The Year of the Monkey: The Reverend Dick Picks the Best Albums of 2012

Here I come,
Walking down the street,
I get the funniest looks from
Everyone I meet.

2012 was a year Alfred Jarry would have loved.  Its main headlines read like a Dadaist manifesto: an Ubu-esque orgy of absurdities, atrocities, banalities, insanities, obscenities, and stupidities: a year horrifying and shocking and utterly predictable, all at the same time.

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.

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."

When asked if maybe, just maybe, it might not be a good time to start a conversation about the proliferation of deadly firearms in American society, pundits and politicos on the right of the political spectrum were virtually unanimous in their response:

"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.

Swift: By the way, I wasn't actually
suggesting we eat the poor.
It was... oh fuck, never mind.

2012 also witnessed a new development in our culture's culinary habits.  Rather than metaphorically "eating the rich" like the Motorhead song suggests, people began literally eating students, the indigent, and even household pets.  This, despite the fact that the rich, as is well known, tend to be less fatty, and thus both more nutritious, and delicious, to boot.

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.

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?  

In Montreal, a 29-year old aspiring porn actor killed, dismembered, partially cannibalized a Corcordia University student, and then apparently mailed parts of the poor guy to two Vancouver elementary schools as well as the headquarters of the both the Conservative and Liberal Parties of Canada.

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.

Top dollar with the gold flea collar.

And as if the world wasn't dog eat dog enough, last year, a stoned Texan dragged his roommate's dog out onto their front porch, and then brutally killed and ate it.  When a neighbour tried to intervene, he jumped down on all fours and began barking and growling at him like 80s WWF superstar, The Junkyard Dog.

Asked about it afterwards, former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and noted dog-torturer, Michael Vick replied, "Shit.  That's cold, yo."

Though many pundits found its delivery
"wooden," the chair later scored points
on Eastwood by not being
completely fucking insane.

Politically, 2012 was a year pretty much devoid of surprises.  The one exception may have been when Clint Eastwood debated a chair onstage at the GOP convention.

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

Obama:
- Took on Bin Laden.  Won.
- Loves cigarettes.
- Is like everything good about
American culture: black.
- Think the rich have it
pretty fucking good.

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

Contestants in the 2012
Miss Arabia Pageant
line up for the always popular
(and super sexy!)
burqa competition.

In the Middle East, racially indistinguishable monotheists refused to live together in peace and harmony as their nearly identical religions dictate and continued hating and killing one another over land, past grievances, and minor theological differences.  In Palestine, Jews and Moslems killed each other.  In Syria, it was Moslems and Christians who killed each other.  40,000 dead at last count.

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.

OO-OO-AH-AH.  Capuchin for common sense.

On a lighter note, up here in the Great White North, the most hotly contested political debate of the year was whether the City of Toronto was justified in arresting and detaining some crazy lady's sensibly-dressed, bargain-hunting monkey for attempting to shop at IKEA.

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.

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.  

Mainstream music continued to assert it's absolute irrelevancy.  Billboard's top ranked albums of the year included two by Adele, two by Justin Bieber, and albums by Nickelback, Taylor Swift, One Direction, Rihanna, and Lionel Ritchie.  Not to mention Whitney Houston's Greatest Hits, and Michael Buble's Christmas album (which was number 2).

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.

Rockin' In The Not-So-Free World: The Best Albums of the Early Seventies

When he wasn't waging war on underdeveloped nations
or destroying a generation's faith in democracy,
Dick liked to rock out with his little Republican cock out. 

I've never really been all that nostalgic.  I don't buy souvenirs when I travel, or try to keep the panties of the women I've had sex with.  I toss Christmas and birthday cards in the garbage immediately after reading them and believe that interrupting an experience so you can photograph it and look at it later, kind of spoils the here and now.  I've never even owned a camera.  For me, life is not a series of fucking photo ops.

