2017 Albums

Quelle Chris, Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often There's a common misconception that rappers aren’t supposed to be like you. Aside from otherworldly emceeing and production abilities, Quelle Chris deals with all the same bullshit. While there’s still money in the rap game, it’s just as unequally distributed as within the country at large. There are plenty of rappers out there that are taking immense risks - creative and financial - to bring you the jams (no Lil Dicky). I have absolutely no issues with flexing - check the rest of this list - but sometimes it’s nice to find a little common ground with your idols. Besides, he made the music video of the year.

Chief Keef, Thot Breaker I wrote most everything that I care to about this record over at Tiny Mix Tapes (side note: this is where virtually all of my other writing can be found), but here’s a little more: there's no one like Chief Keef, and once he’s gone there won’t ever be again. He’s the one-man overlap of the venn diagram between those that have the will and those that have the wherewithal for relentless experimentation in rap. There’s a case to be made that he’s the first good performance artist. Thot Breaker was released in a format vaguely resembling how every other artist in the world puts out music, but don’t count on that becoming a trend, however. Best to lose (and eventually, find) yourself in Sosa’s abyssal catalog of absurdly low-quality snippets (1, 2, 3, 4) and let the next tape drop when it drops.

Future, FUTURE Hip Replacement day ones know my thoughts on HNDRXX, but the ultra-buried lede is this: FUTURE is the consummate 2017 rap album. Buoyed by several of his strongest singles in months (I’m partial to Draco), the album is an absolute culture factory - it’s no coincidence that Mask Off is Future’s biggest chart success to date as well as the year’s most persistent, uh, meme. We also got this, an early candidate for next year’s Oscars. Future rode a flute sample to a new level of cultural ubiquity, upping the stakes of staying sleep from merely missing out on great music to not having the slightest idea what the groupchat was ringing off about.

Others: Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked at Me; The Magnetic Fields, 50 Song Memoir

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Non-2017 Albums

Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, Winter in America (1974) If it’s your thing, you could spend a year drawing somewhat facile comparisons between this thing and the current political moment. I’d rather not have that pollute my listening experience as it has everything else, but to each their own - however you experience it, this is Gil Scott-Heron at the top of his game. Rapping, singing, and speaking in equal measure, he’s completely at home over piano-led jazz arrangements, laying down a manifesto for the disaffected that’s as effective a document of the black experience in the post-Civil Rights era as any.

A Guy Called Gerald, Black Secret Technology (1995) It took me a long time to give drum ‘n’ bass a fair shake - the hangover from the dubstep era was strong enough to infect adjacent genres as well. That was stupid. The electronic music of the 90’s is absolutely magical - a bunch of weirdos inventing techniques and sounds that laptops let us take for granted with entirely analog instruments and sample sources. Gerald, as he’s called, made his name as a founding member of house legends 808 State (interview forthcoming) before branching off to pioneer acid house and jungle. Black Secret Technology is the culmination of his experiments, the rare full-length release from the era that fully justifies and utilizes the album format.

Jim O’Rourke, Simple Songs (2015) I probably listened to this 30 times during a trip to Scotland early this year. Jim O’Rourke is one of those insanely prolific pan-genre artists, much of whose catalog I don’t fully understand, but Simple Songs couldn’t be more aptly titled: it’s a dad-rock album with no particular conceptual or zeitgeist-y reason to have come out in 2015. Absent a compelling and/or marketable narrative, the album is primarily a technical tour de force, keeping song structures and ambitions measured in order to highlight its world-class mixing and mastering. Since listening to music is still at least a third of the battle of appreciating it, sound quality alone can make an album worthwhile; here, O’Rourke’s genius ear for arrangement simply solidifies it.

Others: Tori Amos, Boys for Pele (1996); Burial, Truant / Rough Sleeper (2012)

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Books, any year, read in 2017

Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers I’ve long advocated a sort of personal statistic measuring how recently you were someone you would now consider reprehensible. A year is a pretty healthy number, and for Martin Amis it might have been two. Written at twenty-four about turning twenty, The Rachel Papers perfectly captures the shuddering re-assessment of the late teenage years that the transition into the early 20’s requires (no idea if Amis wrote a follow-up based on the same phenomenon occurring in his late 20’s re: the earlier portion). Its brilliance is a double-edged sword: the fullest appreciation of Amis’s ability to translate personal experience to the written word comes only with the horror of self-recognition.

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories I’m a huge fan of the novel by way of loosely-connected vignette. I didn’t know a thing about life on either side of the Rio Grande before reading this, and now I know even less - where there was a lack of consideration altogether before, there’s now just enough familiarity to raise questions. Cisneros has an unbelievable talent for inhabiting the lives of others, writing a broader range of characters than I can fathom meeting, let alone being. Grouped into sections corresponding to the major stages of its characters' lives, it’s a little bit of childhood nostalgia, a little bit of dirty realism. The titular short story is one of the best I’ve ever read.

Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay All hours are real nihilism hours when you’re an insomniac. Cioran embodies the peculiar 20th century phenomenon of misery-as-energy-source in a particularly sympathetic fashion, favoring aphorism and comprehensibility over the impenetrability that’s too often part and parcel of philosophy about being sad. This interview, the hands-down best I’ve read all year, explains far better than I could. Tag yourself; I’m Ionesco.

Others: John Le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy; Edward Lewis Wallant, The Human Season