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| Here I come, Walking down the street, I get the funniest looks from Everyone I meet. |
Unlike years in recent memory, when we saw angry Average Joes banding together and rising up against the privileged and the powerful, 2012 saw angry Average Joes acting alone and gunning down the weak and the helpless.
In July, a fucked up college drop-out dressed up like Batman, walked into a movie theatre, killed 12 people, and wounded 59 others.
And as if one mass killing a year wasn't bad enough, a second rampage of slaughter occurred in sleepy, economically-depressed, small-town Connecticut, just in time for the holidays. Another fucked up kid murdered his mother, then went into an elementary school and killed 20 first-graders and six adults.
Merry fucking Christmas, America.
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| When reached for comment about the need for a gun control debate in America, Tiny Crossburner, spokesman for the West Virgina chapter of the NRA replied, "now's not a good time." |
"No."
Now, don't get me wrong. As a libertarian, I understand people being spooked at the State taking away their Constitutionally-protected ability to fight back against them. This, unfortunately or not, is a fundamental part of American political culture: if the government steps out of line, its the people's right and responsibility to rise up, fight back, and overthrow the motherfuckers, the fact that this has never actually happened notwithstanding.
I also understand that guns are just plain appealing to some people. They make you feel safe and powerful, especially if you fear minorities or have a tiny dick.
Then again, as a good neighbour, when I see two piles of dead kids in your back yard, I mean, I don't want to point fingers or anything, America, but maybe you guys might want to at least fucking talk about this.
Hey, it's okay to talk. It doesn't mean you're a pussy.
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| Swift: By the way, I wasn't actually suggesting we eat the poor. It was... oh fuck, never mind. |
A Miami man, completely naked and whacked out on bath salts, attacked a homeless guy and was shot and killed by police after he refused to stop devouring the bum's face.
When questioned for comment, his neighbours described him as "kind of a quiet guy, always reading A Modest Proposal.
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| To be honest, sometimes it seems like the way I earn my living isn't really all that important. I mean, fuck, I basically like, screw for money, right? But even if just one kid out there sees me hammering a snatch or eating out an asshole and decides to get into porn rather than drugs or gangs, it makes me feel good inside. Like, I've made a difference, you know? |
By the way, putting aside the whole cannibalism thing for a moment, as well as the fact that we've apparently degenerated as a culture to the point where people actually "aspire" to be porn actors, how is it that a 29-year old has not yet managed to realize this oh-so-lofty aspiration?
Now I'm no expert, but I'm guessing all you'd need to make this particular dream come true is a camera phone, some cocaine, and bus fare home for you and a jonesing, sniffly-nosed, potential co-star, who's no doubt waiting for someone just like you down at your local drink and stink.
Anyways, in addition to first degree murder charges, the culprit is also being charged with defiling a corpse, and with harassing Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. In keeping with the "tough-on-crime" policy of his Conservative government, Harper is apparently hoping that levelling said charges will deter other Canadians from sending him human remains in the future.
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| Top dollar with the gold flea collar. |
Asked about it afterwards, former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and noted dog-torturer, Michael Vick replied, "Shit. That's cold, yo."
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| Though many pundits found its delivery "wooden," the chair later scored points on Eastwood by not being completely fucking insane. |
And lost.
In the U.S. Presidential election, Obama faced and defeated a flip-flopping, Muppet-hating, Mormon plutocrat from Massachusetts whose one redeeming quality was that he looked sort of presidential, that is, in a sketch comedy troupe's parody of what a president might look like sort of way.
Though liberals have learned never to overestimate the intelligence of the American electorate, and even had a few tense moments when a grouchy Obama sleepwalked through the first debate, in the end this turned out to be the political equivalent of the Tyson-Galafianakis fight in the movie, The Hangover.
For some inexplicable reason, the Republicans seem to have forgotten their sure-fire recipe for presidential success: pick a Southern, Protestant religious fanatic who talks tough and looks good in a cowboy hat. Americans don't like their Republicans moderate. That's what the other guys are for.