My high school days in particular are not a time I get all misty-eyed about.  Not that I have no pleasant memories.  Like most guys, I recall my first taste of beer and pussy with a certain fondness, but when I think back Summer of 69-style, I rarely delude myself that those were "the best days of my life."  They weren't.

Veronica later dropped the charges,
not wanting to spoil Riverdale's chances
in the big game.

The Riverdale of my youth was a place of almost impenetrable darkness, a gloomy swathe of burbage whose dank vapours seemed to blot out all warmth and light.  Some creatures thrive in this sort of nocturnal environment.  I just wasn't one of them.  While the Archies and Reggies of the night were chugging brewskis, doing doughnuts in their camaros in the mall parking lot, and tag-teaming Veronica behind the Chocklit Shop, I was sitting in my room, smoking cigarettes, jerking off, or seething with misanthropic pretension like the protagonist in some Smiths song.  I was a frightened, angry little shit.  I possessed neither the ability nor the energy to seek out others of like mind and would have had no idea how to connect with them even if I did.  To say I was a lone wolf would be a bullshit romanticization.  I was just alone.

I don't spend a lot of time snivelling or even thinking about it anymore.  I feel no ill-will, no Nietzschean resentment toward Archie and Reggie.  I have no desire for revenge, nothing to prove to anyone, and very few regrets.  If anything, I'm retrospectively thankful for this long, dark, and lonesome night of the soul.  It gave me time to think.

Later, back at the Dojo,
Sensai would show Johnny
what he really means by "sweep the leg
and finish him."

Perhaps most importantly, it prevented me from having any delusional expectations about what the future might hold.  I learned the truth at seventeen that life, perhaps sadly, is largely devoid of Karate Kid moments.  Mr. Miyagi may get you to paint his fence and wax his car, but if he does, he's exploiting you, not imparting oriental wisdom.  The lesson learned here may make you less naive, but it will not make you a better fighter or a better lover.  You will never kick Johnny's ass.  You will never get to fuck Elizabeth Shue.  Life, as the Buddha teaches us, is suffering - a Cobra Kai boot driving its heel down into Ralph Macchio's face forever.

Okay, maybe not quite so bad as that.  The truth is, we suffer because we cling to our hatred of Johnny, to our lust for Elizabeth Shue.  We suffer because we want to live in a world where retards kick winning field goals like they do at the end of Disney movies.  Where anyone can be a rock star, or a professional athlete, or a millionaire if they work hard enough.

But we don't.  Besides the retards, the world has little in common with a Disney movie.  

This can be a terrible truth and it's not surprising that lots of people don't want to face it.  As such, nostalgia remains a totally understandable impulse, a temporary escape from meaninglessness, and a holding out of hope that maybe one day, someday, life will always be as sweet as it was in our sweetest moments.

Adam: This is all your fault.
Eve: Whatever, dumb-ass.

This seems to be an almost universal human desire.  Almost all cultures are at least partially nostalgic, although they talk about it in somewhat more cosmic terms.  The Jews and Christians have Eden before the fall.  The Germans have their pre-Gotterdammerung Valhalla.  The Greeks speek of a Golden Age before Zeus cut his father's cock and balls off and banished him to Tartarus.

And the rest of us have our youth.  After Reggie and Veronica leave for Princeton, Archie and Jughead will no doubt hit the pub after a hard day at the meat rendering plant, get drunk, play some Springsteen on the jukebox, and reminisce about the touchdowns and blowjobs of their own glory days.

And who can blame them?  I mean, fuck, you do what you gotta do to keep doing what you gotta do.  Not everyone can walk the path of the Boddhisattva.  I sure as fuck can't.  That's why God created drugs and television and organized religion.

And music.

20 years later and still "killin' your brain
like a poisonous mushroom.  Deadly!"

