how the 21st Century so far looked to me... in 2017

Who's the Best Artist Since 2000....

no overall single figures springs to mind, i'd have to divide it up into categories and with multiple contenders jostling for the top spot

* Pop Star as Public Figure -  Kanye West versus Ke$ha (with Gaga not far behind on sheer zeitgeist points and with the proviso I've little appetite for the audio bar "Bad Romance". i suppose you would also have to honestly mention Drake somewhere here)

* Performer / Vocal Presence-  Future versus  Ke$ha versus Dizzee

* Beat-maker  - Terror Danjah versus Metro Boomin versus Mustard (aka Dijon McFarlane - no really that is his actual  name).

* Pop Group in the Bygone and Obsolete Sense - Vampire Weekend versus Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti.

* Endless personal pleasure tinged with awareness of marginality in the scheme of things - Ghost Box versus Moon Wiring Club versus Ariel Pink

* A Compelling Case to Be Made although somehow I don't quite feel it fully myself - Burial versus Radiohead versus Daft Punk

I feel I''m forgetting things from the first half of the 2000s but it all feels quite long ago and hazy...

[this derived from this blogpost, which was in reference to this Dissensus Thread]

A blogpost that led indirectly to this -  a thread (among many others) that led to this

grime 2005

Blackdown (aka Martin Clark) asks me and a bunch of grime-covering journalists about our favorite tunes of the year. 

Here's what I supplied (not sure why some US rap tunes have slipped into my selection):

Kano Featuring D Double E & Demon, "Reload It"

Lethal Bizzle "Against All Oddz"

Kano "Sometimes"

Bruza "Not Convinced"

Three 6-Mafia "Stay Fly"

Vex'd “Degenerate” (Planet Mu)

Skream "Midnight Request Line"

Doctor, Bearman, L Man and Purple "Let It Go" From Eye Of The Tiger Vol 1

Virus Syndicate "Major List MCs" From The Work Related Illness

Roll Deep "Shake A Leg" and "When I'm Ere"

Lowdeep "Str8 Flush"

Crazy Titch "Sing Along"

SLK "Hype! Hype!" (DJ Wonder refix)

Lady Sovereign "Tango" from Bitchin EP

Ying Yang Twins "Pull My Hair" and "Wait (The Whisper Song)"

Kano "Remember Me"

Wiley "Morgue"

Kanye West  - "Addicted," "Crack Music", "Diamonds From Sierra Leone" (From Late Registration)

I also slung Martin this little appreciation of "Reload It" (strangely not admired by others in the grime punditocracy, don't know why) which I had penned for Grime Primer I did for the Wire earlier that year (aka the 7th essay in the Hardcore Continuum series)

Kano Featuring D Double E & Demon, "Reload It"

“Circling back to "Bound 4 The Reload" (arguably the first grime track, no seriously, think about it: electro-bass plus MCing) this track celebrates the pirate and rave tradition of the DJ rewind, when the crowd hollers (or home-listening audience text-messages) its demand for the selector to wheel and come again.”

“Up until grime, the trigger for rewinds would be a killer sampled vocal lick, thrilling bass-drop, or even just a mad breakbeat. Nowadays, the MC being king, the crowd clamors to hear their favourite rhymes. ‘This is what it means when DJs reload it/That sixteen was mean and he knows it,’ explains Kano, before listing the other top dog MCs who get nuff rewinds (two of them, Double and Demon, guest on the track). ‘I get a reload purely for the flow,’ Kano preens, and you can see why as he glides with lethal panache between quick-time rapping and a leisurely, drawn-out gait that seems to drag on the beat to slow it down.”

“The track itself, co-produced by Kano and Diplo, is all shimmery excitement, pivoting around a spangly filtered riff that ascends and descends the same four notes, driven by a funky rampage of live-sounding drums, and punctuated by horn samples, Beni G's scratching, and orgasmic girl-moans. The old skool breakbeat-like energy suggests an attempt to sell the notion of Grime as British hip hop, yet if Trans-Atlantic crossover is the intent, that's subverted by the lyric, its theme being as localized and Grime-reflexive as imaginable. "Reload It" encapsulates the conflicted impulses that fuel this scene: undergroundist insularity versus an extrovert hunger to engage with, and conquer, the whole wide world.”

