ToJo’s Take: 2015 – The Year in Music

 On the subject of best-of lists, NPR's Bob Boilen, concluded his: “There is no ‘best’ in music, just ones we love. There is no right or wrong, just ones that fuel our soul. That's what my list is filled with.” That is the attitude that I approach my annual lists with, for I am but one man, and not a professional. I listen to music because it moves me. I try and participate in the dialogue of contemporary music. I do my best to listen and to be moved and to respond honestly and without pretension. That said, I welcome disagreement. Please point me to things that moved you, to things that I may have missed.

I am fascinated by the current state of music. The market has changed so dramatically and so rapidly, the bar of entry has been lowered in such a way that it can be scarcely kept up with. Never before has music been both so pervasive and evanescent, and so fundamental in its breadth to our daily lives. And I believe that we are better for it. The marketplace of musical ideas is more robust than ever. There is no shortage of great work out there to engage with. Ultimately, that is the point of this exercise. There is a lot out there, and this is our effort to sort through it; to separate wheat and chaff.

A few general impressions of the year of 2015 in very broad strokes:

It was a huge year for hip-hop. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, though I didn’t personally connect with it, is a massive and ambitious work whose greatness I acknowledge, and it certainly feels like the appropriate choice for the year that was 2015, as it has been anointed almost unanimously by the critics. Hip-Hop is not my proverbial bread and butter, but as a casual fan, I cannot recall a year where there were more records that I thought were top-to-bottom excellent. Though only two cracked my personal top ten, just on the periphery were Vince Staples, Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, A$AP Rocky, STS, as well as a couple of very interesting records from the Ghostface Killah, Big Sean, Freddie Gibbs, Earl Sweatshirt, and a surprise late-December release from Pusha T—all of which I would recommend highly. All that was missing was a full-fledged release from Kanye West (though his 2015 one-offs were universally excellent).

It was also a particularly good year for American roots music, country, and Americana with more great work from, Jason Isbell, Ashley Monroe, Kacey Musgraves, Justin Townes Earle, and newcomer Chris Stapleton to name just a few.

Similarly, it was a big year for the revival of old sounds lead by Leon Bridges, with nods across the board to Pokey LaFarge, and Constant Bop (again, to name a few).

Contemporary Pop music is really quite good, and I think that contemporary music culture has all but erased the notion of “guilty-pleasures”. It feels like it’s nothing if not cool to listen to Taylor Swift, adult male or otherwise – with Ryan Adams’ full-on cover of 1989 providing the perfect punctuation mark to this case. It’s safe to unironically jam out to the new Justin Bieber track (hat tip to Diplo & Skrillex, who both had massive years). That said, I do not believe that artists like Adele holding streaming services hostage to eventually cash in with something like 80% of the year’s actual music sales is at all healthy or the right answer to the music industry’s problems.

I struggle to articulate exactly why, but Lean On by Major Lazer was hands-down my favorite song of the year. A departure from my usual melancholy pick.

If you are a Spotify subscriber and have not yet spent time with their Discover Weekly feature, you would do well to spend some time with it one of these weeks. It has proven to be an indispensable and fascinating resource in my musical life.

Also, it sure is great to have a new song from Missy Elliott.

And now, a list:

10 Surf by Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment

Is the new sound of indie hip-hop: lively, optimistic, musically rich, smart, uniquely 21^st century. Watch this video and it will all become clear.

9 Constant Bop by Bop English

Is a classic throwback, a record that believes in the unadulterated joy of the best that 70’s rock & roll had to offer, updated for the modern era.

8 Art Angels by Grimes

Is the sound of a prodigious talent hitting her stride: it is challenging and rewarding, all framed underneath a shimmering pop sheen.

7 Vestiges & Claws by Jose Gonzalez

Is a beautifully rendered and realized, probing record, a spiritual successor to the work of Nick Drake, that feels nonetheless crucial in the modern age.

6 I Love You, Honeybear by Father John Misty

Is a caustic love record from the indie scene’s asshole-poet laureate whose fundamental unpleasantness can’t overshadow his stupendous song-craft and witty lyricism, especially with his renewed faith in the meaning of life with love in it.