Like I said before, I'm not all that nostalgic.  I love music, but I try to be objective about it, and to separate my assessments of its quality from my own biography as much as possible.  For me, "Ice Ice Baby" is neither good nor bad because I was happy or sad the first time I heard it.  It's just bad.  Really, really, really fucking bad.  Many would disagree with me here.  To them it's great because of that time they fingerbanged Molly Stinkysnapper in the back of her dad's Suburu while Vanilla "worked the mic like a vandal, lit up the stage and burned a chump like a candle."  Try as I might, I can no more convince them otherwise than I could those who think the world is controlled by a cabal of malevolent Jews.  Some people are simply immune to appeals to reason, common sense, and evidence.

But if I had to pick an Eden, a Valhalla, a Golden Age of pop music, some period of time worth waxing nostalgic over, I'd go with the 70s.  Again, many would disagree with me.  For lots of people, it was the fifties and sixties that were pop culture's Friday and Saturday nights, the seventies being more like the Sunday morning hangover.

And as far as the mainstream goes, this is no doubt true.  Much of the dewy youthfulness and idealistic sheen that briefly characterized the culture was sullied by the end of the sixties.  Many blame it on the war, on Nixon, on the drugs, but I think a lot of it had to do with a particular portion of the baby boom just growing up, getting jobs, and not really giving a fuck anymore.  The true believers stuck around, but most of them went underground and/or got more radical, and thus escaped the notice of those who like their shit light, happy, and on the surface.

Marx: I'm gonna expropriate your punk ass.
Smith: Whatever.  Laissez-faire, bitch.

As far as the music went, though, these developments were all good things.  A laissez-faire approach has many dangers, but there's no doubt that people do interesting things when you leave them the fuck alone.

Anyways, I'm going to break up the 70s into three parts: 1970-73, 74-76, and 77-79.

Here are the best albums of the early seventies.

Enjoy.

10.  New York Dolls: New York Dolls (1973)

Song Selected: "Personality Crisis."

Good things often have unforeseen negative consequences.  For example, say you meet some sexy such-and-such at your local drink and stink.  You get drunk, go home with them and, much to your surprise, they take you on a wild, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of the flesh.  I'm talking crazy-ass shit, here.  The ceiling cracks open.  The clouds part.  The moon behind them explodes.  Jesus appears, sparkling like a Twilight vampire.  And just as you do the old grunt and shiver, he winks at you and gives you the thumbs up.

Then a few weeks later you find out you've got the clap.

The music of the New York Dolls is kind of like this.  On the good side, they provided the ferocious stomp and swagger that would prove to be a central sonic ingredient in the punk rock that came later.  Then again, their penchant for mindless debauchery and women's fashion lingered in the cultural bloodstream like an infectious agent, spawning musical STDs like Poison, Warrant, and Motley Crue.  This is not the Dolls' fault, though they would not have given a shit even if it was.

9.  Doris Duke: I'm A Loser (1970)

Song Selected: "I Can't Do Without You."

As the title suggests, this Swamp Dogg-produced album is no happy affair.  Songs called "He's Gone," "I Don't Care Anymore," and the above-mentioned "I Can't Do Without You" should give you a pretty good idea of its overarching themes are.  Need a hint?  We're talking full-on failure and soul-destroying heartbreak, kids.  Of heartbreak one can only assume, but of failure, she was certainly no stranger.  Before recording this album, she floundered in nowheresville for most of the 1960s.  Afterwards, not much changed.  Like most things associated with Swamp Dogg, I'm a Loser was artistically great, but commercially, well...  There was a very minor hit ("To The Other Woman, I'm the Other Woman"), but the label soon failed and she sank once again into the quicksand pit of obscurity.  In fact, no one seems to even know where she is anymore or if she's even still alive.  History, however, has been kinder to Doris Duke than the marketplace.  I'm a Loser is now often regarded as a deep-soul masterpiece.  And those who regard it so are right.

