ALBUMS OF THE YEAR, SO FAR

It's mid-June, so here's what I've heard that might wind up on my year-end list(s), so far...

JD Allen, Grace
Airbourne, Black Dog Barking*
Amon Amarth, Deceiver of the Gods
Attacker, Giants of Canaan
Michael Bates/Samuel Blaser Quintet, One From None
Black Sabbath, 13
Terence Blanchard, Magnetic
David Bowie, The Next Day
Dawn of Midi, Dysnomia
Dave Douglas Quintet, Time Travel
Endless Boogie, Long Island
Fire! Orchestra, Exit
The Gates of Slumber, Stormcrow
Hush Point, Hush Point
Immolation, Kingdom of Conspiracy
Killswitch Engage, Disarm the Descent*
Kvelertak, Meir
Mainliner, Revelation Space
Hedvig Mollestad Trio, All of Them Witches
Mostly Other People Do The Killing, Slippery Rock
Jeremy Pelt, Water and Earth
Resolution15, Svaha
Savages, Silence Yourself
Suffocation, Pinnacle of Bedlam
Wayne Shorter, Without a Net

*conflicts of interest prevent me from actually voting for these records in any year-end polls

PROGRESSIVE ROCK/REGRESSIVE THINKING

The New York Times Book Review this week has published a review of an anthology called Yes is the Answer: And Other Prog Rock Tales. Unfortunately for fans of prog rock, they gave the assignment to Rob Sheffield, a nearly 50-year-old man who chooses to maintain the print (and on-camera, when he serves as a VH1 talking head) persona of a sneering teenage boy. As a writer and editor for Spin, Blender, and now Rolling Stone, he's been one of the primary voices of "poptimism" in the US music press, forever championing the shiny, the ephemeral, the marketed-to-teenage-girls. When he decides to publish a book, on the other hand, he fixates on his own teenage years and youth—his first was Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, the story of his courtship of and marriage to his first wife, who died. His second book was called Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut. According to the Times, his third book is called Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke. I suspect it's a third memoir. All of which is fine. But this career path, and set of fixations, makes him pretty much exactly the wrong person to review an anthology of essays devoted to 1970s prog. For while many critics can look dispassionately at work which doesn't dovetail 100% with their personal tastes and still find ways to intelligently critique its strengths and weaknesses, Rob Sheffield apparently cannot. If a book, a movie or a record's not custom-built to push his aesthetic buttons, it exists only to be ridiculed—and its supporters along with it.

Let's begin at the beginning:

Oscar Wilde once said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” But for men born about a century after Wilde, mistakes tended to have more colorful names, like “Yes,” “Genesis” or “Emerson, Lake and Palmer.” These were the hairy dragon-kings of prog rock (short for “progressive”), the bands that ruled the FM airwaves of the 1970s, providing black-light initiations for their adolescent male devotees. Even after all these years, prog remains one of the most intrinsically silly of rock fads: concept albums, ornate time signatures, keyboard solos, lyrical ruminations on the tendency of mountains to fall out of the sky.

A man who's written three books filtering his favorite music through his personal life is calling fans of music he doesn't like "adolescent male devotees," as though they were part of some arcane cult. And we are told right off the bat that keyboard solos and "ornate" time signatures (read: anything that's not 4/4) are "intrinsically silly," and that prog was a "rock fad."

Lovingly packaged and designed, “Yes Is the Answer” is a paper treehouse for gentlemen of a certain age, a safe place to embrace a shared teenage fantasy of adult sagacity they can now re-access as an adult fantasy of innocent youth. And yes (so to speak), the writers are mostly men. Margaret Wappler and Beth Lisick contribute essays on female prog fandom, which for them means fond memories of boyfriends playing albums like King Crimson’s “In the Court of the Crimson King” as a makeout soundtrack. There’s also an essay titled “Do Gay Guys Listen to Yes?” (It’s summarized, tersely: “At least one does.”)

I haven't read the book, but reducing women's interest in music to "a makeout soundtrack" is pretty grotesque. Readers of Love is a Mixtape, fill me in: Is that how Sheffield describes his former wife's receipt of the tapes he makes for her?

Feminists need not worry about Sheffield, though; he's just as sneeringly dismissive of male writers' essays:

Rick Moody, in his highly entertaining and informative guide to E.L.P., credits the drummer Carl Palmer with dabbling in “funk,” a claim he is probably the first to make as well as the last.

Anyone who's heard E.L.P.'s proto-disco stomp through Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" would likely agree with this statement, actually.

Wesley Stace, the novelist who performs music under the name John Wesley Harding, offers a useful tour of the Canterbury art-rock scene. In his account, he got turned on to the music by a high school girlfriend. Not a typical prog story, to say the least.

Because prog is for nerds who can't get dates! Haw haw!

The contributors are not necessarily adept at music criticism, nor fluent in its arguments, so do not expect to come away from this volume with a shopping list of albums you need to investigate. On the contrary — the least convincing moments in “Yes Is the Answer” are the attempts to proselytize, since prog seems to induce some kind of oblivion with regard to other forms of pop. Nobody here seems aware of its influence on hip-hop or dance music.

