#gnjsoty2k20

[groovesnjams]

IT’S SOTY TIME!

idk what’s happening, DV usually makes a meme for this, but, yeah, it’s SOTY time! In keeping with our favorite seasonal tradition, we’re kicking things off with honorable mentions.

[groovesnjams]

gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms       S // O // T // Y 2o2o

nO. 41/50

“Below the Clavicle” by Eartheater

MG:

For reasons that I don’t really want to get into because they are embarrassing to think about, I spent a period of a few months this year totally and completely unmedicated. They were among the worst months of my life as I confronted what a hellish and broken net of cells my brain is and they’re over now and I think I’ll probably remain medicated until I finally, finally die. But I did learn something important: once your thoughts are generated, they must be consumed. I was consuming all my own thoughts. Up until this point, mostly by luck, I think, I was striking an acceptable balance of scattered thoughts, littered thoughts, thoughts I slurped down and promptly forgot, gifted thoughts, shared thoughts, and thoughts I thoroughly consumed. Anxiety is a state of constantly, thoroughly consuming all your thoughts. It’s a space that doesn’t exist physically but is still very real. And “Below the Clavicle” most succinctly captured the feeling of being lost in that space, a space you created, brick by lovingly laid brick, until there was no air left to breathe. The contrast between Eartheater’s mellifluous strings and piercing vocals is that schism of reality and consciousness. When the two are in conflict, reality must win and it’s simple: let’s just get physical, don’t want to talk.

DV:

The words you can’t quite speak do lurk below your clavicle, but that’s not the only thing there. It’s veins and organs and, eventually, assorted viscera. And when Eartheater sings, “Quiet as the blood on my bed”, when she sings “Let’s get physical,” her voice gossamer and ghastly, perhaps she’s talking about sex. But perhaps not. “I'm a clever girl/ To keep my mouth shut”, can read as ironic or frustrated or teasing or taunting, and “Below the Clavicle” allows for all four. Eartheater is betrayed only by a cat, in a role its held since Edgar Allan Poe, getting somewhere and snatching something it shouldn’t. The meaning may skulk just out of reach, but it grows clearer the more you listen - like a dark shape in the fog behind you, like a disturbance of the air over your bed at night, like a rustle from the blinds in the next room. The strings swoop and they swoon and they eventually come to rest, and then you get to learn whose clavicle it was all along.

[groovesnjams]

gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms       S // O // T // Y 2o2o

nO. 6/50

“Losers 2″ by Spanish Love Songs

DV:

It happened to me: I found meaning in a pop punk song, almost two decades after swearing the genre off. After coming of age in the second Bush era, I felt deeply skeptical of claims that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 would lead to “good music” - not only because that’s a sociopathic response to human suffering, but because it’s just not factual. I still own an anti-Bush cassette I got in a parking lot at the corner of Clark and Belmont in 2003, and it was given to me by easily the coolest person I’d ever met at that point, and its artwork is more memorable than its music. More significantly, I haven’t forgotten Rock Against Bush Vols. 1 and 2, the absolutely wretched compilations put together by Fat Wreck Chords during the 2004 election. Most of the protest music during the Bush era was absolute trash! Green Day managed to resurrect their career, but that doesn't mean they were actually worth hearing, just that contemporary rock radio had to fill their non-Daughtry quotient somehow. Anyway: punk rock was the major casualty of the Bush era, I stand by this, and it’s taken almost 20 years for me to reconnect with the genre and with guitar music as a whole. But I’ve been getting closer and closer to caring about guitars the past couple years, and then “Losers 2″ went and blew everything wide open. I hear “No cancer, no crash, it better all go as planned/ Or one day soon, you're not gonna get by” as a gut punch, as a thought I have every morning finally put into words, and every other line of the song lands nearly as hard. The throbbing of this bass is my resting heartrate, the crunchy guitars of the chorus are every moshpit that - after a year of isolation - I’d sell my soul to jump into. "Losers 2″ is a song framed in the personal but with every connection to the political context: we all know the it in "it better all go as planned” means political and social forces utterly beyond our control, forces that hold an immense power over whether we survive; we all also know nothing ever goes as planned. “And you'll always wake up tired/ Because there's nowhere we go from here,” Dylan Slocum howls. Our bodies are fragile, our existence precarious, our world eternally on a precipice. We grasp for meaning and connection where we can, in whatever form we find it. Sometimes it’s the one we’d given up on.