8.  Donny Hathaway: Donny Hathaway Live (1972)

Song Selected: "The Ghetto"

Donny Hathaway probably isn't the first name that comes to mind when you're putting together a list of R&B greats, but maybe he should be.  His albums were always well-received critically throughout his career.  He even had some hits (particularly his Grammy-winning work with Roberta Flack which, frankly, I'm not all that crazy about).  And like Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding, he died tragically and too soon, killing himself by jumping from his 15th floor balcony in 1979.  This alone, given our culture's necrophiliac tendencies, should have made him a legend.  But it didn't.  Which is too bad.  Almost all his albums are great, although Donny Hathaway Live is both my favourite, and my all-time favourite live album.  Like Curtis Live by Curtis Mayfield, Root Down by Jimmy Smith, and Live at the Club Mozambique by Dr. Lonnie Smith, it has this very particular gritty, sweaty, intimate, small-club R&B feel that's rarely even captured in a live venue and never ever ever in the studio.  When the audience sings along with Donny to "You've Got A Friend," it almost makes you like James Taylor.  Almost.

7.  Waylon Jennings: Honky Tonk Heroes (1973)

Song Selected: "Black Rose"

February 3, 1959 may have been the day the music died, but not for Waylon Jennings.  At the time, he was a guitar player in Buddy Holly's band and, being less of an outlaw than one might think, he gave up his seat on the plane to The Big Bopper, who, apparently had a really bad cold.  Few moments in the history of rock 'n' roll, with the possible exceptions of the deaths of Michael Hutchence and Shannon Hoon, provide such compelling evidence for the existence of a just and loving god.  And not many have done more following such a brush with the reaper.  Besides Johnny Cash and maybe Willie Nelson and David Allan Coe, no one in the history of country music has as large and consistently excellent a body of work as Waylon Jennings and this very well may the best of it.  If you're curious about Outlaw Country (and you should be) this is a good place to start.

6.  Swamp Dogg: Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970)

Song Selected: "Total Destruction To Your Mind"

Today, its commonplace for African American artists to claim they "don't give a shit."  It almost goes without saying.  Personally, I don't believe many of them.  But if you want to meet a motherfucker who really didn't give a shit, meet Swamp Dogg.  During the sixties heyday of Atlantic Records, he was a successful producer, engineer, and songwriter there.  Did Swamp Dogg give a shit?  No fucking way.  He bailed and started making his own crazy-ass brand of funky R&B.  Did Swamp Dogg give a shit about marketing to the mainstream and making a big pile of cash?  No fucking way.  He sang about fucking whatever and liked to feature his short, chubby, swamp-doggedy self on his album covers, lying on a pile of garbage in his underwear, riding a giant rat, or surfing in Harlem.  This brand of confrontational apathy may lead you to believe that his albums are sloppy, ramshackle affairs.  Again, no fucking way.  They're all great.  But this one's the best.  

5.  Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters (1973)

Song Selected: "Chameleon"

This classic fusion of jazz, funk, and African music is deservingly one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, and a perfect example of what is possible when artists of high calibre put aside notions of genre supremacy and attempt to preach to people other than the converted.  Only idiots only like one kind of music, and Head Hunters will appeal to everyone everyone with a pulse, a three-digit I.Q., and even the most rudimentary capacity for distinguishing between truffles and turds.  A funky masterpiece.

4.  Can: Tago Mago (1971)

Song Selected: "Halleluwah"

When people think of the music of the 70s, too often what comes to mind is either the jammy soft-cock noodlings of the Steve Miller Band, the Eagles, and others of their pestilential ilk, or the decade spanning works of arena-rock rape gangs like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.  In terms of consistent quality of output, though, the best band of the 70s was none of the above.  From 1969 until 1979, these Krautrock fuhrers released 10 albums that are all better than anything you're likely to hear on classic rock radio.  Though Soon Over Babaluma, Future Days, and Ege Bamyasi are all equally heil-worthy, in terms of instrumental excellence, jackboot-stomping groove, and experimental weirdness, Tago Mago is just a goose-step above.

