Postscript 2006

Just as (with one notable exception) I never meant the political articles on this website to be read as an endorsement of anybody or anything, I don't intend the Critics Poll to be a listener's guide. None of this is supposed to be persuasive writing. It's a description of one guy's experience of a year's worth of pop music; to paraphrase the great Charles Isbell from rec.music.hip-hop, just one pale white man's opinion. Jim Testa described the participants in this Poll as readers of my website; by that, I think he meant to differentiate it from year-end recaps that solicit ballots from professional critics (gah) only. Well, I'm a professional critic, and let me tell you, it isn't anything to boast about. Chances are, you're more productively employed -- you're a musician, or a teacher, or a visual artist, or an activist from Jersey City who I met while doing the Jersey City thing. There are Poll regulars who have no interest at all in The Tris McCall Report. They check the site on the Monday after the last Saturday in January to see who won, and then ignore it for the rest of the year. So, no, I don't think of the Critics Poll as an extension of the TMR. The first Poll predates this website by fourteen years. Should I wake up one morning thoroughly fed up with Google PageRankings and RSS and "blogs" and all the rest of the nonsense of Web 2.0 and decide to pull all of this junk down, the Critics Poll will live on inside my filing cabinet. Whether or not there's a Tris McCall Report, Mr. Tris McCall is going to do the Critics Poll.

Why I am so determined to do it is a fair question. As wiser heads than mine have pointed out to me, the value of pop art is utterly subjective; thus, ranking recordings on a Mohs Scale of excellence is a really silly exercise. I am intelligent enough to realize the degree to which putting records in an order -- and helping to feed the logic of the "classic album" -- is doing the devil's work. As a card-carrying Chaotic personality (I'll let you decide yourself if it's a Chaotic Good or a Chaotic Evil monster you're dealing with here), listing and classifying record albums ought to be anathema to me. Everything else I do -- including and especially this website you're reading -- is a testament to willful disorganization. My computer files are a rabbit-warren of hyperlinks, associations, dead-ends, and crossed-wires. When I watch a sporting event, I don't give a damn whether or not the best team wins. I don't expect charity, fairness, or justice, or the love I take to be equal to the love I make.

Yet I habitually rank records. And you do, too, otherwise, you wouldn't be playing this game with me. Year after year, you'll put one album at six and another at seven, and that'll signify your belief that, absurd as it may sound, #6 is incrementally better than the one at #7. One cold day in December, it occurred to me that Knives Don't Have Your Back was marginally superior to Ys. That became the assessment around which I built the rest of my Top Twenty list. You may have had a similar eureka-moment, or you might have just thrown yours together on the basis of the album covers, or the singers' political beliefs, or the kick-drum sound. Regardless, you had your criteria just as I did, and I don't assume that there's any correspondence between yours and mine.

Most of the lists that you see online -- in the new indie rock critical establishment and elsewhere -- don't bother to make their criteria clear. And since there's so much overlap between those lists (as we learned during the great Illinois disaster of 2005), rock criticism has lately seemed to speak in one monolithic voice again. If, at the beginning of the decade, you were worried that the Internet was trashing all systems of validation and turning art-assessment into relativist mush, you've got to be pleased with how things have actually shaken down. Instead of a million little lights shining from a sea of URLs, we've gotten the tyranny of conventional wisdom. Once again, there are "right" answers and "wrong" answers to the question of What Is Good Music?, and those of us whose opinions and values don't align well with the new establishment are getting buried under a landslide of orthodoxy, reiteration, demographic forecasting, and database-building.