MG:

There are so many words in “Losers 2,” so many raw emotions voiced as precisely as possible, and because this year was so full of suffering for almost everyone, save for the very rich and well insulated, there’s a lot that’s broadly relatable in Dylan Slocum’s diatribe. I take issue with the line about cops, that they’re patrolling neighborhoods they’re afraid of. That’s certainly true in cities, especially mine, where cops live at the farthest fringes, right on the edges of the suburbs and then spend their working days creeping in where they don’t belong. And maybe it is fear that underlies all their terrible base instincts and the long, systemic damage they’ve done to neighborhoods, communities, families, and people. Maybe fear is the thing that undergirds their unchecked power, or maybe nothing undergirds their unchecked power and that’s what allows it to unfurl and poison a society. But none of that is true of all the rest of the cops, at least half of the cops, who are patrolling their hometowns, from the medium to the very, very small. Those cops aren’t afraid at all because they’re living in racially and socioeconomically homogeneous boxes and they’re pulling over their neighbors and they’re ruling over a little fiefdom that utterly submits to them at every turn. I take issue with Slocum’s narrow view of what motivates police to be such a force of evil in our world but that’s how I know I love “Losers 2” and don’t simply agree with it objectively. It’s a low risk, high upside proposition to write a song that critiques power or sides with the disenfranchised because we’re all taught to embrace art that shares our values and both deranged Q-Anon devotees and the sober, lucid Black Lives Matter advocates believe they’re speaking truth to power and giving voice to the silenced. These vaguely political anthems truly suck because they’re shallow bumper stickers for our pity cars, a zero effort way to communicate our values to strangers without ever demonstrating or living those values beyond hitting play on a dumb song. By limiting his perspective to only what he’d observed and by offering no salve to the dull, painful trudge of the period between adulthood and death, Slocum and Spanish Love Songs wrote a song big enough to mean something and meaningful enough to get it wrong. “Losers 2” isn’t about us, any us, it’s about a you or a me and the garrote of anxiety and isolation that will strangle each and every you and me until we’re no longer terrified to die at our age, we’re just dead.

[groovesnjams]

gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms       S // O // T // Y 2o2o

nO. 1/50

“Elevation” by quest?onmarc

DV:

I’ve missed my friends this year, but we’ve had our group chats and largely kept up with an online happy hour and had a lot of video calls and occasionally managed backyard visits so like, I miss them but I also feel almost more connected to them than usual? Like if I make it through this pandemic, they get nearly the credit my family does. But. What I really miss, what I’ve realized more and more as the year’s gone on, is I miss seeing my friends at places. Specifically, music places. Specifically, bars or clubs or auditoriums, specifically anywhere where it wasn’t the videochat’s muting algorithm that we had to worry about, it was the soundsystem drowning out any human voice. I miss it so much I can practically feel the sticky floors and the miasma that settles into the space when everyone’s packing in with their winter coats on and the spit of someone trying too hard to share whatever’s on their mind. I wanna hear them! And I wanna forget it immediately after, just as they’ll immediately forget whatever I shout back at them! And I miss the communal trust that we’re all sharing the most important thoughts and our bodies are vibrating on the same frequency and we’re all experiencing exactly the same things at the same time in the same place.