3. Sly & The Family Stone: There's A Riot Goin' On (1971)

Song Selected: "Family Affair"

It's too bad Sly Stone couldn't keep his sht together.  For a few years in the late sixties and early seventies, Sly and his Family Stone were, perhaps even more than the Beatles, the most universally loved band in the world.  Everyone dug these cats: hippies, rock fans, the R&B audience, even jazz musicians listened to, appreciated, and were influenced by them.  Like many from this generation, however, the drugs eventually took their toll, and while they didn't kill Sly, they pretty much incapacitated him from about 1975 onwards.  The band's earlier work was, like the Beatles, distinctly utopian - a kind of groovy interracial orgy.  Here the band's music, like the culture as a whole, takes a darker, funkier, angrier, more exclusive, and more dystopian turn.  The band was still interracial but, be forewarned whitey, this album has way more of a Black Panther growl to it than its predecessors.  

2.  Marvin Gaye: What's Goin' On? (1971)

Song Selected: "What's Goin' On?"

Marvin Gaye was probably the sexiest motherfucker who ever lived.  When Marvin was a kid and the kids made fun of him about his last name, he would respond with, "Hey, say hi to your mom for me." And he meant it.  Because he had actually fucked their moms.  Even when singing about God, the children, and impending environmental catastrophe as he does here, he can still get your honey's cunny runny like you never will.  The man was smooth with a capital OO.  His own father shot him to death because his bitch wanted Marvin, not him.  Anyways, Marvin's the best R&B artist.  Ever.  And this is the best R&B album.  Ever.  But hey, don't take my word for it.  Put it on.  Kick back.  Unwind.  But watch out dudes, best keep your ladyfriend in check cuz Marvin's about to blow her fucking mind.

1.  The Stooges: Fun House (1970)

Song selected: "T.V. Eye"

The last and greatest album of the rock 'n' roll era.  The fusion of small-town angst, electric amplification, and rhythm and blues that produced rock 'n' roll is here taken to its inevitable and, ultimately, illogical conclusion.  The moment when the saxophone kicks in toward the end of "1970" is the musical equivalent of the Manson murders and the massacre at Altamont.  In the Ornette Coleman-inspired free jazzy freakout that follows, all the ridiculous and delusional notions of rock 'n' roll as a utopian force for positive social change are completely fucking obliterated.  Unlike Coleman's stuff, there are no theoretical underpinnings here that justify this violation of conventional notions of harmony and song structure - no suggestion of new beginnings.  This is the sound of the toilet of the 60s being flushed and a million screaming hippies going down the drain.

War, Hate, and Misunderstanding: The Best Albums of the Late Sixties

Who ya gonna call?

I've never been a particularly groovy guy.  I don't believe that smoking pot makes you smarter or more creative.  Nor do I believe in the magical properties of pyramids, magnets, or crystal deodorant.  I don't think that the position of the stars at the time of our birth influences our personality or that the human race was seeded by extra-terrestrials.  I maintain that the government's decisions to put fluoride in the water supply and inoculate infants against deadly diseases were good ones and not conspiratorial plots to poison us or track our whereabouts.  I also bathe regularly, I don't recycle, and I refuse to pay three times as much for eggs or produce because it has a sticker on it that says "organic."

Basically, I'm not a hippy.

Fox News Headline 1967:
Police dog defends self against taunting Negro.
"Boy was eyeballin' me," dog explains.   

Along with Vietnamese children running down the street with their skin on fire and police beating the shit out of black people for daring to want the civil rights they actually already legally had, hippies are among the first things that come to mind when people think about the sixties.  For me, it's the image of a dirty, lazy, stinky, hairy, Tommy Chonger falling out of a VW bus in a cloud of bong-smoke, face-first into a pile of dogshit, then getting up, adjusting his poop-smudged granny glasses, and mumbling, "oh, wow, man.  Far out," to no one in particular.

Down South, Santorum is still all over the place,
but elsewhere things have pretty much dried up.

