2016 In Memoriam: The Album is Dead, Long Live the Album

One of the most antiquated mediums of music deliver experienced a surging Renaissance in 2016. While the music industry still gripes with how to perceive and roll out the music album, artists are just… putting it out. It’s a wild idea, I know.

serge
Armchair Society

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**Whew, well this year is almost over and hopefully with out any more interactions *gets in car, drives through a forest and knocks on the nearest pine until his knuckles bleed*. What a disastrous prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road has this year been, but even in the darkest times there is light. The 2016 In Memoriam series is everything we wish to remember and forget about this roller-coaster of a year. Think of it is a multi-tiered Yelp review.**

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The album is supposed to be long dead and gone as a music release format. Our great and benevolent overlords of the algorithm favor the monochromatic singles that bleed into their successors with such monotonous ubiquity that we’re 3 years away from living in a world where it feels like it’s one song on repeat over and over again. There isn’t supposed to be a planned and meticulous compilation of songs that delivers music in well thought out and deliberate manner. Why do you think Views sounds nearly identical no matter how you rearrange the songs: voicemail-melancholy-melancholy-voicemail-island tune-melancholy. But here we are, talking about some of the great music that came out in 2016. From hauntingly beautiful to downright “too cool for the Spotify algorithm inventive”. What a good year to be a music fan.

In many ways, 2016 has become the year of the “goodbye album,” a year that claimed too many talented artists who left us a few parting mementos through which to remember them. In a sense Bowie’s Lazarus felt like a most fitting farewell of all for an artist who both lived and died on his own terms. Already deeply emotional, the songs took on new meaning following Bowie’s sudden passing. It was the kind of melancholy punctuation mark that his career deserved in the end, adding a bittersweet note to this year’s musical roll-out.

Similarly, We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service is akin to encompassing Phife Dawg in kryptonite and preserving him for eternity. It’s a Q-Tip album through and through, brimming with his lyrical ambition and ability to stretch classic hip-hop into various levels and sub-genres, but sections of it are definitively Phife’s. His flow is timeless and encompassing, and even though it has been 18 years since The Love Movement. In a sense, We Got It From Here is the synthesis of a creative clash, the timeless flow of Phife and the immeasurable ambition of Q-Tip. What makes it even more poignant is that they couldn’t reconcile it earlier to give us more good music. For now, we are left with this fleeting memento of the talent the world lost and the one that lives on forever.

While Lazarus was mystically dark and ambiguous until the final reveal and We Got It From Here was more of a celebration of Phife than anything else, Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker sounds almost like a love letter to death, which is a weird person to write a love letter to. It’s moody and filled with acceptance of the inevitable, it’s a narration of his own passing more so than a tribute to his immeasurable talent.

The rest of the year read as all over the place as the Sacramento Kings draft strategy (but in the opposite sense, as in ALL GOOD, ALL CAPS). It was as much as an experience of launching an album as much it was simply going back to what worked. The Queen of the Twitter as well as your hearts and probably U.S. President sometime soon given the way things are headed, did another one of her surprise launches. With Formation already filling in as a de facto revolution anthem around the country, Lemonade dropped like a bomb with the sudden impact of one. Beyonce has long been the cornerstone of the modern-day zeitgest, to the point where she can probably fit five mansions and a pool on her plot of land within it. Her theatricality and ability to generate themes out of societal conciseness always translated to music. From personal infidelity to globality of Black Lives Matter, Lemonade was almost like a manifesto. Almost. But hear me out (prepares to field Twitter firestore), the album was aight. There’s some very dope productions on there and her typical ear for what hits, but it’s not like that shit was Blonde.