5 Compton by Dr. Dre

Is the most consistently listenable hip-hop album of the year. A return to form for a legend of hip-hop, fleshed out with a deep cast of talented lyricists who fully realize the good Dr.'s grand ambitions. It is the first record since Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy that has succeeded at both mammoth artistic and populist ambitions.

4 Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit by Courtney Barnett

Is whip-smart and just an incredibly done wordy rock record from 2015’s unanimous rookie of the year; a work of musical literature that perfectly encapsulates the life of a 21st-century 20-something (or 30-something).

3 Love Songs for Robots by Patrick Watson

Is a beautiful meditation on life in the modern age – it is immaculately crafted, symphonic and Beatles-esque, it is the sound of a group of touring musicians firing on all cylinders, concerned with the world they occupy: apocalyptic, wistful, hopeful.

2 Divers by Joanna Newsom

Is massively, frighteningly, frustratingly ambitious, an exploration of life and time, a work buried deep in literature and philosophy, across eleven unique arrangers who each treat Newsom’s compositions with great care, for better or worse. The album is incredibly dense, and demands and deserves attention. It is the sound of a singular artist operating at the height of her ambitions, if less obviously emotional, and more obtuse for it.

1 In Colour by Jamie XX

Is a gorgeous and textured musical voyage. It is simultaneously an exploration of the history of electronic music, and a bold step forward, paying homage as it points forward. It is eminently listenable, beautiful, and engrossing. It is the album that I turned to more than any other this year. It is the sound of an old friend. It is a warm blanket. It is excellent.

Click here for a youtube playlist of some of my favorite songs of the year.

Click here for a Spotify playlist of some of my favorite s

ongs of the year.

Honorable Mention:

No Cities to Love by Sleater-Kinney

Summertime ’06 by Vince Staples

1989 by Ryan Adams

Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens

Star Wars by Wilco

From Kinshasa by Mbongwana Star

Multi-Love by Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Currents by Tame Impala

Sound & Color by Alabama Shakes

Traveller by Chris Stapleton

Everybody’s A Good Dog by Diane Coffee

Second Sight by Hey Rosetta!

Coming Home by Leon Bridges

Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell

The Blade by Ashley Monroe

After by Lady Lamb

Whiplash: An Exploration of Greatness in Two Dimensions

Whiplash
**
by Tom Johnson

Whiplash is a movie about greatness and the pursuit of greatness. It takes as its canvas the world of jazz and jazz drumming and uses to illustrate the particular point a drum student (Miles Teller) and his fascist teacher (JK Simmons). It is a film with razor sharp ideas distilled to near purity. It is tidy and linear and technically accomplished. As an impressionist piece about the pursuit of greatness, it is a marvel. As a movie about two human people with thoughts and feelings and emotions, it is disappointing.

One of Whiplash’s myriad Oscar nominations is for best adapted screenplay. The Academy’s rules for what is adapted and what is original are arcane, at best, (I will never forget that Borat’s lone nomination was for adapted screenplay) but in this particular case, the distinction serves to highlight a flaw with the film that seems particularly relevant. Whiplash’s screenplay is considered adapted from director Damien Chazelle’s own short film regarding the same name, conflict, and subject.

That Whiplash is an adaptation of a shorter work seems relevant. Because as in short fiction in opposition to novel-length work, short fiction succeeds greatly in two dimensions – things happen, but there is little expectation of characters to be full and vibrant and breathing – short fiction is concerned with conflicts, with episodes, not with characters. In transitioning the film from short form to long form Chazelle fails to turn his work from two into three dimensions.

For sure, the fundamental conflict is gripping. Every standoff between Simmons and Teller is utterly compelling, but it feels ethereal and dream-like, scarcely human. It is a horror-story vision of the pursuit of greatness – what it costs and how to get it. And it succeeds as such, but never does the film offer any explanation of either characters motives – what drives them in their respective pursuits – they seems simply to exist for these two express purposes and little else.