Though I blame the hippies for much that is wrong with the world today, I still have mixed feelings about them.  Kind of like I do about Christians.  I mean, hey, Christians built the Sistine Chapel and Chartres Cathedral.  They include among their members some full-on, shitkicking motherfuckers like Dante, and St. Francis, and Leonardo da Vinci.  Then again, they also tore down the monuments of the ancient world, destroyed most of its art and literature, and plunged western civilisation into a dark age for over a thousand years.  They also gave us the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, witch-burning, and more recently, Rick Santorum.

The hippies, contrary to their inflated opinion of themselves, are obviously less historically important.  Nonetheless, few special interest groups have had a more pervasive influence on contemporary culture than Jerry Garcia and his patchouli-stanking ilk.

Let's start with the good stuff, which can be summarized simply, easily, and most importantly, obscenely:

Fucking.

One, no, make that two of the things
I like about hippies.

The hippies brought an awareness of fucking, in all its forms, into the forefront of popular culture: fucking each other, fucking the Man, fucking the dog, and getting all fucking fucked up.  Since then, AIDS, the war on drugs, and the rise of the religious right have pretty much put the kaibosh on all this, but hey, I still dig it the most, Daddy-O.  Calling in sick to work, laying in bed all day, getting high, playing with one another's peepees, and plotting the overthrow of the military-industrial complex is some groovy-ass shit.

Fuckin' A, man!

However, aside from championing the obvious merits of zonking and bonking, the hippies' emphasis on wishy-washy open-mindedness pretty much boils down to a philosophy in which the willful suspension of critical thinking is deemed a virtue.

And it is this unwillingness to recognize qualitative distinctions between things, much more than sex, drugs, and revolutionary sentiment, that has had an altogether pernicious effect on contemporary culture.  Since the sixties, people just don't seem to value or even use their reason much anymore.  Besides the harmless stupidity of mood rings, liking Pink Floyd, and thinking its okay for white people to have dreadlocks, we now live in a world where someone can have misgivings about the moon landing, the origin of species, and whether the holocaust happened, while remaining a steadfast believers in ESP, the trans-substantiation of communion wafers, and the reality of pro-wrestling.  And then run for elected office.  And win.  I mean, in Canada, the current science minister is a fucking chiropractor and a young-earth creationist.  The hippies made it okay for all of us to be entitled to our own opinions, even our own truths, regardless of whether they're contradicted by every shred of evidence anyone has ever found.

It's like, all relative, dude.

 At Nuremberg, Donald insisted he was "just
following Walt's orders."  

Okay, maybe you can't totally blame the hippies for the fact that people have seemingly become more irrational and retarded over the last forty years.  But even the best and brightest of them haven't exactly done much about it.  Throughout the seventies and eighties, while their enemies were out there in the world dismantling the welfare-state, breaking labour unions, bombing abortion clinics, and conducting a full-scale war on Blacks and Hispanics masquerading as a war on drugs, the hippy intelligentsia were sitting in their ivory towers, listening to Enya, while they whined about insensitive pronoun use, racist imagery in Disney movies, and how porn makes fat chicks feel shitty about themselves.  Not that these issues don't matter, it's just that, when the Man's ass-raping you, the first thing you do is try to get that dick out of there, not criticize his cocksmanship.

Anyways, despite all that, the late sixties was a great time for music, even if you're like me and not all that into The Beatles, The Stones, or Led Zeppelin.

...And some of it was even made by hippies.

Enjoy.

10.  The Shaggs: "Philosophy of the World, 1969"

Song Selected: Who Are Parents?"

Imagine a crazy old lady in rural New Hampshire has a premonition while reading her young son's palm.  Her gypsy intuition tells her he will marry a strawberry blonde and have three daughters.  The three girls will form a band and become famous musicians.  The son takes the old bat seriously, especially when the first two predictions came true.  When his daughters become teenagers, he buys them instruments and, even though the girls couldn't play all that well and have absolutely no knowledge of musical structure or convention, he gets them to write an album's worth of songs and books studio time in order to capture their sound "while it's still hot."

