The Most Bullshit-Free Records of 2016
Awarding the best of everything in music
Best album to just, like, put on whenever, ya know?
KAYTRANADA — 99.9%
Best cool guy with the best cool guy album title and the best cool guy vibes
Cass McCombs — Mangy Love
Best Album of the Year
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — The Skeleton Tree
2016 was the year Bullshit took on a life of its own. Bullshit was everywhere, in everything. There was some Bullshit we hated and some Bullshit we loved and some Bullshit we laughed at. There was repellant Bullshit and magnetic Bullshit, abstract Bullshit and crystal fucking clear Bullshit. There was even Bullshit we used as a salve for other Bullshit.
For a while it was easy enough to navigate the vast landscape of Bullshit because we had our Bullshit detectors on full blast. But then we looked around and noticed that Bullshit had become sentient. And we went Uh Oh. And we started asking questions like “What if Bullshit isn’t so much invading our world as we are now living in Bullshit’s world?” And we went Double Uh Oh. We’d crossed the Rubicon of Bullshit.
But right smack in the midst of all the Bullshit, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released 40 minutes of the most Bullshit-free music ever recorded. Skeleton Tree is spare, soulful, somber and, well, skeletal. Press play and all you’ll hear is honesty, mastery, bravery, beauty, poetry, madness, sadness. Amidst the swells and swoops, the strings and strums, there’s that voice calling you, cutting through the Bullshit with haunting, human truths.
“Nothing is for free. And it’s alright.”
Best collective regional effort
Los Angeles Hip-Hop: Schoolboy Q—Blank Face; Kendrick Lamar—untitled unmastered; Anderson .Paak—Malibu; YG—Still Brazy; Vince Staples—Prima Donna
This has to be up there with the most classics to ever come out of the same city in one calendar year.
Taken separately, you’ve got some of the best, most exciting music released this year— from Schoolboy Q’s bleary and bleak midnight music, to Kendrick Lamar’s fiery untouchable bars, to Anderson .Paak’s addictive Califusion, to YG’s retro-modern G-funk, to Vince Staples’ flat-out brilliance.
Taken together, you’ve got what human potential sounds like.
Best Hamilton
Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam—I Had a Dream That You Were Mine
See also: Best lead single; Best production; Best sustained commitment to a theme; Best male vocal performance; Best collaboration.
Best song that sounds a teensy bit like Savage Garden but instead of “Chicka Cherry Cola” you get a danceable rumination on saying goodbye to a friend and lover who made you realize you could be more than you thought
School of Seven Bells—“Ablaze”
Best promotional materials
Dinosaur Jr. — “Solo Extractions”
They know and we know that we come to Dinosaur Jr. for the magnificent squall of distortion that’s been exploding out of J. Mascis’ guitar and obliterating eardrums for 30 years and counting. So to promote their excellent, punchy new album Give a Glimpse of What Yr Not, they pulled every guitar solo from every song and piled them into one handy clip. Well played.
Best televised performance
Beyoncé and Dixie Chicks — “Daddy Lessons” at the CMAs
This one has a bit of everything. It’s got Beyoncé taking her Dixie Chicks-inspired “Daddy Lessons” and bringing in the actual, reunited Dixie Chicks for backup because, you know, she can do things like that. It’s got the sassiest sax-man since The Lost Boys (3:40). It’s got Matthew McConaughey thumping his chest like he really is that dude from The Wolf of Wall Street (3:52). But, best of all, it’s got Kenny Chesney looking sad (4:05) as he gazes upon a majestic, powerful performance which doubles as an on-stage in-person subtweet that reads “Kenny Chesney and his music and his fans are garbage.”
