The Year In

Every time we head into a new year, it's a time for hopeful outlook, and a time to reflect. You see all sorts of best-of lists. I was listening to NPR's All Songs Considered listening to their end of the year best of. It was partly the opinions of several of the folks who do their music show, which leans heavily to the indie scene, as well as votes by fans of the show.

I'll list the top ten by votes. Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, Sigur Ros's Takk, the self-titled Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spoon's Gimme Fiction, My Morning Jacket's Z, The Decemberist's Picaresque, The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan, Death Cab for Cutie's Plans, Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and the number one voted album, Sufjan Stevens Come On Feel The Illinoise.

Of these albums, I own all except the Fiona Apple, My Morning Jacket's, and the White Stripes. In other words, I have 7 of the 10 listed, which shouldn't be so surprising since I picked these albums primarily from the website (not quite so true for Sufjan, who I found browsing at Amazon).

The various people who host All Songs Considered were also asked to list their favorite songs. One of them really liked Feel Good, Inc. by Gorillaz.

I just watched the video online, and it is rather unusual. I've heard parts of the song, since Apple used it heavily in one of their Ipod ads. Leave it to Apple to add to its hip status by picking songs that, to anyone else, would just sound like a song, but has some meaning to those in the know. It's just elitist enough that others recognize it, but not so elitist that no one's heard of it.

The video for Feel Good, Inc. draws heavily from anime, but American (or at least non-Japanese) anime always seems a bit different. In this case, it's part anime, part inserted video, a la Apple's Big Brother ad, and ends in a rather subversive, ominous way, which you rarely see in anime. Of course, how would I know? I'm hardly an anime fan. It just seems different.

My listening habits are a bit odd in that I think I'm much older than the demographic for the music I listen to, but I think that I'm not that unusual. I suspect the trend is that as we get older, more of will continue to seek the latest "good" music.

The teens and post-teens that are listening to new groups like Sufjan or Clap Hands, are going to continue to listen to this scene as they grow older and head into their thirties and forties, being more hip to today's scenes than their parents were. You know how parents would often exclaim "That's not music!" when listening to the music of their kids. Now, they may be listening to that kind of stuff for much longer. Heck, NPR may be making this all respectable for the NPR set.

Ultimately, this is a splinter group, one that's gaining some popularity (enough that people have coined the term "yupster" which is short for "yuppie hipster", and yuppie itself being short for "young urban professionals". I suspect the other term for this is bobos, which, alas, sounds too silly to really really catch on. There's a sense of this term referring to a poser, someone who uses, as the Newsweek article points out, the soundtrack to the O.C. to inform their music selection (for that matter, Six Feet Under is also credited for bringing indie music to its fans).

Television shows use indie music to give it a kind of street cred. Although the purpose is completely different, this is how Indian music is distributed. Not through shows so much, but through films. Most bands in the west release CDs and/or tour. Popular Indian music is disseminated through film, usually as the lead actors lip sync their way through the songs (singers are considered so specialized in what they do that mere actors wouldn't think of trying to sing their own songs---Hong Kong actors can work around this because many of them came into the industry through talent scouts looking for singers, then producing albums, and finally, having these singers cross over into acting).

One of the albums I picked up this year was In The Heart of the Moon, a collaboration between Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabete. It's an unusual mix. Toure has often been called a Mali bluesman. Toumani plays the harp-like kora. Ry Cooder, who helped Toure produce one of his albums (I believe it was his last, Niafunke), was also key arranging these two in an improvisational session that lasted a few days.

To be fair, I had CDs from both of these guys years ago, so they weren't so new to me. Before trying out the indie music scene, I picked up a lot of music that's termed Afropop, a lot of it is quite good. There has been some crossover, with the album Dimanche A Bamako (Sunday at Bamako, I gather), two blind husband and wife musicians, singing in French. These two are also from Mali, which seems to be the hotbed of African music.

I also really like the deeply resonant, Cesaria Evora, but I don't know if she's released any albums lately.

I've just put in an order for Konono No. 1, which is a band from Congo. It was considered, along with Dimanche and In the Heart of the Moon, the three best albums coming out of Africa this past year.

I think I'm going to listen to a little more of Clap Hands Say Yeah. I suspect much of whether you like the album will depend on whether you can stand the voice of the lead singer, Alex Ounsworth. It sounds like a bit of a roller coaster of a song. The first "song" is more like an exhortation at a carnival or circus, which, alas grates, but the rest of the album is first-rate.

Although it was released in 2004, the soundtrack for Friday Night Lights, the somewhat fictionalized story of a Texas high school football team that feels the pressure of a town to win the state championship, has music by Explosions in the Sky, by a group that's classified as post-rock. It seems like a totally odd choice for music, but it works (for me). The group is based in Austin, which goes to show that all music from Texas isn't honky-tonk, line dancing, and country.

Oh, I'm going to end on a completely unrelated note. Whole Foods rocks! I was at Whole Foods yesterday looking for spices, in particular, nutmeg. I'm not a huge fan of nutmeg, but Dave wanted some, and it is often seen as an ingredient to pumpkin pie. I discover this huge stash of spices, and it's like dirt-cheap. Well, cheap enough. It's like going to an Indian store.

What I got for $2, I'd have to easily spend 3 or 4 times anywhere else. Sure, they're packaged up in cheap, throwaway plastic containers better used for pastries or what-have-you than spices, but I can deal if it's going to cost so little.