Crazy, right?  The really crazy thing, though, is that this actually happened.  The girls are The Shaggs and the album they recorded is "Philosophy of the World," one of the most delightfully demented albums ever made.


9.  The Mothers of Invention: "Freak Out! 1966"

Song Selected: "Hungry Freaks Daddy"

A lot of people hate Frank Zappa.  Even hard-core fans of the Z-man, such as yours truly, have some difficulty disputing that his fusion of Edgar Varese, doo-wop, and sophomoric locker room humour is sometimes, well, kind of retarded.  But Zappa at his best and Zappa at his worst occasionally overlap in a sublimely ridiculous sort of way, as they do on this debut offering by The Mothers of Invention.  As well as being credited by many as being the first rock concept album and influencing both The Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," on "Hungry Freaks Daddy" and "Wowie Zowie," it also features the best use of xylophone and kazoo in the history of rock 'n' roll.  Let the Mothers help you get your freak on, bitches!


8.  The Fugs: "The Fugs' Second Album, 1966"

Song Selected: "Dirty Old Man"

The "Fugs' Second Album" evokes the all of best things about the sixties counterculture.  It's kind of like a Robert Crumb comic set to music:  an LSD-addled orgy of ejaculating cocks, hallucinatory gobbledeegook, dirty jokes, rabble-rousing faux-Marxist propaganda, and big, bouncing titties.

I could say more but I don't think I have to.


7.  Mississippi Fred McDowell: "I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll, 1969"

Song Selected: "Good Morning, Little School Girl"

Mississippi Fred McDowell is actually from Tennessee, not Mississippi, but he's still the shit as far as authentic Delta blues goes.  He was an old man by the time he was discovered by Alan Lomax in 1959 and had never recorded before.  Instead, he'd made his living share-cropping and busking outside a candy store in Como, Mississippi for extra cash.  What's great about this album is that you get to listen to old-time Delta blues recorded with modern techniques and equipment.  It's like getting to hear Charley Patton or Robert Johnson without having to aurally squint through the hissing crackle of a shitty 1920s or 30s recording.  It's also cool to hear McDowell babble almost incomprehensibly about all sorts of shit.  Like why he don't play no rock 'n' roll:

Because it sucks.


6.  Bob Dylan: "Blonde On Blonde, 1966"

Song Selected: "4th Time Around"

At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Dylan basically stuck his middle finger up at the American folk audience by going electric.  He got booed, but in typical Dylan fashion, he didn't give a rat's ass, and recorded a couple of raucous folk-rock albums, "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited," to rub their folky faces in it.  "Blonde On Blonde" is a much less grating and angular affair, softened as it is with C&W warmth and R&B soul.  Besides the ultra-irritating "Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35" that opens the album (otherwise known as "Everybody Must Get Stoned"), every track on "Blonde On Blonde" is either, poignant, or interesting, or sublimely beautiful, or all three, as in the case of "Visions of Johanna," "One Of Us Must Know," "I Want You," "Just Like A Woman," and the above-mentioned "4th Time Around."  With the possible exception of 1975's "Blood On the Tracks," this is Dylan's best shit.


5.  Aretha Franklin: "I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, 1967"

Song Selected: "A Change Is Gonna Come"

Though her career as a recording artist goes all the way back to 1956, Aretha didn't really begin her reign as the Queen of Soul until she recorded "I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You."  Then she busted out into the popular consciousness like a pair of double Ds out of a B-cup bikini top.  "I Never Loved A Man..." is often cited as the best R&B album of all time and it'd be tough to dispute this, packed as it is with songs of sexy sin, sultry salvation, and full-on I-am-woman-hear-me-roar-type female empowerment.  Limp-dick, do-wrong motherfuckers beware!  The Queen'll bite that shit right off.  Respect!