Best addition to the road trip rotation
Kevin Morby—Singing Saw
Best rainy-day psych-rock album that kind of all sounds the same at first but when you stack up enough rainy days and give it some more spins it becomes clear enough that you’ve misunderstood it a bit and that in fact what you thought was “formulaic but good” was in actuality “focused and perfect” and maybe it’s even good for sunny days too
Heron Oblivion — Self Titled
The (Modified) “Advanced Genius Theory” Award for throwing a killer curveball
TIE: Frank Ocean and Sturgill Simpson
A few years ago, a writer named Jason Hartley put forth “The Advanced Genius Theory” of music. It’s complicated, but basically boils down to this: true geniuses don’t lose their genius, but they do Advance beyond audience expectations and comprehension, often in ways that are shocking (or even saddening) to their core fans. There are a ton of sub-rules within the theory, the most problematic of which excludes any artists who have not already sustained at least 15 years of Genius Music, resulting in this genuinely interesting theory being used primarily to justify appreciating kinda shitty albums by older rock musicians.
So I’d like to modify and greatly simplify the Advanced Genius Theory. For our purposes here, let’s consider an album Advanced if it is (a) made by an artist who can safely be considered a Genius based on recent work, and (b) catches fans of that artist off-guard in a way that leads to an undeniable realization that the artist is even more of a Genius, and a different kind of Genius, than previously believed.
And so, the winners of 2016’s (Modified) Advanced Genius Theory Award are Frank Ocean’s Blond, for stripping away everything but impossible beauty, and Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, which invents modern country-soul in the form of a maritime-themed concept album about fatherhood.
Best electronic music for jogging that lets you disappear into a syncopated kinetic symphony of sound, heart, and lungs, forgetting for just over eight minutes how lame both electronic music and jogging are
Lindstrøm — “Closing Shot”
The Best Band Going Right Now is a pretty easy call
Parquet Courts — Human Performance
Best Song of the Year that isn’t Beyoncé’s “Formation”
Francis and the Lights (feat. Bon Iver and Kanye West)—“Friends”
Beyoncé pretty much ended the contest for song of the year all the way back in January. She didn’t just win, she won in the way only Beyoncé can, which is with so much force that it appears there is only one way to win, and that there can be only one winner. So let’s recognize that there’s all kinds of winners out there, and they aren’t all world-shaking. Sometimes Big Winners just sway thoughtfully, quietly, until Bon Iver jumps in and sings “I will turn around” and you can’t help but feel like there’s no way a song could be better.
Album with the greatest number of insightful singalongs
Car Seat Headrest — Teens of Denial
I don’t know what I was expecting with that band name. Okay, that’s a lie—I was expecting some twee nonsense. Instead I got song after song after song that made me think, made me head-nod and fist-pump, made me laugh, made me sing along then shout along, and hit repeat again and again.
The Roy Orbison Award for really taking it up a notch at the end of an already great song
Savages— “Adore”
The “Goddess in the Doorway” Award for inducing severe denial in listeners
Kanye West — The Life of Pablo
In 2001, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner famously (infamously?) wrote a 5-star review of a garbage Mick Jagger solo record called Goddess in the Doorway. I have never heard that album. You have never heard that album. And yet we can safely say that album is not an all-time classic. Still, we can understand how reviews like that happen. Sometimes people are just too close to an artist, too accustomed to greatness, to see the truth. Sometimes there are artists who, to a given reviewer, can simply Do No Wrong.
This year, Kanye West turned us, and the entire internet, into Jann Wenner reviewing that Mick Jagger album. Because Kanye has delivered classic after classic, altering the course and potential of mainstream music with every release (that’s, like, hard to do!), we bent over backwards finding ways to talk about this bad album without using the words “bad album.”
There are three songs on here that rank with the year’s best—“Ultralight Beam,” “Famous,” and “Waves”—and some other good ones, largely propped up by crucial collaborators. But mostly this is just Kanye talking about bleached assholes while sounding like the same.
Get well, Yeezy.
Best Sentiment expressed over the Best Beat with the Best Guest Verse
Dreezy featuring Gucci Mane — “We Gon Ride”
I just love a good ode to friendship. And I love it even more when it doubles as a banging, bouncing Welcome Back to Gucci Mane.