Speaking of Blonde, and bucking the common release trends, I never thought we’d see another Frank Ocean album, like ever. I thought his whole 1-week HGTV experiment was basically an announcement that he’s gone to find himself somewhere in the waters of Minnetonka and he was just building a canoe or something. Fortunately, Frank delivered following his ambiguous carpentry lesson. Blonde has become the comfy pair of pants of 2016, the album you put on where you can’t think of something else and let it soothe you. To compare it to his previous work would be unfair purely because of how different it is. He progressed into sonic minimalism, twinging at the sounds as little as possible. It’s a love letter to himself and his fans (current and the ones lost around Blonde).

That is not to say that the year wasn’t bubbly as hell. Anderson.Paak set the tone with dropping Malibu, which went largely underrated for most of the year. Up until maybe July, the only peeps copping the record were ones who consistently appreciated good music and deep diving head first into crates and hype beasts who did it just so they can name drop them owning it into conversations without having listened to it once. But game recognize game and talent can’t stay hidden for long, so Paak quickly exploded as a polymath able to blend genres and play musical instruments. He’s everywhere now, down to the NBA commercials and his blend of California Soul, R&B and Hip-Hop is basically the sound of 2016. A melodic melange of optimism and inherent need to do drugs, because let’s face it Trump is going to be president soon.

Adding to the list of dudes finally getting their shine down, Chance The Rapper graced us with Chance 3 aka Coloring Book, which, lol, earned him a Best New Artist nom from the Grammy’s. And if you’re following, yes, that’s his third mix-tape, and yes Acid Rap dropped way back in 2014 so this nomination basically reaffirms that the Grammy’s are narrated by people as culturally in tune as your “hip” aunt who still sells you Montell Jordan YouTube links (speaking of, Montell Jordan has performed at at least 5 NBA games in five different NBA cities this year which means that the dude is probably in on hard times. We need to get to Spotify and give Montell some love, he gave us “This Is How We Do It” and he looks like Dollar Store RZA). Chance’s melodic optimism and ability to look on the bright side is the side of hope we needed for 2016. Listening to Coloring Book is like sprinting through a summer meadow towards a rainbow while more Chance the Rapper plays in the background. It’s a surreal out of body experience that leads to pure joy and a much needed detour in the modern era of trap rap and sad voicemail hip hop genre. Don’t even get me started about D.R.A.M.

If you’re into the new wave though, your year was also pretty dope. From Young Thug, to Rae Sremmurd all the way to Travi$ Scott. If anything, this was more about artists finding their voices on record. Thug settled in as bizzaro trap thesaurus with Jeffrey, Travi$ discovered himself as the Trap Kid Cudi with Birds in the Trap while Ear Drummers delivered the anthem of the latest meme (I still don’t know whether I get buck or stand perfectly still when “Black Beatles” comes on) as well as some heavier stuff on Sremm Life 2. All of this buoyed by ScHoolboy Q’s heavy drops on Blank Face. In the age of the algorithm, it’s hard to maintain consistency through an album and warrant for multiple front to back listens. We’ve been dissuaded from listening to music in this manner, but Blank Face invites multiple viewings. It layers itself with overlapping beats and screeching vocals from the artist. There is complexity to tracks AND the way they’re aligned. Front to back.

No hip hop discussion would be entirely complete without bringing up Kanye West and Drake. I’ve been often accused of not liking Drake very much. Which, I mean, yeah, I don’t. But I liked Take Care, his objectively best album, and Nothing Was the Same, his sonically most complete one. Ever since then he has been caught up in his uninspired faux-cool guy persona, just charismatic enough for you to care but unambitious enough so it’s not for long. It’s like he’s an android from Westworld who’s personality is populated by the Google search results for “how to be cool”. Every time he manages to approach a semblance of consciousness, someone comes along (usually a Spotify algorithm) and resets the network settings.

Views isn’t particularly a trash album. It has moments of the sound that was so enigmatic on Nothing Was the Same, but falls apart under self-inflicted pressure to be cool. Same tired out voicemail drops to show you how above it all he is and “why are they here” Caribbean tunes because Toronto gets Caribana and like, you gotta do something for that I suppose. It’s not bad per se, it’s just lazy, filled with everything we’ve seen before, perfected in entirely no way what’s so ever.