Well, when we started this poll eighteen years ago, we were foes of conventional wisdom. In 2006, the Critics Poll has gotten too big to resist the tidal pull of trends and Indie Nation faves, and that's something I've come to accept. So instead of wasting any more words insisting on why my rankings are the proper ones, I'm going to talk a little about how I come to the conclusions that I do. The point is not to give you a road-map for your own assessments (God forbid), but to suggest that my value system is specific to me, just as yours is to you, and that I judge albums not on any eternal verities, but on Tris McCall's own proclivities. Every day, all day, I listen to albums -- I stick them into my little Bose boombox next to my desk one at a time, and rock out to them as I'm clattering away. Most of them get forgotten about. A few catch on with me, and go into heavy rotation. And every year, twenty of them are hype enough to end up on my list. Here's how I make my judgments:

Does the album sound intriguing?
The first thing I'll notice about a new album is its sound. If there's something compelling, or even mysterious, about the textures on the album, that'll usually serve as an enticement for closer examination. A good example from '06 is Palo Santo by Shearwater. My first time through, I couldn't make heads or tails of what Jonathan Meiburg was singing about (and I still can't). But the vibe of that album was so spooky and dream-drunk that I knew I'd be revisiting it. I have found that odd-sounding records almost never end up in the Top Twenty, and that really great albums are ones that don't sound terribly weird. But having an arresting sound is a good way for a record to get over my initial hurdle.

Do I like the lead singer or rapper? Is he or she somebody I'd want to invite back to my living room for a second or third spin?
Now, this is the biggest razor for me, and the one where I'm most likely to make a crucial mistake. There are hundreds of records released every year that I'm sure are fantastic, but which I'm never going to evaluate fairly because I don't dig the vocalist. Almost all metal albums -- even those by cool bands like Isis and Mastodon -- fall into this category. The Early November's music isn't all that different from that of the rest of the bands on Drive-Thru. But I don't find Ace Enders an insufferable singer, and that makes all the difference.

For years, I thought this was the standard criteria of evaluation for pop music listeners. What ten years making music in NYC has taught me is that this isn't true: many are more likely to assess a record on its rhythm or on its production. Also, vocal I.D. doesn't seem too meaningful to Gothamite rock fans: they'll celebrate a singer who grabs his tone, phrasing, and even inflections from Ian MacCulloch, or Ian Curtis, or Thom Yorke. I like frontpeople who are weird and edgy, and who project singular personalities. I don't care too too much about pitch or tempo or meter or vocal elasticity. I'm looking for a character.

Are the musicians trying to do anything challenging, or are they content to recreate a genre-specific experience for listeners?
This is not a deal-breaker -- I am a huge Oasis fan -- but I do like bands that defy expectations and try to record something reasonably novel. Then again, very few experimental-rock or post-rock albums ever get the time of day for me, because the minute the instrumental hijinx start getting in the way of the singer, I'm on to the next CD faster than you can say Animal Collective. I also like groups that attempt to straddle or draw connections between genres, as long as the artists are respectful of the traditions they're subverting, and it seems like they've done their homework. To me, Idlewild is an educated and informed hybrid, while the dude rapping on the Islands record sounds like dilettante. You may have arrived at the opposite conclusion.

By now, I've determined whether or not I'm going to make the album under consideration a part of my life, or if I'm going to file it in the stacks and pull it out from time to time to make mixtapes for Hilary. From here, the questions get harder, and more demanding:

What's the writer's perspective? What is he saying? Does the main character seem coherent and distinct, or is he just a conduit for pretty pop tunes?
Catchy melodies are wonderful, and tight song construction is great, too. But a top-drawer album needs to be more than just a repository for somebody's song-craft. Phoenix's It's Never Been Like That is ten terrific tracks, impeccably played and sung with great r'n'r attitude. By some definitions, it's a flawless set. Yet I have no idea what the band is on about, or who Thomas Mars's character is, or why I ought to care about the things he's singing. I can roll all the windows down and speed on Route 46, hollering along and having a great time. But my appreciation for Phoenix stops there. My feelings about The New Pornographers are similar: much as I'd like to root for them, they're never going to penetrate my consciousness, or give me anything more than smart "fun". Their inscrutability makes them emotionally inaccessible to me.