Or maybe they felt like prog stands on its own, and doesn't require additional credibility conferred via sampling. This is maybe the most ironic paragraph in the entire essay—even as Sheffield smirks at the writers' lack of aptitude and fluency as music critics, he makes one of the most elementary logical errors a critic can make. The writers are at fault for not re-contextualizing prog in the light of, say, Kanye West sampling King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" on his song "Power"...and yet I find it hard to imagine Sheffield ever demanding that hip-hop be contextualized via its sampled source material. Hip-hop critics are some of the most myopic, Year Zero-minded writers in all of music criticism, with virtually no interest in anything predating the summer's hot single or mixtape, and yet writers dealing with rock are required to demonstrate a keen and respectful awareness of how that music has led to hip-hop, or be dismissed as lacking in fluency.

The New York Times has plenty of access to writers who actually like prog—Steve Smith, a regular contributor to the paper's Arts section, is merely the first name that comes to mind (because he's a friend). Why they gave this assignment to Rob Sheffield is beyond me.

WELL, THAT'S...REASSURING

So here's a commercial I saw this morning:

What the creeping hell? Wasn't Hugo Weaving's character in The Matrix (there were no sequels, SHUT UP), Agent Smith, supposed to be the villain? And aren't people already terrified and baffled by the US health care system? How, then, is a commercial which basically depicts the health care system being taken over by Agent Smith(s) supposed to make people feel good? About anything? I eagerly await the next commercial in this series, in which Weaving will seal someone's mouth shut or implant a squirming robot shrimp into their torso. All in the name of improving GE's profit margins American health care, of course.

THURSDAY MORNING 10

Rico, "Jungle Music"
Napalm Death, "Errors in the Signal"
Anthony Braxton, "Opus 23B"
Kylesa, "111 Degree Heat Index"
Einsturzende Neubauten, "Fur den Untergang"
Pig Destroyer, "Terrifyer"
ZZ Top, "Avalon Hideaway"
David Bowie, "Dancing Out in Space"
The Jesus & Mary Chain, "Taking It Away"
Motorhead, "Die You Bastard"

2012: LISTS AND FAREWELLS

I only had to put together a few year-end lists this year, and where I didn't just give the same Top Ten to multiple outlets, titles still reappeared. There just weren't that many really great records released in 2012. I heard a lot of fantastic music, but much of it was recorded and originally issued between four and seven decades ago.

Anyway, here's the Top Ten I submitted to both The Wire and to the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll:

1. ZZ Top, La Futura

2. Emmure, Slave to the Game

3. JD Allen Trio, The Matador & The Bull

4. Manowar, The Lord of Steel

5. Cannibal Corpse, Torture

6. Aluk Todolo, Occult Rock

7. Bill McHenry, La Peur du Vide

8. Fushitsusha, Mabushii Itazura na Inori

9. Charles Gayle Trio, Streets

10. Black Music Disaster, Black Music Disaster

Top Ten lists were also published at my job, and here's the list I gave them:

1. ZZ Top, La Futura

2. Baroness, Yellow & Green

3. Gojira, L'Enfant Sauvage

4. Napalm Death, Utilitarian

5. Emmure, Slave to the Game

6. Dwight Yoakam, 3 Pears

7. Rush, Clockwork Angels

8. Kreator, Phantom Antichrist

9. Manowar, The Lord of Steel

10. Aluk Todolo, Occult Rock

The Wire also requested a list of reissues; here's that one:

1. Dr. Feelgood, All Through the City (With Wilko 1974-1977)

2. David Murray Octets, The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note

3. Underworld, Anthology 1992-2012

4. Various Artists, The Original Sound Of Cumbia - The History Of Colombian Cumbia & Porro 1948-79

5. Fania All-Stars, Live in Africa

6. William Parker, Centering: Unreleased Music 1976-1987

7. Various Artists, ¡Saoco!:The Bomba And Plena Explosion In Puerto Rico 1954-1966

8. Henry Threadgill, The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note

9. Ismael Miranda, El Niño Bonito

10. Cecil Taylor, Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!

There were a few other records that impressed me this year, but didn't make it onto any of my lists: The Alabama Shakes' Boys & Girls, Ralph Bowen's Total Eclipse, Ravi Coltrane's Spirit Fiction, Orrin Evans' Flip the Script, Grass Roots' self-titled debut, Conrad Herwig's A Voice Through the Door, Clarence Penn's Dali in Cobble Hill, Dayna Stephens' Today is Tomorrow, Yosvany Terry's Today's Opinion, and a bunch of others, most of which I reviewed for Burning Ambulance.

This was the first year since 1997 that I was viewing music journalism more as an outsider than as a participant. I still write for a few places, but only a few; some of the outlets that used to print/post my work have been rendered unrecognizable due to editorial shake-ups, while others have ceased to employ freelancers. My primary outlet for straight-up music criticism is BA, which may re-emerge as a print journal in 2013.

I've been fortunate enough to transition to a new phase of my career, one that excites me greatly and challenges me in entirely different ways than anything I've done before. My plan is to keep writing about records that—and interviewing musicians who—interest me. For paying outlets when I can; for BA the rest of the time, with no guide but my own taste. I hope you'll read some of it.