DECISION 2012
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| Obama: - Took on Bin Laden. Won. - Loves cigarettes. - Is like everything good about American culture: black. - Think the rich have it pretty fucking good. |
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| Romney: - Took on Big Bird. Lost. - Hates fags. - Rejects the polygamy of his Mormon ancestors, yet has binders "full of women." - Thinks you're lazy. |
AMERICA HUMS AND HAWS FOR A MOMENT THEN CHOOSES CORRECTLY
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| Contestants in the 2012 Miss Arabia Pageant line up for the always popular (and super sexy!) burqa competition. |
The Arab Spring of 2011 suggested that the winds of change might be stirring up the desert sand, but in Egypt and elsewhere, Arabs used their newfound freedom from tyranny to elect tyrannical Islamist regimes that promptly took away their newfound freedom. Though the more naive among us were disappointed by this, we really shouldn't have been. Apparently societies that prefer their women hooded and/or clitless are not the most fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of a vibrant liberal democracy.
Go figure.
And just in case you're a Westerner and feeling superior, keep in mind that this is pretty much all our fault. Middle Easterners may at times seem an overly irritable people, but folks tend to get a little pissy when you arm and side with the very regimes that keep them in ignorance and squalor, maintain military bases on their holy grounds, on top of robbing, cheating, and slaughtering them en masse in Iraq and Afghanistan and anywhere else where there's oil underneath the otherwise worthless ground they've eked a miserable existence out of for the last few thousand years. Guess what? These people hate us, have good reasons for hating us and will probably keep on hating us until we stop treating them like shit.
Again, go figure.
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| OO-OO-AH-AH. Capuchin for common sense. |
Though little Darwin's shortsighted acceptance of low quality in exchange for low prices may suggest a failure on his owner's part to teach her monkey good consumer habits, common sense, IKEAN or otherwise, would seem to dictate the following response to the situation:
Jesus Christ, Toronto. Give the crazy bitch her fucking monkey back!
And last but certainly not least, the music.
Unlike Dickens' assessment of the revolutionary period in France, 2012, musically speaking, was neither the best of times nor the worst of times. There were a number of good albums, a handful of great ones, but nothing truly amazing or game-changing.
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| He make not be doing too much "dancin' on the ceiling" these days, but Ritchie's home- care nurse insists the 80s pop legend remains active. "He's always up for a trip to the mall in his mobility cart or a game of Farmville. Sometimes he plays it all night long," she revealed. |
And people wonder how Dub-yuh could've been elected President twice.
It was also a year of comebacks. Among others, Jimmy Cliff, Dr. John, Swans, and Bobby Womack all released half-decent new albums, though, unfortunately, none of them quite made my top ten list. The Jimmy Cliff and Dr. John offerings in particular are well worth your while, though.
If there was one musical trend that dominated many of the best albums this year it was aggression. However, this wasn't the dumb, mean-spirited, throw an old lady down the stairs or stomp a baby's head in kind of aggression that seemed to permeate our culture this year. Whether it was in the form of the absurd, nihilistic rants of Death Grips, the sexualized ferocity of Metz, the anarchic exuberance of the Japandroids, the menacing 90s-style film-noirish gangsta rap of a Killer Mike, or even the slick, stylish reappropriation of crypro-fascist arena rock by Sleigh Bells, the aggression in the music of 2012 seemed either justified, or properly focussed, or just plain cathartic.
Not that 2012 didn't have its softer side. In fact, some of the very best albums of the years were less of a slap than a stroke. The smart, big-hearted sensitivity of a Frank Ocean, the non-date-rapey swagger of Divine Fits, and Tennis' distinctly nonthreatening vision of the good life, all come to mind.
Anyways, enjoy.
10. Death Grips: NO LOVE DEEP WEB
Song Selected: "No Love"
When in "Come Up And Get Me, " MC Ride shrieks, "I'm in Jimmy Page's castle!" its hard to tell if this is a critique of the classic rock elite's aristocratic pretensions, or just something fucking awesome that may or may not have happened to him. This ambiguity is central to their aesthetic. Death Grips are clearly angry and menacing, but not in a Snoop Doggity "never hesitate to put a nigga on his back" sort of of way. It's more like the musical equivalent of a midnight crashing of a stolen police car through a Starbucks window. Damaging, yes, but victimless.
Death Grips released two albums in 2012, both of them equally good, although I've got to give the edge to NO LOVE DEEP WEB, if for no other reason than its album cover. It depicts an erect cock jutting into a shower stall with the album title scrawled across it with a sharpie. I would have liked to show it with the song I picked, but YouTube reflects our society's ongoing lack of cock-friendliness by concealing it behind a black rectangle in all their videos of the band. After all the horrifying obscenities that have happened in the world over the last few years, are we really still squeemish about seeing a fucking dick? Really?
