snaildoc #1 album 2014
Run the Jewels - RTJ2
I took some time to read other year-end lists before finalizing my choice for my favorite album of the year. Maybe I missed something. It’s definitely happened in the past, and in 2014 I actually exposed myself to less music than in previous years. If there was ever a year that I’d miss something big, this would be the one. And, maybe, as Chris mentioned, my listening habits have become canalized, and I’m en route to losing the neuroplastic adaptability necessary for a man my age to ever get into vaporwave on my own and I’m missing out on some great vaporwave. Maybe, these lists would turn me on to something fantastic and experimental. Bands like Deafheaven making it onto a lot of people’s list last year are a great example of year-end picks giving a deserving underdog some needed exposure.
But. The most picked album of the year was “Lost in the Dream” by The War on Drugs. If we were picking best dad-rock album of the year, that record would be number one! I get it, sonically, just as a dopamine-receptor pleasing combination of guitar sounds and sung notes. It’s a great collection of nice noises. But the thing that troubles me about so many people picking Lost in the Dream as the best record to come out this year is that those pushing for dad-rock revivalism so hard are championing the sound without the substance. They’re arguing for a facsimile of a genre because it sounds nice, and neutering the cultural message that gave the music its initial relevance. The populist appeal of Springsteen was that his songs were humanizing narratives set within blue-collar America. They were about a specific and public feeling in a specific era, reacting to external political and economic forces. I genuinely don’t know what the fuck aWar on Drugs song is about, and I’ve parsed through the lyrics on genius.com. From what I can decipher, they’re songs about sometimes being in a relationship with a woman ( …or a baby?), and sometimes that can be difficult. There’s a place for that kind of introspective comfort food, but its place is not in a real discussion over what kind of record should reflect cultural mood in 2014, unless you think having the leisure to sit around listening to nice sounds and staring at your fucking navel all day is where the majority of North America is, which is a view not borne out by numbers. To pick Lost in the Dream as the best album of the year is to absent yourself from the frequently ugly world around you. It’s saying you’d rather go to brunch.
It would be intellectually dishonest of me to say that there was critical consensus around Lost in the Dream. Lots of people picked St. Vincent, and rightfully so, because it is a fantastic, sonically deep record. And, many people and publications picked my favorite record, including Pitchfork, despite that record appearing at the top of only one of it’s writers' year-end list. But on the topic of critical consensus, what surprises me is that both St. Vincent and RTJ2 were both better reviewed in terms of numerical score than Lost in the Dream, but that record still was the most picked. Why?
Which almost brings me to discussing RTJ2. But first, I need to give a special shout-out to Rolling Stone for picking stupid fucking U2’s stupid fucking Songs of Innocence as record of the year. If picking Lost in the Dream is an unreflective and rockist pick, based on the assumption that guitar rock produced by dudes with long hair is inherently important when it sounds great, then the severity of critical shallowness that goes into saying U2 released the best or most important record this year is just baffling. It’s one thing to be paying attention to new music and pick something good but that doesn’t get at the tone of the year or the national mood or whatever. But Rolling Stone picking U2’s record sends this message: “We’re old and we’re comfortable and we’re genuinely done trying to deal with or think about anything new.” If I was worried about not being able to appreciate new music, I should stop, because there are tenured music writers at huge, established publications that are clearly in way worse shape than me. Actually now that I write that, it kind of makes me mad. Do your job, motherfuckers! Think about what you’re listening to, and what you’re telling people they should listen to!
So I can only pick RTJ2 as album of the year. Just on pure, instinctively appealing sound, it’s fantastic. RTJ2 is a Voltron formed of everything right in rap. The back-and-forth deliveries of Killer Mike and El-P are expertly timed, each verse is insightful or incisive, lyrically complex and filled with clever allusions and wordplay. It draws on and references the best of rap and hip-hop from the past twenty five years: the iconoclasm and righteous anger of Public Enemy, N.W.A. and Ice Cube, the buddy-cop chemistry of rap’s best duos, (eg Outkast, EPMD, UGK), the measured vulgarity of Biggie and 2$hort, the narrative prowess of Ghostface, the polysyllabic density and abrasive production of the best years of Def-Jux albums (ie Cannibal Ox’s Iron Galaxy.) These attributes would make RTJ2 the best rap record of the year, and most of the elements were present in nascent form on the first RTJalbum. But it’s the best record of the year, period. There’s powerful, necessary commentary here on racial, economic and political inequality, on police militarization, on government surveillance, on mass incarceration. El-P and Killer Mike address practically every issue of substance and check it off the list. But more than just rap about these problems, they create a record that distills what it feels like to experience these things (Killer Mike), or to know that others experience them, to be aware of systemic inequality, to be viscerally mad about it, but to feel obstructed by a system that resists change and that doesn’t actually care about your good intentions (El-P). It’s a record that gives voice to what it feels like to recognize and be pissed off about systemic inequality. Distrust in public institutions is a real, valid sentiment, and it’s one those institutions have seemingly been doing their best to exacerbate, whether that’s through corporation-privileging international trade agreements, mass surveillance and denial of basic rights to privacy, to due process, to rights to clean air and water, to not get shot in the street mid-arrest. RTJ2 does a great job of crystallizing that anger – it’s a record that makes you want to punch down buildings and at the same time make the world a fair and equitable place. That it recognizes that the world is not that place yet, that maybe some shit needs to get punched down, and that it lets the listener know that maybe it’s not crazy to feel that way, is what makes it the best record of 2014.