Best albums I couldn’t think of categories for other than “Damn These Are Great Albums” so here’s a list:
Angel Olsen — My Woman
Leonard Cohen—You Want It Darker
Miranda Lambert — The Weight of These Wings
Nicolas Jaar—Sirens
Nails—You Will Never Be One of Us
Chance the Rapper—Coloring Book
Carly Rae Jepsen — Emotion: B Sides
Steve Gunn—Eyes on the Lines
Blood Orange—Freetown Sound
Beyoncé—Lemonade
Non-wanky yet explosive Guitar Jam of the year (or , Dude, is it more of a Guitar Journey? Whoaaa)
Chris Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band—“High Castle Rock”
The Infinite Achievement Award in Giving Zero Fucks
Bob Dylan, obviously
See that photo right there? It’s from 2004, when Bob Dylan was in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. Since about 1965, Bob Dylan has been a living breathing counterexample of what we today call “fan service.” The man does what he wants.
If there was a lifetime achievement award for not giving a flying fuck what anyone thinks or expects, Bob Dylan would’ve already won it several times over—for plugging in, for his performance in Don’t Look Back, for his many creepy mustaches, for his Christian Rock phase, for his keyboard playing, for wearing the same jacket on three different album covers, and on and on.
But given what Dylan pulled off in 2016, we must once-and-for-all recognize his unrivaled achievements in this arena by awarding him the first-ever Infinite Achievement Award in Giving Zero Fucks.
See, last year Bob Dylan released an album of Sinatra covers. That is to say, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, with one of the worst voices of all time, performed a collection of songs he didn’t write, songs popularized by one of the greatest singers of all time. And then this year Bob Dylan released ANOTHER Sinatra covers record. Incredible.
Was he finished? He is never finished, which is why this award is for infinity. Bob Dylan became the first musician to ever win the Nobel Prize for literature…and didn’t acknowledge it for weeks. Instead he sat silently while a bunch of super smart denizens of the internet masterdebated whether he, one of the greatest and most impactful writers of anything ever, should be considered a “writer” at all. Then when he finally got around to thanking the Nobel Committee for the unprecedented award, he said he would “try” to make the ceremony. Perfect.
I bet the members of the Nobel Committee were really excited about how hard he was going to “try” to make it, like it was a friend’s kid’s birthday party. In the end, he bailed, obviously. Magnificent.
Best proof that disappearing into the wilderness can still yield profound and soulful results (provided you entered the woods with a proven ability to be profound and soulful in the first place)
Bon Iver—22, A Million
Best excuse for me to quote Guy Debord
White Lung—Paradise
Punk music is alive and well, thank goodness. Every year you’ll find some punks who push the form to new places, or just stick to the old paces and really nail it. White Lung manages to do both at once. With one of the best songwriters/vocalists currently going in any genre, aided and abetted by a stellar guitarist who plays like he has four hands, all pushed toward frenzy by a punishing rhythm section, Paradise is 29 minutes of punk perfection released forty years after the form crystallized in a famous New York City club that is now a John Varvatos flagship store.
Punk music didn’t come out of nowhere in the mid-70s. The sounds had been bubbling up for a decade or so, and even the sloganeering that united the first-wave punks under one banner was borrowed largely from radical precursors like Guy Debord’s Situationist International.
And so, while you’re getting wild to songs like “Kiss Me When I Bleed” and “Paradise” and “Dead Weight,” might as well keep these words from Debord on your mind:
“We are inevitably on the same path as our enemies—most often preceding them—but we must be there, without any confusion, as enemies.”
Seems relevant!
Best chorus to get lost in, and then further lost in, and then swept up in, swept all the way up in the clouds, looking down at where you started, deciding to take a hard pass on coming back down to Earth, because dreamy ethereal cloud transportation is the way of the future, and we deserve a future like that, where we can drift away in the same boat, chase the light of the rainbow, and besides it’s so damn nice up here, so close to heaven
Clams Casino featuring Kelela—“A Breath Away”