UbuWeb Top Ten - Mouth Music

 UbuWeb Top Ten

November 2014
Selected by Simon Reynolds

1. Fylkingen Text-Sound Festivals – 10 Years
2. Canada - Jeux Vocaux Des Inuit (Inuit du Caribou, Netsilik et Igloolik)
3. Lily Greenham - Tabula Plena
4. Paul Lansky – Artifice
5. Furious Pig - I Don’t Like Your Face
6. Delia Derbyshire (and Barry Bermange) - Dreams
7. Extended Voices - Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Toshi Ichyanagi, Morton Feldman
8. Jaap Blonk - Flux de Bouche
9. Trevor Wishart - Vox
10. Tellus#22 ‘False Phoneme’

The A to Z of the Eighties - A Definitive Guide to the Decade (SR contributions only) - Melody Maker December 23-30 1989

This was great fun to do but arduous - as a staff writer, you had to do your Herculean bit for these big package features -  there's about 40 or so micro-essays from me here, super-distilled little takes on phenomena, figures, fads of the '80s - some of my favoritest scenes and sounds, and some of my least favoritest scenes and sounds. 

I'm not sure if any research as such was done - where could you go to do it in those days? There was no internet, there might have been some old magazines lying round the house, but no reference works on the '80s as such. So it mostly was all pulled from my memory, sharper then, and dealing with quite recent stuff - but still,  no doubt some errors crept in there on the factual front.  

Talking of errors - as they're non-bylined, and this is over thirty years ago, I'm like 97% certain these are all by me, but apologies if I've accidentally trawled in something by Stubbsy or the Studs. 

Of course other writers got to do things I would have liked to cover, so it's not a total Zeitgeist-scan according to Moi, but .... not that far off, actually.  

It's how I saw things precisely then - the winter of '89 - and  not always necessarily how I see them today, or indeed how I saw them within a year or two of writing.

 

faves of the 2010s - tracks

These were my votes for best tracks of the second decade of the 21st Century in the Pitchfork poll of critics

Placement wise, there was some strategic voting going on here - and at the bottom I've added rather a lot of things I thought of later that I either should have included but forgot, things that rose in my estimation in the last year or so, and some that I didn't actually hear until after the decade ended.   

Unlike with albums, there's vastly less of the "critic head" here - tracks are about a pure hit of pleasure, rather than metrics like artistic ambition or approving of what the group is aiming for or other non-hedonic criteria. This is the stuff where I turn up the volume when it comes on the radio.

1 Future: Fuck Up Some Commas  

2 Ke$ha: We R Who We R  

3 Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: "Round and Round" 

