RICH: When we talk about pop, we talk about gloss, and 2011 was not lacking there: Lips sparkled, wigs glowed and house music kept a firm grip. But plenty of 2011 didn’t shimmer. It came straight from the gut. There was the id-driven subject matter of Drake and Tyler, the Creator (two sides of a cathartic coin). But there was also subtler, lighter material: Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera’s “Moves Like Jagger,” Britney Spears’ “I Wanna Go” and One Republic’s “Good Life,” among other 2011 hits, all used whistling as a selling point.
Adele, Bruno Mars and even Lady Gaga proved that the market for adult contemporary (and the emotional schlock that comes with it) extends beyond the last remaining album-buyers (i.e. old people) and into the youth-skewed airwaves. I don’t know if withholding has ever been less in a commercial artist’s best interest — a very strange notion in our otherwise vetted, publicist-shielded, damage-controlled times.
ZACH: And here I was listening to Meek Mill freestyles and thinking that the thing that defined the year in music was that there was nothing defining it at all — no overarching storyline that we could grab onto (until Bon Iver wins the Grammy he doesn’t want), and no single artist summoning the zeitgeist from deep inside his damaged conscience (miss you, Kanye!). Adele sold an astonishing number of records, but her triumph was fundamentally conservative — blues-based ballads that get by on old-fashioned virtuosity. Drake’s “Take Care,” my album of the year, was the opposite — a radical if cuddly assault on traditional rap, but too polarizing to lay claim to the collective imagination.
I have seen records from all of the above artists top various best-of lists, with nary a repeat among them. Is the tacit story of 2011 a fracturing of one massive audience into a million specialized and tiny ones? Or did that happen a long time ago? Speaking of a long time ago, what are we to make of the fact that this year was when we suddenly decided to loudly celebrate every anniversary known to man, from the 20th birthday of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” to the 10th anniversary of Alicia Keys’ “Songs in A Minor”? Ploy by a dying record industry? Or outbreak of nostalgia among aging critics longing for a time before endless Spotify playlists?
RICH: The idea of no consensus is sweet to me, in a year when popular gushing over mediocrity made me feel really isolated. Have fun slogging through Kate Bush’s “50 Words for Snow” for the rest of your lives now that you’ve canonized it, everyone! Heterogeneity makes more sense and better parallels what’s going on in pop anyway — especially now that we are recommitted to mainstream eccentricity.
But choice is its own cloud. And unlike what Apple’s iconography suggests, it’s a stormy one. That aforementioned premium on eccentricity has us paying attention to anyone who could be America’s Next Top Genius Train-Wreck: Kreayshawn, Lana Del Rey, Rebecca Black, Azealia Banks, Odd Future and on and on. It’s exhausting. That said, with the one-hit wonder being all but obliterated by iTunes, it is nice to have some different colors in our rainbow.
Ah, nostalgia. I do think it’s a driving force, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Maybe we’re returning to stuff because we’re still working it out — our current recycle cycle of 20 years is not a lot in the grand scheme of things!
Just one question: Did you have fun this year?
ZACH: I did, because I am a person with feelings, and music in 2011 was often very much about feelings. (What was I saying about no overarching narrative again?) It might be weird to confess how much the Weeknd’s predatory R&B delighted me, or how entertained I was by Frank Ocean’s ultra-sincere odes to Coldplay and women who like Z-Trip, but this was music that reveled in its everyday, unfiltered specificity.
I’ve been wondering all year where the quote-unquote recession art has been. Maybe it’s been hiding in plain sight — so much of the music I liked most this year had a decidedly 99 percent bent, in the sense that it was about the material details of average life. Like Rick Ross said, “Am I really just a narcissist / Because I wake up to a bowl of lobster bisque?” This is a question I ask myself every morning. If 2010 was all about dark twisted fantasies, 2011 was about dark twisted realities, with all the exhilarating and/or disappointing late nights that might imply.
