Let the record show my top 10 albums of 2008:

1. Bon Iver- For Emma, Forever Ago...
2. The Loved Ones- Build & Burn
3. Kaki King- Dreaming of Revenge
4. of Montreal- Skeletal Lamping
5. Right Away, Great Captain!- The Eventually Home
6. Gym Class Heroes- The Quilt
7. Coldplay- Viva La Vida
8. The Hold Steady- Stay Positive
9. TV On The Radio- Dear Science...
10. Santogold- Santogold

Looking back on a year always makes me realize how inconsequential parts of it were--all of the things that felt like they had to be huge, life-altering events turn out not to matter that much once you look at the whole 365-day context. Breaking my arm seems like such a little thing now that I'm whole again, and turning 21 was nice, sure, but my life isn't actually that different now. I have no doubt that the one thing that I'll always remember when I look back on 2008 is the election of Barack Obama and the small part I played in his campaign.

Unrelated to the above navel-gazing, today one of my favorite songs came up on shuffle. This song is, technically, about Seattle, but I listened to it obsessively two years ago when I was canvassing in PDX, and this song is Portland to me. It's the best-fitting mash-up/remix I've ever heard, and it reminds me how much I love that city.

The Blue Scholars- Inkwell (Crashed Cop Car Remix)
Blue Scholars at Amazon

Lupe Fiasco, "Hustlers and Customers"

The holiday season brings us a new track from Lupe, and you know, of course I love it--this guy could cover Crank It and I would probably love it. Here he combines a few measures from some piece of classical music (I can't name what it is, but I'm 95% certain I did ballet to this piece when I was a kid) with a classic, simple beat, resulting in a queer kind of syncopation that my ear finds addictive. There's not much else to the structure of this song, and it is repetitive, but so catchy and interesting that it doesn't get old. Lupe's rapping is pretty much what we expect of him by now: wordy rhymes and lush, vivid ghetto stories with a wide cast of characters. Good stuff.

Lupe Fiasco- Hustlers and Customers
Lupe Fiasco at Amazon

inspired by

The crust of day-old snow gives way under the sole of my boot, crunching and crinkling like red leaves in autumn. I'm walking from my car (parked almost the whole block away, there's never any fucking parking available on this street, your neighbors must throw parties all the damn time) to your house, and I'm reciting under my breath the words I will say to try and get you back. They will work. I know they will work. You love snow, and yesterday was the first real blizzard of the year, so I predict that you'll be in a forgiving mood. You're probably making yourself tea right now. When you open the door to my face, you'll see that my nose and cheeks are red, you'll see my breath brittle in the air, you'll see that the jacket I'm wearing is practically threadbare, and your impulse will be to invite me in out of the cold. I will have won half the battle. I mumble the words I will say again and again, and they sound more persuasive each time.

Bon Iver- Blood Bank
Pre-order the Blood Bank EP
Bon Iver on Amazon

Two:

Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit are The Very Best

This album/mixtape/whathaveyou is awesome! I freely admit that I lack the vocabulary to say much more than "it's awesome," so there you go. Mwamyaya is Malawian (I don't know if this is actually a word; whatever, he's from Malawi), and he and Radioclit mix traditional Africana with electro, soul & R&B, indie and Michael Jackson. On the album you'll hear familiar strains of M.I.A., Vampire Weekend and Santogold, and each song is more colorful and dynamic than the last. I hope these guys get huge.

Mwamway and Radioclit are letting folks preview and download the album for free over here, so you really have no excuse. Go, grab it, and listen. It will make you happy.

Snow Patrol, A Hundred Million Suns

I feel vaguely like I should be embarrassed for liking Snow Patrol as much as I do. They're "soft rock," I heard 'Chasing Cars' a million times on the radio last summer, and they make the kind of mellow, emotional music that's easy to sneer at. But they write songs that tap into the most delicious strains of longing and melodrama, almost always without crossing that line into saccharine. (And when they do cross the line, I never mind because it's still so satisfying.)

Their latest album feels like a fairy tale that must come to terms with a realistic--and accordingly, unhappy--ending. Gary Lightbody's shaky voice always implies foreboding, and the songs switch constantly from urgent anxiety to bittersweet acceptance. It's very pretty music, lovely even, but its loveliness doesn't mean it lacks substance or weight. Buy it here.

Today I got around to listening to 808s and Heartbreak. And you know what it reminds me of? The Mountain Goats' Get Lonely. No, really. They're both essentially concept albums about being dumped, they're both intensely personal, and on these albums both John Darnielle and Kanye dwelled (dwelt?) so much on trying to make the listener feel their sense of loss that they produced albums that were worse than the rest of their work. Both Get Lonely and 808s and Heartbreak are characterized by this sense of vast space. Get Lonely features lots of unbearably slow songs that feature only Darnielle's voice and one haunting acoustic guitar, and 808s and Heartbreak is mostly just Kanye singing with Autotune plus percussion. There's other stuff on the album, but it mostly just serves to highlight. Most of the songs on the album are long, stretching out the emo and attempting to give the songs more weight.

I think one of the reasons the album doesn't really work is that we're used to this kind of thing from, well, The Mountain Goats. And Elliott Smith, and Bon Iver, and Ani Difranco, etc--we're not used to it from pure pop. This sort of crushing rejection, self-doubt and existential angst is both cliché and really difficult to articulate, so listeners want musicians to approach the subject sideways, with metaphor and complex language something less blatant than 'you've broken my heart.' Kanye gives us lines like "don't say you will/unless you will," and most of his lyrical content comes off as clumsy and too surface-level.

I think what he's trying to do with this is interesting--making such a personal, lovelorn and (for better or worse) genuine album that sounds so similar to the R&B pop on the radio that music snobs love to sneer at. I am all for pop music that isn't afraid to be serious. And as a producer, Kanye still has the ability to produce hooks that are fun to listen to and that I can't get out of my head. I think several of the songs work really well on their own, like 'Paranoid' (which has a throwback 80s and Prince sound that I love) and 'RoboCop.' Both of these songs feature more instrumentation and energy than most of the other tracks, as well, abandoning the spaciousness of Kanye's misery to give us well-rounded and catchy songs.

But overall, it falls flat. Maybe this is personal preference: I actually really like Kanye's rapping, and don't like the thought that he's possibly abandoned rap in his music, and I have never liked the way Autotune sounds. I think it's fine for Kanye to experiment and make an album that seems to be more for himself than anyone else. But many defenses of this album that I've read seem to suggest that fans should ignore any faults they hear and love it just because it's personal. I strongly disagree with this. Emotional honesty is not the only rubric of judging an artist's work, and just because Kanye has bared his heart to his listeners doesn't mean that I have any obligation to like the album.