9. Japandroids: Celebration Rock
Song Selected: "The House That Heaven Built"
Vancouver's Japandroids shitkick off their shitkicking second album with the sound of fireworks popping overhead, a flurry of raucous guitars, and the following lines: "We're all lit up tonight / And still drinking / Don't we have anything to live for? / Well, of course we do, but until it comes true / We're drinking." One of the better justifications for mortgaging your youth that rock 'n' roll has offered us over the years. It also reflects the undercurrent of melancholy lurking just beneath the surface of this very overtly exuberant, celebratory, even joyous music. Fuck the future, kids. Your dreams are never coming true. So get laid, get wasted, and fucking give 'er because one day you'll be old, and you won't be able to do even that anymore, and you'll regret ever moment you wasted prepping for something that never even happened.
8. Metz: Metz
Song Selected: "Wasted"
Metz are from Toronto, but don't hold that against them. Their self titled debut is excellent: punishing, bludgeoning, but still super sexy, that is, if you're in the mood for a fuck-'til-you-bleed kind of experience. They remind one a bit of a slightly slower tempo Bad Brains or Minor Threat in their combination of nun's cunt tightness with a total disregard for conventional tunefulness. It is this display of well-honed chops and the control that such mastery allows for that most impresses one about Metz. Truly colossal destructive forces like that unleashed by the atom bomb required years of thoughtful work and planning by smart, energetic individuals. Apparently, it took these guys a few years to adequately capture their sound on tape in its full Nagasakian intensity. Metz is their Manhattan Project.
7. Killer Mike: R.A.P. Music
Song Selected: "Anywhere But Here"
On "Big Beast," the incendiary opening track of this years best hip-hop album, Killer Mike mixes together the usual ingredients that both characterize gangsta rap as a genre, and provide the basis of its enduring appeal: morbid humour, lyrical cleverness, psychopathic ultraviolence, and laid back, funky beats conducive to weed-smoking or driving around bobbing your head. Typically, it also offers an alternative vision, fictitious or not, of life in America's most famous and/or infamous cities.
In none of these respects does R.A.P. Music disappoint. Mike's depiction of Atlanta, whether accurate or not, is unlikely to elicit much praise from the city's chamber of commerce: it has fuck all to do with Civil War history, or the Olympics, the Braves, Hawks, or Falcons, or anything else outsiders might typically offer as reasons for checking it out. According to Mike, Georgia's biggest city "ain't shit sweet like a peach," but a place where he and his crew "be lurkin' in the club on tourist muh-fuckers" or planning to attack and rob a seemingly well-protected celebrity, whose bodyguard, Mike opines, "ain't shit, we strip 'im like a stripper-bitch." Also contains the best song about hating Reagan since Suicidal Tendencies' "I Shot The Devil."
6. Cloud Nothings: Attack On Memory
Song Selected: "Stay Useless"
When it gets right down to it, there's nothing all that novel or unique about Cloud Nothings, with the possible exception that their singer and songwriter, Dylan Baldi, sounds like he might be Rodney Anonymous of the Dead Milkmen's angrier, artsier, more earnest, and not-that-funny younger brother. In many respects, his band's third album sounds like just another offering from some college kid with a pretty decent record collection. But what makes this album very good is the way in which Baldi transcends his mediocre subject positioning and vocal shortcomings through craft and passion. This is just a great batch of well-constructed indie rock songs performed with guts, precision, and Revenge-of-the-nerdy gusto.
5. Tennis: Young And Old
Song Selected: "Origins"
In 2010, Tennis released Cape Dory, a musical travelogue of married couple and Tennis members, Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley's post-collegiate yachting adventure along the Eastern seaboard of the U.S.
Sounds unapologetically whitebread and elitist, right? It was, but it was also cute as fuck, and their second album, Young And Old retains all the charm of their debut despite its altered subject matter. Here the duo explores love, domesticity, and the doldrums of the post-university homefront with a degree of enthusiasm that makes you wonder whether this might be every bit as much of an adventure for them as their yachting trip.
Fuck, who knows. Maybe it will be.