And what a year for late nights. While guys like Drake and the Weeknd were content to sit ashamed in the corner and mutter about their conquests, women like Rihanna and Beyoncé had huge hits with frank odes to how good they had it at home. Was there a better love song than Beyoncé’s “1+1,” or a more happily carnal one than “Countdown”? Has anyone in recent memory released a record as foulmouthed and unapologetic as Rihanna’s “Talk That Talk”?
RICH: The sex album has become unceremonious — a nice development. Back in the day, with Madonna or Janet Jackson, there was a very conscious slowing down of the music and a conscious voice-hushing. Now Rihanna’s matter-of-factly powerful sexuality is the best thing about “Talk That Talk.” Her money is where her mouth is, and her mouth is all over.
On the odds and ends tip: A) Stop trying to make Jessie J happen, industry! B) It’s strange to consider an objectively stunning millionaire the underdog, but I felt a little sense of triumph when Jennifer Lopez returned to the Top 5 after a nine-year absence with “On the Floor” (which takes the little that she has to offer vocally and makes it sound like so much). C) Britney Spears’ best single, in my unpopular opinion, was “Hold It Against Me.” I rode the Musik Express at an amusement park on the Jersey Shore this summer, and that song blasted while the teen operator sang her heart out to it. The idealism and innocence just waiting to be obliterated were beautiful. And that dubstep breakdown! Talk about defining ’11!
ZACH: What’s this “dubstep” you speak of? Any genre that can encompass both Ye and Jay’s “Who Gon Stop Me” with choked warbling of that most delicate of English fawns, James Blake (maybe he and Jessie J should hang out? On an ice floe?), is likely not a real genre at all. But if we are talking Britney, allow me to salute “Till the World Ends,” the most pleasurably mindless club anthem of the year. Ke$ha, who helped write the song and appears on the remix, gave Britney a priceless gift here; Nicki Minaj, who also guests, convincingly suggests a bad-ass lineage that unites all three artists, from teen umbrella-bot to mud-covered Dylan aficionada to schizophrenic guest-rap theater weirdo. This is the avant-garde, and it’s in clubs from Ibiza to Iowa. Amen.
But I didn’t care much about Britney’s album. As with Nas’ blistering “Nasty” or Stephen Malkmus’ winsome “Stick Figures in Love,” I was surprised about how much sustenance I could draw from a single song without wanting another. In an era of unrelenting abundance, it’s always nice to be left hoping for just a little bit more.
Adele, Bruno Mars and even Lady Gaga proved that the market for adult contemporary (and the emotional schlock that comes with it) extends beyond the last remaining album-buyers (i.e. old people) and into the youth-skewed airwaves. I don’t know if withholding has ever been less in a commercial artist’s best interest — a very strange notion in our otherwise vetted, publicist-shielded, damage-controlled times.
ZACH: And here I was listening to Meek Mill freestyles and thinking that the thing that defined the year in music was that there was nothing defining it at all — no overarching storyline that we could grab onto (until Bon Iver wins the Grammy he doesn’t want), and no single artist summoning the zeitgeist from deep inside his damaged conscience (miss you, Kanye!). Adele sold an astonishing number of records, but her triumph was fundamentally conservative — blues-based ballads that get by on old-fashioned virtuosity. Drake’s “Take Care,” my album of the year, was the opposite — a radical if cuddly assault on traditional rap, but too polarizing to lay claim to the collective imagination.
I have seen records from all of the above artists top various best-of lists, with nary a repeat among them. Is the tacit story of 2011 a fracturing of one massive audience into a million specialized and tiny ones? Or did that happen a long time ago? Speaking of a long time ago, what are we to make of the fact that this year was when we suddenly decided to loudly celebrate every anniversary known to man, from the 20th birthday of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” to the 10th anniversary of Alicia Keys’ “Songs in A Minor”? Ploy by a dying record industry? Or outbreak of nostalgia among aging critics longing for a time before endless Spotify playlists?
RICH: The idea of no consensus is sweet to me, in a year when popular gushing over mediocrity made me feel really isolated. Have fun slogging through Kate Bush’s “50 Words for Snow” for the rest of your lives now that you’ve canonized it, everyone! Heterogeneity makes more sense and better parallels what’s going on in pop anyway — especially now that we are recommitted to mainstream eccentricity.
