Listen, The xx are people, too. Yeah, they seem overly morose and make austere, sad tunes that got you through some rough times in college, but they have their own needs and desires. And it’s not easy to be on tour—and thats why their mix, “The xx: on the road,” is such a revelatory look into what the trio listens to throughout the good times and the bad, after the excellent shows and after the depressing gigs that bum everyone out. (If you’ve been in a band, you understand this despair.) Creating the perfect sonic zone is the key to surviving the drives between shows with your sanity intact, and this mix definitely conjures some vivid vibes.“The xx: on the road” opens with a song of their own: “I Dare You," a track that signifies confidence and, as a precursor to their favorite jams, serves as a testament to the band’s search for meaning in the musical world. It is pretty cool to see Iggy Pop’s (Bowie-produced) “Nightclubbing” and Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” on here, and it’s easy to hear how the slow-motion darkness of those songs has affected The xx over the course of their career. But while its not surprising to learn they enjoy grooving to Talking Heads and Dinosaur, it requires a little more imagination to visualize them getting jiggy to Missy Elliott and Usher.Overall, all of these tracks elicit a pretty relaxed vibe; there’s no noise music, no metal, no jazz, no classical, nothing too avant-garde. This isn’t music for pregaming a monumental event or for shotgunning beers. This is some serious, chill-the-fuck-out music. And it totally makes sense coming from The xx.
Spaces are important. And for many people, the bathtub is the most sacred of all listening spaces. Amniotic water temperature, flickering candles, blissful solitude — rockin’ tunes in the tub rules. Thus, it makes sense why receiving someone’s bathtub playlist can be a truly revealing, psychological experience. Here are a few thoughts on Chance the Rapper’s bathtime playlist, titled “Yup.” First, if it were me, I would begin with something a little more relaxing, but that’s just my personality—”Harambe” is a cool choice to start off with, and Young Thug had a great 2016, so he deserves the top spot here. Then we go onto Bon Iver’s “00000 Million,” the inclusion of which 1) seems appropriate for bathing, and 2) reminds me of Rosie O’Donnell’s tweet from 2011, “i like the song perth — its good music for making dinner.” There are a lot of good hip-hop tracks on here, many of which I missed earlier in the year. I love that Chance included “Summer Friends” from <i>Coloring Book</i>—listening to one’s own music is an important experience, and the bath is a great place for reflection. Lots of Frank Ocean on here (maybe too much?), and a few things on that I’ve never heard of. Didn’t know Smokie Norful—now I do, and I like him. Even though this is a personal playlist, I feel like it should still be subject to the Playlist/Mixtape Rulebook, which clearly states that an artist not be used more than once on the same mix, and if they are, definitely not twice in a row. Penalty!
Identity, as Nitsuh Abebe writes in the intro to The New York Times Magazine’s “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going” feature, is at the center of nearly all conversations about music today. The gist of this theory is that the ethnicity, sexual preference, experience, and general “identity” of the artist should be a primary force in understanding the artistic object. And so the playlist of music curated for the Times’ article is an identity-based projection of where music is ostensibly going.
Yet, rather than envisioning an ideal future in which the divides between people are overcome, this list simply thrusts the social issues of today into tomorrow, reinforcing the status quo and prognosticating that, if this list comes true, future society will more or less face the same obstacles we have today. Music, like all art, is a function of its particular moment, therefore, this playlist raises an interesting question: How do we overcome the problems of society today to be able to create genuinely new art tomorrow?In the Adele portion of this feature, the section’s author claims: “That’s the future of music: recognizing, in the present, that you’re permanently indentured to the past.” So, the way forward is to look backward. But what this theory ignores is that the duty of humanity (up to this point) is to overcome its past, not to cherish it. Understanding the history of popular song forms is not going to change the world; however, pursuing a meaningful critique of the society that produced these forms might.
For the most part, the socially oriented songs on this list seek to engage the present moment in content, but one must wonder whether it does in form. There is very little actual radical music on this list (except for possibly Kanye West). There’s little avant-garde, and basically no classical (which, historically, has grasped social change far better than popular music). There’s no instrumental jazz, there’s one metal track (plus a bonus slot for a Metallica song), and no electronic music. Punk? Don’t bet on it. World music? Nah. So the presumption that this list represents a diverse set of voices that we should use to point the way forward does not seem to hold water. This playlist is diverse in the same way that a Starbucks music endcap or the Billboard Top 40 is diverse. The actual marginalized voices and the actual radical music of today—the real stuff that could illuminate the politics necessary to create a better world tomorrow—are few and far between here.
That isn’t to say that this music is bad—some of it is among the very best mainstream pop music. Future’s “Mask Off” is one of the great self-negation anthems of the year; Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” is a compelling artifact of truth and despair; Church of Misery’s “Make Them Die Slowly” is a pretty decent Japanese heavy metal track; Kanye West’s “Fade” is a masterpiece of production that brilliantly combines four unique samples; Charles Bradley’s “Changes” is an attractive cover of a Black Sabbath classic. But do they really critique the world we live in? Do these songs truly grasp the essence of social life today? And if so, do they point beyond themselves, showing a way forward? On a formal level, not really. Frankly, if this is the music of tomorrow, we should expect to remain living in the world of today.
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