This failure to provide crucial character development leaves much of the films actual plot points feeling hollow and peculiar if not outright unbelievable. Every scene not immediately regarding Andrew’s megalomaniacal pursuit of greatness and Fletcher’s adamantine refusal to expect anything less than perfection is almost universally unsuccessful. Andrew and his girlfriend fails to hit home because we know nothing of this character other than that he wants to be great. It feels tangential at best. The same applies to a peculiar dinner scene the film feels we need to see. It confirms what we already know about the character and little else. The willing suspension of disbelief has reared its ugly head particularly hard this year and it comes on aggressively in Whiplash, with a bizarre third-act car crash hurtling towards a totally perplexing final quarter of the film. The film’s final scene isn’t non-triumphant but it fails to make up for the abject weirdness of the movie’s closing half hour.

The film is technically accomplished with some slick cuts and editing particularly in the jazz ensemble scenes and in the practice room where we see Andrew practicing until his hands bleed. It is an impressive feat, elevating music into the visual pantheon of sports-physicality (even if it pushes this a bit hard – honestly, it’s a little weird to see the cymbals soaking wet in every scene – if that’s supposed to be sweat, how did it get there and how did one human body produce so much of it?). And then, of course, there is the acting. Simmons and Teller carry the movie even when the script otherwise lets them down. They go all in on their characters. There isn’t much depth, but there is certainly fury and they deliver it in spades. Their scenes are compelling if unbelievable, which is as much as can be reasonably asked. Simmons feels like safe money to take home the hardware come Oscar Sunday.

I have reservations about Whiplash. It is a frustrating film, particularly on the back end, but it is an impressively wrought meditation on the pursuit of greatness, and it is occupied by two eminently compelling performances. It is folly to judge a work in terms that it does not ask to be judged by. With a charitable readjustment of expectations, Whiplash could be a great movie. Without them, it is a frustrating movie with some great moments. Moments that may yet be worth the price of admission.

Regarding Inherent Vice

Regarding Inherent Vice
Or: How Forgettable Would the Big Lebowski Have Been if Every Scene Was Five Minutes Longer?
**

By Tom Johnson

I suppose at this point, it should be difficult to be disappointed by Paul Thomas Anderson movies. We should have learned long ago that disappointment is incongruous with PTA. PTA makes whatever movie he wants and sometimes they can be a source of awe and that should be about as much as you think about that. Being disappointed by a PTA movie is like being disappointed by not winning the lottery that one time.

And yet, what are you left with at the end of Inherent Vice, aside from a distinct impression that the movie was decidedly less than it feels like it should have been. Less fun. Less sharp. Less beautiful. Less of everything other than run time, really. Certainly less than the sum of its parts – to be certain it has a laundry list of pretty impressive parts, some of which are absolutely fun in the moment, but taken as a whole, they fail to really hit the mark.

Inherent Vice’s fundamental sin is its pacing. PTA films are known for their ponderousness, often approaching if not exceeding two and a half hours. But rarely does he deal with such obvious levity, and the last time he did – and with great effect with his Punch Drunk Love – he did so in just over ninety minutes.  Here, the glacial pace drags the film irreparably down. There is plenty in the film that suggest that it’s a comedy, but the end result is a comedy with an utter disregard for comedic timing. Indeed, Inherent Vice seems almost like a master class in how not to pace a comedic film, and the importance of pace and comedic timing particularly against such peers as the Big Lebowski or the Coen Brothers' Best Picture Victory Lap, Burn After Reading. There is no better way to understand why a joke falls flat instead of soars than to watch these three in succession.

It’s a peculiar effect Inherent Vice has. It seems to hit all of the notes that PTA wants to, it just lingers for several minutes too long in almost every scene and there are too many needlessly talky scenes that disrupt all of the often great slapstick. The performances are almost universally delightful, particularly the comic turn by continually underrated Joaquin Phoenix. Most of the endless string of cameos hit their mark. I was charmed by Joanna Newsom’s voice over work. And yet, what does it all add up to? Certainly not as much as I had hoped. And yet, it’s hard to call it disappointment. It’s simply the work of Paul Thomas Andersen.