4. Dirty Projectors: Swing Lo Magellan
Song Selected: "Unto Caesar"
Dirty Projectors are definitely the artsy fartsy types. They create a harmonically dense, rhythmically complex, and occasionally virtuosic music that often gets them dissed and dismissed as being but the latest incarnation of the detestable, oft-regenerating hydra of prog-rock.
This is unfair. Sure, their lead singer / lead guitarist / "musical director," David Longstreth went to Yale and can actually play his instrument, but he also likes Black Flag, dislikes Steely Dan and Yes, and "fucking hates" Frank Zappa.
A better comparison is probably with a band like Talking Heads, whose founder, David Byrne, they've collaborated with. Though some of their past releases have been, at times, a bit elitist and pretentious, the music on Swing Lo Magellan, is often deeply soulful and super catchy, two powerful populist elements almost invariably lacking from prog. By far, their best album yet.
3. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange
Song Selected: "Lost"
I'm a huge R&B fan, but I really don't like a whole lot of it made after about 1980. Since then, the genre, in my opinion, has been denigrated by its overemphasis on the mechanical rather than the spiritual aspect of the music: focussing on gimmicking production techniques, synthesizers, and vocal histrionics, rather than plain old-fashioned soul. In its attempt to be contemporary and progressive in has, in effect, thrown the musical baby out with the bathwater.
Channel Orange was thus something of a revelation this year. True, there's still a fair bit of stuff on the album whose appeal still seems geared exclusively to junior high girls, which is one of the reasons I'm not as gaga about it as some people were. But it also has four or five songs that are among the best R&B tracks of the last thirty years, and even at its weakest moments, Ocean evokes so much sincerity, intelligence, empathy, and humanity that you forgive him all his trespasses. Well, almost. Anyways, its the best R&B album since D'Angelo's Voodoo back in 2000.
2. Divine Fits: A Thing Called Divine Fits
Song Selected: "Shivers"
Two bulls are standing at the top of a hill, looking down at a herd of cows. The younger bull says to the older, "Hey Dad, let's run down there and fuck one of those cows." The older bull replies, "No, son. Let's walk down there, and fuck 'em all."
Wisdom comes from experience. However, while this may be true when it comes to fucking cows, it's tends to less true when it comes to rocking out, which is perhaps one of the reasons why A Thing Called Divine Fits, despite the confident swagger of the performances on it, was, by far, the most underrated album of the year. The idea of a supergroup of industry veterans is no longer considered a very cool idea, and hasn't been since about 1970. And for good reasons. More often than not, the results are the shits. But this collaboration between Britt Daniel of Spoon and Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade is a definite exception. A superb collection of slick, catchy, sexy pop-rock songs.
1. Sleigh Bells: Treats
Song Selected: "You Lost Me"
There was no clear-cut best album of the year, in my opinion. Any of the albums in my top four could have been rearranged in almost any order, and any could have taken the top spot. It was a tough call.
I guess what set Treats apart from the others for me was that it wasn't just a collection of good songs (actually, quite a few albums had more good and/or great songs on them than this one), but was a definite album, a cohesive and coherent work of art with a clear vision, aesthetic, sound, and purpose.
What's perhaps most surprising about Treats is what a shitty idea Sleigh Bells started with: making an album whose sonic starting point is the guitar sound of the Mutt Lange-produced albums of Def Leppard. This colossal wall of riffage is sometimes composed of dozens upon dozens of guitar tracks layered overtop of one another. Back in the 80s, this could only be achieved in a gigantic, gazillion-dollar multi-track recording studio, and only by people with enormous amounts of time and money on their hands. A truly capitalist rock sound if there ever was one. Moreover, this sound was used, not for any redeeming purpose, but to provide a means by which the creeps in Def Leppard could better molest underage groupies and consume vast amounts of liquor and blow.
But sometimes the most amazing results come from the worst ideas. Sleigh Bells starts with the acme of rock ugliness and manages to make something sensitive and beautiful out of it. The sound, remixed, decontextualized, and neutered of its sleazy, date-raping, chest-beating, cock-stroking, drunkenly running over school children in a Lambourghini connotations, becomes just, well, a sound again. And kind of a cool sound at that. Sleigh Bells manage to show that even at its most crassly commercial and excessively self-indulgent, rock, if appropriately re-weaponized and pointed at the right targets, can be used for good just as well as evil.