Does the language on the album become part of my own lexicon? Do I think about the album as I move through the world, or does it stop playing the minute I cut it off?
Momus once wrote (in response to Freud) that his unconscious was structured not by dreams but by pop song lyrics. Mine, too. No matter what I'm thinking or doing, I've got a song lyric that corresponds to it. I'll be walking down the street, and I'll think "walking down the street, in my all-stars, in my khaki suit, doin' what I do"; I'll go to the bank, and be thinking "hey, hey-ey, baby I got your money, don't you worry." This whole week, while I've been carrying on tradition, I've had "Carry On Tradition" stuck in my head. Those of you who are unfortunate enough to know me personally will recognize that a good 60 to 75 per cent of my out-loud utterances are quotes from rap albums. I've read all the greats from Plato to Nietzsche, but the philosophers who've really made an impact on me are the ones behind the microphone.

So I've never found a portable MP3 player necessary; I take the songs with me wherever I go. Some records dissipate once they're done - they're all fire and flash and great fidelity while they're spinning, but once they're sitting on the shelf, the song is over. Others don't sound like much while you're listening to them, but they'll haunt you later; there are certain understated De La Soul cuts that I first rocked in '91, and it seems to me like I never stopped hearing. That's why I never bother complaining about the production on Nas records. It's immaterial -- I know that no matter how dull the track sounds when it's on, I'm going to hit the street and see the barbed wire and tall brick wall, and I'm bound to hear the voice of the poet.

Is the album advancing an argument? If so, is the argument convincing? Is this album changing the way I look at the world, my surroundings, myself?
And by "argument", I don't mean Neil Young singing about impeaching the president. Some albums are so rich and associative that the tracks gel into particular worldview and a perspective. That perspective doesn't have to correspond with my own -- in fact, I prefer it when it doesn't. The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living is everything its detractors say it is: arrogant and unhinged, drugged, self-absorbed, harrowing, nasty. What the critics have missed is how broad Mike Skinner's social-critique is, and just how far up the ugly tree he needed to go in order to make it. Somebody needed to step into the breach and draw connections between celebrity, the culture industry, consumer vacuity, self-loathing and violence; when he raps, at the end of "Can't Con An Honest John", that it's all "one big con", he's speaking with an authority he's never been able to inhabit prior to this album. So many of the dumb reviews of this album complained that Skinner is now a rude and cold person and no longer a representative of endearing British youth -- see, they wanted him to continue being the boy they wished he'd be. He's liberated himself from his own crippling politeness, and in so doing, he's begun to speak for himself and himself only. He's not, and never was, the Voice Of A Generation, and that's a good thing, because those voices never say anything we don't already know. He's much too smart, and too singular, to be an echo.

Finally, is this album better than perfect? Is its recklessness its own reward; is it a glorious, defiant mess? Does it convince me to love its mistakes?
Every year, I'll hear a few albums that strike me as "perfect". They hit all their marks; they're endlessly enjoyable, the performances are flawless, the lyrics are fantastic, the singer is great, they do everything I ask an album to do. Those albums rarely make my Top Ten. Why? Because a "perfect" album (for '06, Let's Get Out Of This Country is the best example I can think of) really gives me nothing. It doesn't challenge any of my suppositions about music or writing. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, or angry, or feel like I've lost anything, or force me to reassess any of my assumptions. It's merely satisfying, and unimpeachable, and inviting, and already tailored for me to love it.

A truly great album is reckless. Great albums are composed and recorded in a fever; they're uncensored, and often unfiltered. A great album is ambitious; it goes for the big gesture, falls flat on its face, and then goes for it again. There will be moments on a truly great album that strike you as awful, or wrong, or cheesy, or ludicrous. But it'll keep calling you back anyway. You'll live with it, and as you do, you'll learn to love the things that first gave you pause. Outsiders will come to the record and call it whacked out, or insane, or impossible to get with, but you'll know the truth.

If you think all of this is an awful lot of responsibility to hang on the popular song, I'm sure you're not alone. Plenty of people wish nothing more from a new record than that it give them something to sing along to, or dance to, or just play in the background while they ride the train from home to work, and back again. But me, I don't go to the symphony or the opera. I don't watch movies or television. Most of contemporary fiction leaves me cold. I don't get into this "new media" nonsense that the kids are pretending to enjoy these days. Pop music is what I have, so I ask everything of it. Year after year, it delivers.