4 Migos: T-Shirt  

5 Sage the Gemini: Gas Pedal  

6 Travis Scott: Goosebumps  

7 Migos: Slippery  

8 Haim: Honey and I  

9 Young Thug: "Constantly Hating" [ft. Birdman]  

10 Rae Sremmurd: Black Beatles  

11 Gotye: Somebody That I Used to Know [feat Kimbra]  

12 Tinashe: "2 On" [ft. Schoolboy Q]  

13 eMMplekz: Gloomy Leper Techno  

14 Migos: Top Down on Da NAWF  

15 Vampire Weekend: Diplomat's Son  

16 Future: All Right  

17 The Weeknd : Low Life [ft. Future]  

18 Migos: MotorSport  

19 Metronomy: The Look  

20 Maria Minerva: A Little Lonely  

21 Rae Sremmurd feat. Nicki Minaj: Throw Sum Mo  

22 Kanye West: Black Skinhead  

23 Schoolboy Q: Studio  

24 Jeremih: "Oui"  

25 Lorde: "Royals"  

26 Kendrick Lamar: "Swimming Pools (Drank)" 

27 Loski x Russ x Taze : Olympic Chinging  

28 Migos: Bosses Don't Speak  

29 Dev: In the Dark  

30 Chief Keef: On the Corner  

31 Bruno Mars: Locked Out of Heaven  

32 Tyga: Rack City  

33 Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: White Freckles  

34 Migos: "Bad and Boujee"  

35 Travis Scott: Antidote  

36 One Direction: What Makes You Beautiful  

37 21 Pilots: Stressed Out  

38 Future: I'm So Groovy  

39 Schoolboy Q: Collard Greens  

40 Carns Hill: Waps (Remix) (feat. Monkey, Dimzy, R6 & Youngs Teflon)  

41 Drake: One Dance (feat. Wizkid and Kyla)  

42 Rae Sremmurd: No Type  

43 Lil Wayne: Knockout (feat. Nicki Minaj)  

44 Desiigner: Panda  

45 Ty Dolla $ign: Paranoid [ft. Joe Moses] 

46 Zomby: Mercury's Rainbow  

47 Tame Impala: Elephant  

48 Eartheater: Inclined  

49 J Hus: "Did You See"  

50 Die Antwoord: Jou Ma Se Poes In 'n Fishpaste Jar  

What's missing: 

Sophie - "Faceshopping"

Billie Eilish - "Bad Guy"

Geneva Jacuzzi - Love Caboose

Mark Van Hoen - "Holy Me"

Big Sean - "Dance (A$$)"

Big Sean - Beware

Big Sean - Bounce Back

A dozen more Migos tunes frankly 

Icona Pop  "I Love It"

Kendrick Lamar - ‘bitch don’t kill my vibe’

Lorde - Teams

Post Malone, "Rockstar"

Lil Wayne - How to Love

regrettably some Chris Brown tunes ('Loyal' etc)

Ty Dolla Sign - "Paranoid" 

Daft Punk - Fragments of Time, Contact, the one with Panda Bear on

more Ariel Pink - Menopause Man, "Stevepink Javascript feat. R. Stevie Moore", the Ethiopian tune he done ripped off on Before Today,  etc

Pharrell - Happy

Several more Travis Scott tunes

Robin Thicke - Blurred Lines

Actress, 'Supreme cunnilingus'

Giggs - Lock Doh feat. Donae'o

Giggs and Mr Eazi – London Town

Giggs and Donaeo – Linguo 

Giggs - Monsta Man

La Roux - In for the Kill

La Roux - Bullet Proof 

Etta James featuring Flo Rida, “Good Feeling”

Nicki Minaj, “Super Bass”, "Beez in the Trap"

Maria Minerva, “Hagasuxzzavol” 

D'Angelo - Prayer

lots more DJ Mustard bits

Kesha - Blow, 

Kesh - Backstabbers (technically 2009 I think, fuck it)

Rihanna - Cheers

Aphex Twin - Original Chaos Riff (technically a reissue or archival first-issue, fuck it)

Bon Iver and James Blake - Creek Fall Boys Choir

More Young Thug

More Chief Keef

More UK drill

Far East Family, "Like A G6

Oneohtrix Point Never - Preyouandi

Lana Del Ray, "Video Games"

YG – Big Bank

YG - Why ya always hatin'

MGMT - several, obvious things, but particularly "When You Die"

James Blake - If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead 

Daphne & Celeste - You and I Alone

The Inhuman League - You Were Working as a Waitress in A Cocktail Bar

Naomi Elizabeth - the Topic is Ass

Holly Herndon  - Fear, Uncertainty Doubt 

Ariel Pink - Another Weekend  

Jeremih - Royalty

Y.G., "Toot It and Boot It"

Foster the People, "Pumped Up Kids"

Gesaffelstein, "Piece of Future"

John Foxx & the Belbury Circle, "Almost There"

Nightshift, “Made You Look (Hugo Massien Remix)”

Ariel Pink, “Put Your Number In My Phone”

Theo Nasa, “Area 51”

Area 8, “On My Level” 

The Weeknd, "The Hills" 

Let’s Eat Grandma, “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”

David Bowie, "Blackstar"

---- "Where Are We Now"

Mike Posner, “Pill in Ibiza”

Fat Joe/Remy Ma/French Montana / Infrared, "All the Way Up"

Yo Gotti, “Down in the DM”

Lil Uzi Vert, "XO Tour Llif3"

Rich the Kid, "Plug Walk"

Gucci Mane featuring Migos, "I Get the Bag"

 Miguel featuring Travis Scott, "Sky Walker"

Laibach, "The Lonely Goatherd"