But choice is its own cloud. And unlike what Apple’s iconography suggests, it’s a stormy one. That aforementioned premium on eccentricity has us paying attention to anyone who could be America’s Next Top Genius Train-Wreck: Kreayshawn, Lana Del Rey, Rebecca Black, Azealia Banks, Odd Future and on and on. It’s exhausting. That said, with the one-hit wonder being all but obliterated by iTunes, it is nice to have some different colors in our rainbow.
Ah, nostalgia. I do think it’s a driving force, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Maybe we’re returning to stuff because we’re still working it out — our current recycle cycle of 20 years is not a lot in the grand scheme of things!
Just one question: Did you have fun this year?
ZACH: I did, because I am a person with feelings, and music in 2011 was often very much about feelings. (What was I saying about no overarching narrative again?) It might be weird to confess how much the Weeknd’s predatory R&B delighted me, or how entertained I was by Frank Ocean’s ultra-sincere odes to Coldplay and women who like Z-Trip, but this was music that reveled in its everyday, unfiltered specificity.
I’ve been wondering all year where the quote-unquote recession art has been. Maybe it’s been hiding in plain sight — so much of the music I liked most this year had a decidedly 99 percent bent, in the sense that it was about the material details of average life. Like Rick Ross said, “Am I really just a narcissist / Because I wake up to a bowl of lobster bisque?” This is a question I ask myself every morning. If 2010 was all about dark twisted fantasies, 2011 was about dark twisted realities, with all the exhilarating and/or disappointing late nights that might imply.
And what a year for late nights. While guys like Drake and the Weeknd were content to sit ashamed in the corner and mutter about their conquests, women like Rihanna and Beyoncé had huge hits with frank odes to how good they had it at home. Was there a better love song than Beyoncé’s “1+1,” or a more happily carnal one than “Countdown”? Has anyone in recent memory released a record as foulmouthed and unapologetic as Rihanna’s “Talk That Talk”?
RICH: The sex album has become unceremonious — a nice development. Back in the day, with Madonna or Janet Jackson, there was a very conscious slowing down of the music and a conscious voice-hushing. Now Rihanna’s matter-of-factly powerful sexuality is the best thing about “Talk That Talk.” Her money is where her mouth is, and her mouth is all over.
On the odds and ends tip: A) Stop trying to make Jessie J happen, industry! B) It’s strange to consider an objectively stunning millionaire the underdog, but I felt a little sense of triumph when Jennifer Lopez returned to the Top 5 after a nine-year absence with “On the Floor” (which takes the little that she has to offer vocally and makes it sound like so much). C) Britney Spears’ best single, in my unpopular opinion, was “Hold It Against Me.” I rode the Musik Express at an amusement park on the Jersey Shore this summer, and that song blasted while the teen operator sang her heart out to it. The idealism and innocence just waiting to be obliterated were beautiful. And that dubstep breakdown! Talk about defining ’11!
ZACH: What’s this “dubstep” you speak of? Any genre that can encompass both Ye and Jay’s “Who Gon Stop Me” with choked warbling of that most delicate of English fawns, James Blake (maybe he and Jessie J should hang out? On an ice floe?), is likely not a real genre at all. But if we are talking Britney, allow me to salute “Till the World Ends,” the most pleasurably mindless club anthem of the year. Ke$ha, who helped write the song and appears on the remix, gave Britney a priceless gift here; Nicki Minaj, who also guests, convincingly suggests a bad-ass lineage that unites all three artists, from teen umbrella-bot to mud-covered Dylan aficionada to schizophrenic guest-rap theater weirdo. This is the avant-garde, and it’s in clubs from Ibiza to Iowa. Amen.
But I didn’t care much about Britney’s album. As with Nas’ blistering “Nasty” or Stephen Malkmus’ winsome “Stick Figures in Love,” I was surprised about how much sustenance I could draw from a single song without wanting another. In an era of unrelenting abundance, it’s always nice to be left hoping for just a little bit more.