4.  Sly & The Family Stone: "Stand! 1969"

Song Selected: "Everyday People"

James Brown may have been the first to hit it on the one and vamp it 'til it bleeds, but Sly Stone and his supergroovy family perfected it, tossing heaping scoops of rock, psychedelia, and utopian interracialism into the funky mix.  Sly later became rock's most notorious unfatal drug addict and scam artist, regularly ripping off promoters by getting advanced for performances he was always a no-show to, but for a few years during the late sixties and early seventies, he was probably the coolest and funkiest man alive.


3.  Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: "Trout Mask Replica, 1969"

Song Selected: "Moonlight On Vermont"

Featuring songs about the holocaust ("Dachau Blues"), the nocturnal hallucinations of aquatic invertebrates ("Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish"), and a two-movement homage to the female pudenda ("Hair Pie: Bake 1 & 2"), needless to say, this Zappa-produced offering from Don Van Vliet and his merry band of hippy freaks is truly one of the weirdest albums ever made.  It's also one of the best.

2.  The Beach Boys: "Pet Sounds, 1966"

Song Selected: "Hold On To Your Ego"

Ask yourself what kind of music Ludwig van Beethoven might make if he was reincarnated as a fat, ultra-uncool California kid who couldn't surf, was deaf in one ear, and was ruthlessly bullied by his dad.  The answer would be "Pet Sounds."  Brian Wilson here creates a rhapsodic symphonic soundscape in which to act out his own unrequited California dreams.  Though always seemingly but a swoon away, the fulfillment of these longings remains ever-elusive, like a hallucination of happiness you know in your heart of hearts isn't real, but that you refuse to give up believing in.  A heartbreakingly beautiful ode to joy from a man that madness and sadness would keep silent for almost forty years afterward.

1.  The Velvet Underground: "The Velvet Underground, 1969"

Song Selected: "What Goes On"

Many would argue that this eponymous third album by The Velvet Underground, while undoubtedly great, still pales in comparison to their Warhol-"produced" debut with the German chanteuse, Nico.  They would be wrong.  "The Velvet Underground & Nico" is unquestionably a revolutionary album and it sounds as such, replete with all the paradigm-overturning highs and frustratingly dated lows of what 1967's avant-garde thought the new world would sound like.  "The Velvet Underground," on the other hand, is the sonic equivalent of the perfect fuck: bursting with anticipatory swellings, sweaty, communion-inducing interplay, and climactic discharges of energy.  And it ends by snuggling up against you like a groggy lover while you drift off to a deliciously dreamy sleep.

Given a choice between fucking and fighting, I'll take fucking, and so should you.

***DICK'S PICKS*** 

for the week of March 11, 2012

New Shit:

Tennis: "Young And Old"

Song Selected: "My Better Self"

Great story about this band.  Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore met in college, fell in love, dropped out, bought a sailboat, and decided to spend a year exploring the eastern seaboard on it.  When they were done, they figured they'd write and record a bunch of songs about the experience.  The result was the fucking fantastic "Cape Dory," which beautifully commemorates their adventure of love on the not-so-high seas.  While the theme of "Cape Dory" is, as you might expect, largely nautical, "Young and Old," though slightly more earthy, is no less sun-soaked.  Kind of like a premonition of springtime during these darkest, coldest days of the year.  Check it out.


Old Shit:

Chic: "Dance, Dance, Dance: The Best of Chic"



Song Selected: "Good Times"

Though Disco is, with some justification, the most maligned of R&B's many incarnations, only the seriously boogie-averse can resist the shit shaking appeal of Chic.  Chic was the brainchild of guitar and bass duo Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, who also created Sister Sledge and all that funky shit you used to hear on Sesame Street.  The twelve-inch singles collected here offer a utopian vision of a boogie wonderland where the champagne flows like the crystal streams in heaven and the cocaine never runs out.  Combined with a handful of Tylenol 3s, a bubble-bath, and a vigourous session of masturbation, "Dance, Dance, Dance, The Best of Chic" is also the best cure for a hangover I can think of.