But it seems like it’ll still be months before we get to do that again, so I’ve turned to Soundcloud mixes in the meantime. Their mobile app is garbage and I’ve avoided it in the past but at home, it’s easy to find a good mix and spend an hour or two transported to somewhere else. There’s some shit out there (same as anywhere else) but when it’s good it’s truly great - so much better than YouTube’s so-called algorithm, or Spotify’s payola. It’s producers and DJs who will take you on a fucking journey, and who you can truly put your faith in. I started the lockdown listening to classic floor fillers - shoutout Tom Moulton’s Labor Day 1974 mix tape, I love you - but thanks to recommendations from folks like Crystal Leww, I quickly wound up in much more contemporary spaces. And the best of the many DJs I heard all year was quest?onmarc, and the single best song I heard all year was “Elevation”, a distillation of the chaos of 2020 into three minutes of propulsive, beautiful dance music, an encapsulation of the year’s entire terrible zeitgeist in one track. “Elevation” is a place. It’s what I’d been missing for months. This is a song that starts with droning, fuzzy noise, adds a pounding drumbeat and - at the signal of an airhorn - becomes increasingly frenetic and uncontrollable, shifting every few seconds to hit a new plateau but never dropping that beat or risking a missed step. It’s simultaneously elegiac and pummeling; it’s everything 2020 was and could be; it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever heard a whole year in a single song. I want to move to this in a room where there’s no room to move properly, and yell at my friends and barely hear them yell back, and put my hands up and head down and feel that bass in a way I know my body will punish me for in the morning. It’s worth it, or at least I can hope it will be, and nothing in this terrible year has made me feel both more anxious to be back in those beautiful communal spaces, and more happy to be alive in this unprecedented terrible isolation, as “Elevation” delivers in three ecstatic minutes.

MG:

In a year full of tragedy and strife, stillness and restriction, worry and isolation, chaos in place of routine, routine in place of discovery, and moon-dictated tide of boredom in and anxiety out, there’s perhaps one small thing worth celebrating: I FINALLY GOT A SONG WITH NO WORDS TO SOTY NUMBER ONE. What’s this year to a bridge troll like me? I eat misery like it’s a kitchen cabinet filled with spinach cans. And after all that eating, meal after meal of disappointment and bodies stiff from too much sitting, I shit out this gem. Alright, onto why “Elevation,” specifically, is our wordless (not even a vocal sample, I cry) selection for the top spot. DV says it’s the whole year in both potential and kinetic energy and I’d go a step further and say that you can only accomplish something so vast and idiosyncratic with a piece of tightly structured electronic music. Even a single lyric would take “Elevation” from the realm of universal to the drawing room of multi-purpose. Here we have a world of imagination housed within a world of brutality. The production is bludgeoning, the kind of excessive force that indicates a crime of passion, but in response our bodies soften and absorb all the tension, transmuting it to movement and flailing our limbs to the beat (or around it, as the case always is when the limbs are mine.) Do we need the hurt to feel the glory? Absolutely not, that’s preposterous. We can’t avoid it, though. We can’t control it or contain it or direct it but when dealt a blow we can dance. It’s the lesson at the heart of everything from Mary Poppins to Footloose to “Common People” and “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.” But these are all ancient and steeped in a calcified whiteness that is alienating to a future world with better possibilities. The dance is up to our imaginations and that’s where “Elevation” truly excels. This isn’t a dark song for a dark room during the darkest part of the night. It’s that, too, but nestled at its core is unbound ambition, the brightness of daylight. Truthfully, it’s anything you want to hear and without the usual dull hum of everyone else’s voices your wants are the  loudest sound around.

[groovesnjams]

gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms       S // O // T // Y 2o2o

nO. 20/50

“TRRST” by IC3PEAK ft. ZillaKami

MG:

Their attack on SolarWinds Orion is just the latest in a Russian cold war on US democracy but Russia must still wait in line behind our own government for the honor of being the biggest threat to the “free world.” Their infiltration and manipulation will never truly harm an innocent victim because the United States is a bully country divided in half with one side made up of neo-liberal warhawks thirsty for foreign blood and the other vicious white nationalists thirsty for domestic blood. We are a people always at war. Still, Russia. They’re very bad. What do we do with their art, their cultural exports? Russia is banned from the next couple Olympics because their athletes aggressively dope, but I can’t imagine this punishment will do anything to deter what is now almost a national rite of passage. In that grand tradition, and in keeping with Russia’s history of complicated rhetorical brilliance (Lolita), IC3PEAK are provocateurs, not just reminding us that their people are the ones behind the Internet Research Agency but never letting us forget. Do we believe them when they say “I did nothing wrong/ but I got on a blacklist”? The unreliable narrator is pleading and seductive in her vulnerability, but like Humbert Humbert, the good parts and the bad parts are all the same parts. Ultimately, I’m an unfit arbiter of the ethics of art during war time, but I feel there’s no real point in denying something as breathtaking as “TRRST.” Plus, it’s too late to matter. Russia is here, in our internet, in our social media, in our brains and the virus will seek to ruthlessly execute until its host expires.

DV:

The political and cultural landscape in Russia is obviously not the same as in the USA, but artists in either country are capable of turning out both drek and diamonds regardless of who’s in power, and crediting political context in both cases probably risks being insensitive and blinkered at best. I can only approach “TRRST”, a political protest song, from my own context with the past few governments in the US, and with the recognition that it absolutely bangs in an utterly wrenching way, and that it succeeds where so many other political screeds fail. "Is it so wrong if I want to die/  Want to die?” is a hell of a lyric no matter the context. And “TRRST” builds its hook around a plea to “Mama”, as universal a word as humanity has, in the form of a heartwrenching plea paired with a bracing industrial beat. IC3PEAK - and ZillaKami, who one-ups them by narrating his own death during his own verse - dramatically embrace the encroaching darkness, daring to call it down to confront them and then spitting in its face. Maybe that’s the most powerful response we can have.

[groovesnjams]

gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms       S // O // T // Y 2o2o

nO. 2/50

“Ngihamba Nawe” by Simmy ft. Sino Msolo

MG:

I have no context for the meaning of “Ngihamba Nawe” other than an abiding belief that all songs are love songs. And honestly? For much of the year I felt that it was pretty weak as far as love songs go. It’s so soft and gentle and sunlit. Where are the trials and tribulations? Where is the desperation? Why is it not a ballad? A funny thing happened. I became a, sort-of, de facto weed dealer to my sister who lives in a state where weed is not legal. I’d delivered her a three month supply in October when she visited for my mom’s birthday and we planned on me bringing some to our Christmas get together and then maybe my mom would bring some with her to my sister’s birthday in February. The plans weren’t firm, we simply trusted that because everything had always gone a certain way in our family that the footsteps of our lives would once again merge into a single path for the holidays. My husband and I spent almost the entire month of November hemming and hawing over whether or not to visit his mom for Thanksgiving (a newer but, if anything, more important tradition) before letting her know only a few days prior that we’d settled on it just not being safe. She was relieved. Shortly after, every pending family get together was cancelled like an unfun game of Mouse Trap, and I say this as someone who has spent, like, 25 consecutive years journaling to myself about how stressed out and depressed I am to live through another Christmas Day. Once I couldn’t have it anymore, it was the thing I wanted most of all. The thing my sister wanted most of all was the weed casually promised to her months prior. And in my mom we found a solution. We’d, all of us, drive to Mt. Vernon, IL and meet at the Arby’s off I-57. With all disrespect to everyone I’ve hugged on Christmas who didn’t make it to that parking lot, this year was the greatest Christmas of my whole entire life. I’m certain it won’t be topped. It was like Charlie Brown’s tree, perfect in its paltriness. Which brings me back to “Ngihamba Nawe.” It’s obviously a love song, but not all love is bass drum and melodramatic keys. In fact, that’s some of the worst love out there. It’s the love that mandates you sit in a stiff chair, in a poorly lit living room, repeating “ooohhhh, not too much, how about you?” to all the people you’re lucky enough to avoid the rest of the year. The best, the happiest, the most unforced and the brightest love is right here on “Ngihamba Nawe” and I’d taken it all for granted, too long.