Two more comments, and then I'm going to give it a rest until January '08; one on my Best Rapper, and another on my Biggest Disappointment. I'll give you the bad news first. Justifications for selling your songs to big corporate advertisers go in and out of style. Lately, it's become vogue for artists to pantomime an innocent curiosity about how the big corporation will use their work. The artist pretends to be a naïf provocateur rather than the company shill; he's handing The Man a barbed dart from the underground and challenging him to turn it to his advantage . Kevin Barnes did this in interviews; he said something like "we wondered what Outback Steakhouse would do with a song like 'Wraith Pinned To The Mist', and thought it would be really amusing to see what they came up with."

Let me spare you the wild speculation. The Outback Steakhouse isn't going to do anything interesting with your song, and nor is any other multinational corporation. The advertising company that caught and caged your work is going to squeeze all the life out of it, turn it into a loathsome little jingle, and make you rue the day you were born. You're not going to laugh or cheer or be bemused; you're going to be embarrassed to turn on the television set. That's what advertisers do. It's what they did before they used Nick Drake to sell Volkswagens, and it'll be what they continue to do long after everybody has forgotten who Of Montreal is. There is nothing so subversive about your work that the corporate steamroller can't flatten out; nothing so "weird" or "anti-establishment" that it can't be folded back into some noxious justification of the consumption machine. The practical dynamics of a sellout shouldn't be cool, or mystifying, or intriguing to anybody who has lived in America for more than two months. We own televisions; we know the drill.

Now for the praise. Some of you guys voted for Hip-Hop Is Dead as this year's most inappropriate album title. You probably did so because you, like me, greatly respect Nas and believe that as long as he's still cutting chart-topping records, hip-hop is in fine shape. But many of the lukewarm reviews for Hip-Hop Is Dead also accuse the album of being contradictory -- here he's saying he's going to cap emcees who insist hip-hop is still alive, there he's insisting that hip-hop will never die, etc. Well, all great writers, from KRS-ONE to Abraham Lincoln, contradict themselves: if you sling enough verbiage around, some of it is going to accidentally end up undermining your main idea. But I don't think Hip-Hop Is Dead is a particularly confused set, or that he's challenging his own principles. Ever since '91 at least, there have been people within the rap community (and outside of it, too) who insist that it's game over; that hip-hop went through its golden age and it now sucks, that materialism has taken it by its collar, and that its true revolutionary essence has been perverted. And just like there are different flu variations each winter, every year we get a slight mutation of the argument: sometimes it's the g-rappers who've killed it by being too violent, sometimes it's the big-money playa emcees who've taken it down by not "keeping it real", sometimes it's the Southern emcees who've ruined it by their ignorance, sometimes it's the New York emcees who've finished the art form by taking the major-label dollar. While there are purists in every musical subculture, I don't think fans of other genres really have to deal with this crap. There isn't a substantial percentage of the college rock audience who run around yelling "indie is dead!", right in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. Fans of Alan Jackson don't say "country music is dead" when Rascal Flatts puts out a crummy album.

Nas takes this as his starting point. He's given us an album-length examination of the "hip-hop is dead" discourse, opened questions about why it exists and why it seems so specific to rap music, and invited us to draw our own conclusions. Of course Nas doesn't believe that hip-hop is over, and that ought to have been apparent on the first single, which goes "if hip-hop should die before I wake…" It's speculative. Many reviewers have criticized the silly Edward G. Robinson voice the rapper uses on "Who Killed It?", but it makes more sense when you realize that Nas is making fun of his audience. If you're looking for a definitive answer out of him, he gives you a blunt one in the spoken-word piece that closes the set. Of course he confuses things with that album cover where he's putting a rose on hip-hop's grave, but this, too, is at least a bit of a joke: a cartoonish representation of the record's content by a guy who has always thought that overliteralization was funny.

Okay, folks, that's a wrap. Thanks for reading, and I'll catch you all next year, unless I catch you before that.