This stands in stark contrast to Kanye who has caught up to himself in the race to be smart just for the sake of being smart. Suffering from creative ADD in all shapes and sizes, Yeezus never offered the same album twice, sometimes not even once, switching up styles halfway through. Musically, The Life of Pablo… What can you say about an album who’s biggest track wasn’t even by it’s top artist? It still had shining moments of Kanye’s genius to capture the most modern sounds and layer voices, melodies and tones in bunches on top of each other to the point where you can’t even tell who’s is signing (autotune on steroids). Conceptually is where it’s owed the most.

TLoP is currently in the perpetual state of “Ima fix wolves,” and that isn’t going anywhere. What’s most intriguing about the album is the manner in which it released, re-released, reinvented itself and introduced the world to the “malleable” album — one that would grow over time as the artist changed himself. Kanye recognized the fluctuating economy of online streaming and worked to not as much tailor his release to it as to break it, dropping new cuts, re-doing songs and forever fixin’ Wolves. If nothing else, Pablo gave the world Desiigner, whom it can have back by the way.

Rhianna basically played herself with Anti, which is kind of upsetting because it’s her best and most comprehensive album to date. Previously ADDish, she was able to set the tone and follow through on the majority of tracks, going deeper than she has before and actually adding some much needed gravitas to her music, whatever that may mean to you. Some will blame the surprise nature of the album, but it’s only a surprise in as much as if you didn’t have Instagram and/or eyes and anticipated that an artist release singles consistently was about to release an album. To be fair, it all contributed to a weird roll-out mechanic that culminated into more conversation happening about the manner of release than the music itself.

Radiohead returned with A Moon Shaped Pool, a weird record encased somewhere between the old and the new. For a variety of their fans still struggling to come to terms with their departure from the grunginess of their sound into an android like wonderland, this may be a pleasant welcome back, or another artistic experiment in the place of giving the people what they want. The album is, to its credit, significantly more organic than their previous efforts, as in it sounds like it’s been produced by living organisms as opposed to some sort of sentient machines. It hums and bellows all over the place where cohesion is a distant memory, yet it somehow ends up sounding more melodic than we could have hoped for.

Speaking of inherent experimentation with sound, boy has the Weeknd traveled a long way. From the flickering light hotel room bellows of House of Balloons, he has taken cocaine consumption public and into the mainstream. While Starboy is definitely Abel’s album, the Daft Punk touch is heavy throughout, giving it that almost comic-bookish quality (I presume it has something to do with his most recent transition into Blade). He is the drug consumption advocate for the drug era, the seller of experience. Weeknd’s voice has always been the drawing factor, he is able to stretch it over chords and find melody in a variety of ways and Starboy is his trip out of the rabbit hole he fell into with Beauty Behind the Madness. It’s less generic, more alive with sound and vibrant with determined personality. Yes, it’s a lifestyle of excess, but one that comes with a dose of self appreciation.

Much like Starboy is the Weeknd’s rediscovering himself moment, Awaken, My Love is Donald Glover’s. Actually, that’s not 100% correct. It’s more like Donald Glover finding himself, taking himself to the desert under the guise of spiritual discovery, getting himself hopped up on LCD then spinning his body around and driving away in a Toyota Celica while leaving the old self behind. Sorry Kanye, but Awaken, My Love is the most inventive reimagining of the year, a blending of genres and eras so seamless you basically feel like you’ve wondered into an underground soul club through a back door somewhere in Detroit circa 1950s. Between Atlanta and Awaken, My Love, Glover becomes a true polymath and a master of free artistic expression and ability to do dope shit with dope friends. The sounds on the album are unfamiliar to 2016 and yet universal on a non-chronological timeline of musical genre blending. It’s a soothing melody that takes you on a trip of both cultural and musical history to arrive at the very moment where its needed most. You should probably just go listen to it already.

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