hope to purge themselves of a catastrophic childhood by immersing themselves in violent gloom, let me assure my fellow depressives that the release that such dour mass catharsis allows also fades quick. Better to follow the lead of these ever-chirpy pop punks, who let loose with one rant against their elders (“If we're fucked up/You're to blame”) before unlocking the real secret of teenboy uneasiness—girls just seem way cooler and smarter. But instead of sublimating that fear into misogyny, these older bros sweeten it into a well-deserved respect for freethinking trouble girls who correctly suspect they won't feel this messed up forever. Corporate suckers still rock!