DV:

Early in the US lockdown period, before anyone knew quite what was going on or how long it’d last, my partner and I watched She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and I’ve kept coming back to it in the months since as a bright spot in the darkness. This is an exceptionally sweet, optimistic story about two people finding themselves and each other and saving the universe because of it. Not every relationship has a Catra and an Adora? Presumably? But all I really know is that months later I still feel emotionally overwhelmed every time I think of Catra getting the happy ending she spends the whole story hopelessly grasping for. It feels so improbable, so lucky, and in retrospect so inevitable - in the way only a beautifully executed narrative can be. And to be super corny about it I feel improbably lucky in having found my partner, and I hear that improbability in “Ngihamba Nawe”, the sweetest song from an album that won’t even get a physical release in the US - much less a review anywhere in the Western hemisphere besides The Singles Jukebox. The lyric, a duet, narrates a couple trying to feel out whether they’re each into the other. They take turns describing their uncertainties; they find out they need not have doubted. It’s as certain as a perfect romantic comedy and perfectly as satisfying to discover that of course they belong together: the production, from Sun-El Musician, tells you as much from the warm embrace of its first tone. “There are many others but I still choose you,” Simmy sings, her voice an unmistakable embrace. And “I choose you” is a lyric with a lot of history behind it, but Simmy leads into it with an emphasis on the significance of choice. Love is meaningful because it’s a decision we make with each other, because we could move in other directions but know that there’s only one future that actually makes sense and it’s one together. The chance of meeting someone amongst the chaos of life is beautiful, but more beautiful is the chance that you can continue to grow with each other after that moment, that you choose each other again and again, as you learn and discover more about each other and yourselves. True romance is discovery, from the first moment on. And my hope for the future is that we each deserve the glorious sunlit lands that “Ngihamba Nawe” promises.

[groovesnjams]

gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms       S // O // T // Y 2o2o

nO. 3/50

“My High” by Disclosure, Aminé, slowthai

MG:

In years past, I think (I think) we’ve attempted to make a list that will register as intrinsically personal as it rolls out but will also register as timeless and thoughtful if revisited years later. I know, we are very great. Previous lists have included declarations of finding my most favorite song, which implies something evergreen and everlasting, a song for all times and any times. This year, say it with me, has been profoundly different. I hope all these songs carry meaning as the bleak backdrop falls away to reveal...I don’t know. Something. Not this. And when that time comes, what will we want to soundtrack our revivification? DV has been very explicit: bangers, in a crowd, or anywhere there are other people. As is my erstwhile want, I’ve been cagey. I don’t like crowds! I go to bed at 9 PM! But those are sort of superficial and easy explanations for why I feel uncertain about the future. The bedrock truth is that in no point in my life have I undergone this kind of change and then returned to my previous self completely intact and ready to resume life as though an entire year or years were just me, floating through space, and I’d finally come home. All this lengthy preamble to say: “My High” sounds like eulogy for a recent past. I started writing this post believing I’d conclude “My High” was the song that would bridge our woeful present and carry us on its buoyant back to a place of eternal happiness. But it won’t, it can’t. Sorry to be so grim! Even though the world that makes up “My High” is but a fond memory, we still have the song, the artefact, to make our eternal return. Even though we can’t go back, even though our bodies are more time capsule than time travel, I know we will try.

DV:

I want to give full credit here to Aminé - who had the best lyric of 2019 on “Jailbreak the Tesla” - and slowthai - who has a way of only turning up on bangers - but I also have to acknowledge that with “My High”, Disclosure have made the best song of their career, and I never thought they had something like this in them, and I am so happy to be wrong because this song is just so fucking good. Who knew these dummy brothers could make a banger as fun as this? It’s utterly against all odds, against their track record, and even more enjoyable because of it. Their beat scampers and gallops, restless and driving yet somehow light as a feather. It’s the perfect setting for Aminé, who manages the year’s goofiest chorus with the simple change-up between “Bitch don't fuck up my high” and “Please don't fuck up my high”. There’s an entire, all-too-familiar story in those two lines! I have admittedly been on both sides of it, for better and worse; not to give him too much credit or unintentionally roast myself but is this the key dichotomy of being stoned in two lines? Regardless,  the entire song barrels along on this positively gleeful level, from Aminé’s “Thinks I'm wrong, maybe it's them drugs” to slowthai’s breathless verse, to way the production never quite lets up but also never quite stays in the same place, propelled by perfectly-timed ad libs and clever dynamic shifts. My feelings for “My High” are something between: now I don’t have to listen to Disclosure for another 8 years, because that’s how long it takes them, and: I should pay attention to Disclosure now, because this is one of the year’s absolute best. I still have to figure out how to handle that, it’s on me, but maybe the best thing about “My High” is that I can just compromise by following where slowthai and Aminé go from here. Probably we all should.

[groovesnjams]

gr_OOves ‘n j A_ms       S // O // T // Y 2o2o

nO. 4/50

“On My Own” by Shamir

DV:

Six years ago when Shamir hit our radar with “On The Regular” I did not expect that he’d be making the best 90s redux song I heard in a year full of 90s redux songs, but here we are. “On My Own” is angst-filled and brilliant, a complicated breakup song that’s also - despite its title - a singalong jam. Picture me, the first time I’m back in a huge safe crowd someday in some beautiful future, shouting along with everyone else: “But I refuse to fucking suffer!” It sounds glorious now, with only Shamir’s multitracked vocal, and it’ll sound even better then, with a few hundred people who can’t sing singing along, finding a chorus outside the actual chorus. “On My Own” thrives on that contradiction, on the way Shamir scatters its high points like diamonds across a mirror, like form spontaneously generating function. It’s probably impossible to make a pop song about solitude because pop is a functionally communal art form, but that tension - artists do love their solitude, but they do also love their audience - informs some of the genre’s greatest work, and it’s the motivating tension underlying “On My Own” as well as my fantasy performance of it. We did suffer, we all suffer; we also all refuse it. These aren’t incompatible ideas, they’re just fundamental expressions of humanity, a species that developed the idea of logic without ever experiencing it. Shamir contains multitudes, as do we all.

MG:

Like a lot of people with too much time on their hands this year and a persistent lack of foresight that can’t be attributed to any pandemic, my household welcomed a puppy because what better time to get a puppy than when you are forced to stay with it, to keep a menacing vigil over its tiny, sharp milk teeth, to absorb all its pitiful wails and whimpers as though you are human egg-crate foam. Guys, it’s awful. The only revelation in the experience, other than finally understanding why childless folks think puppies are on par with babies (like, they’re not, but, ok, I do get it) is my discovery of the Buzzr channel. At least in the Chicagoland area, this is a station you can pull in with rabbit ears and all it airs is old game shows. It’s best in the middle of the night when things are already surreal and disjointed. As I watched Richard Dawson press his lips to each and every woman’s face, all I could think was “well, at least these women are all dead now and don’t have to remember this anymore.” Like Buzzr, Shamir is also mining the past for ways to make the uncomfortable present more beautiful but it’s a fraught prospect. The guitar riffs that overflow “On My Own” are borrowed nostalgia but they’re returned with glorious clarity, improved by their time with Shamir. The affection is there but the adherence to tradition is not; this is why it’s crucial that these vaunted relics be revisited by outsiders. Guitars aren’t inherently bad but an unquestioned acceptance of any object’s use and limitations is. The game shows had simple, often silly rules. One show revolved around a card game where you guessed if the next card in the shuffled deck was higher or lower than the card before. We’ve forgotten the games and all that’s left is a time worn reverence for people like Richard Dawson or Joan Rivers or Bob Barker or Charles Nelson Reilly.  We are so concerned with preserving Betty White, but Scoey Mitchell is still alive and we can recognize him, in his lifetime, as the greatest recurring game show panelist of the original game show era. “On My Own” is a break up song that revels in its big emotions and communicates an enduring self-reliance through catchy pop production. That might sound familiar, or even basic, but it’s an opportunity to revisit something we thought we understood and instead find we’d forgotten the best part.