The Fifty Songs That Saved Me In 2018
Photo: Seydou Keita
THE HULKING, HEAVING PSYCHOPATHIC KILLER
Wild transgressions. Half the nation in horrified disbelief, the other wildly cheering the demise of all that’s good and decent about America. Personal loss, sadness, regret, failure. Anger at the vulgar inequities of life. $100 million weddings in India while 500 million weep from hunger and fear. Exploited, forsaken, stripped of all dignity, hanging themselves from trees because of unjust debts they couldn’t repay the rich and powerful and amoral. Meanwhile, American bombs shred little children in Yemen. We starve them and kill them slowly, painfully, with disease and indifference, while celebrating psychopathic tyrants, megalomaniacal, sick-in-the-head sheikhs, merchants of death and oppression, selling our souls along with our fucking weapons. Earth opens up like a monster’s jaws. Heaven’s collapse in black, mournful rain. Terrible tsunamis, epic snowstorms, treacherous famines, deadly wildfires in California consuming rich and poor alike. Nature protesting our brutalities. And Japan, that infinitely civilized, gracious, delicate culture will soon legalize the killing of whales again. What a year. What an age of disbelief. What a time of utter and willful ignorance and mayhem.
The hulking, heaving Mongoloid killer stares at the baby just born. His hairy, clawed hand caresses the child’s tender pink cheeks. What have we become? Where are we going? Can we pause in our amusement, our rush to nowhere, to feel, to think, to contemplate the madness before it consumes us?
THE PLEASURES WE CRAVE/A BLUE CENTURY
There are also the gracious, the brave, the generous, the sober amongst us. Are we listening to them? Do we see them? Can we clear a little path for them? Shouldn’t we support them as extravagantly as the pleasures we crave? Nadia Murad, who escaped the hell of ISIL sex slavery to become an activist and save the Yazidi people. Dr. Christian Blasey Ford, who heroically took on American patriarchy, Azim Premji, the Indian billionaire, who in a country with negligible philanthropy gave away all his wealth. Millions of others, the unknown and unsung, the silent beautiful who suffered tyranny but smiled, who lost sons and daughters to crazed gunmen but got up to face life the next day. A mother with Alzheimer’s who still checks my pulse and touches my brow, who still asks if I need money…
Yeah. It’s been a year and a blue century living it. But music saves. It soothes and lifts and takes you away, above and beyond the blood, the tears, the angst and fear, the torn skin and bruised self-respect and bleeding ulcers of despair. Every artist somewhere deep inside their ravaged heart wants to transform, to lift the veil of confusion and conspiracy and help us confront the terrible and beautiful truths of life, sing a song that helps us walk the crooked, drunken line.
THE FIFTY SONGS THAT SAVED ME IN 2018
So, this is the music that kept me from the monsters of 2018. Old, new, stolen, bartered and overheard, desperately foraged out of sonic trash bins and strangers’ medicine boxes. Dirty little fixes and sparkling, self-righteous hymns, broken dirges and raw-honey lullabies sung by homeless old black men and nubile blue-eyed blondes; disobedient, bent, fucked-up music most of it, but laced with paracetamol, CBD, serotonin, jaggery and endorphins- music for the weary and decrepit but also the inspired, enraged, awakened and impassioned; for lovers and losers and vagabonds like me.
For this list of the most therapeutic songs of 2018, I went through my twelve monthly-playlists of the year and some others, and made an edit of a hundred songs, which over the past month I have whittled down to these final fifty. Yes, children were killed and sacrifices made. Do I have a lot of time on my hands? No. Music sweetens life.
THOLA AMADZOLI
Brenda Fassie’s “Thola Amadzoli” amongst a lot of other African music helped me get over the anger of personally discovering that apartheid is still rampant in Africa. Broken, wild and gone for thirteen years she is an underappreciated artist short-changed by her own country. For a while I ricocheted between the Tanzanian 90’s electro of Acid Queen and the narcotic grooves of female super-group Les Amazones d’Afrique who are campaigning for gender equality. Mother Africa gives us so much art and soul and depth and beauty and we in the West give her very little back. If only we returned to the world as much as we steal from it. Listen to “Tizita” (R. Yohannes) from Ethiopia and cry in ecstasy.
HOW FAR IS SPACED OUT?
Back home from various wanderings I discovered Lonnie Holley, an uncategorizable musician/sculptor from the South who paints such a stark, painful and stunningly accurate portrait of Trump’s America I am not surprised no one listens to him. “I Woke Up In A Fucked-Up America” and “How Far Is Spaced Out?” are just two dark masterpieces on his new album. We are not a country who wants to look in the mirror and face our ugliness. And Lonnie’s story is so epic and enthralling it makes Bob Dylan’s fictions read like children’s storybooks. There is the hypnotic beauty of Yves Tumor’s jagged electronica(?), and unabashedly joyous R&B of Robert Finley who was homeless until recently. Black outsider music that does not reach large audiences because our mostly safe, mediocre, homogenized, tainted music industry hates outsiders, risk takers and outliers and anyone marginally deviant from the Top 20 drivel on the radio. (Radio?).
JAPANESE BREAKFAST
But yes, there was Amen Dunes from Brooklyn, with “Freedom”, a stately, addictive, redemptive album that yielded many cures for me as did Nathan Bowles’ Appalachian, banjo-fueled folk-trance. My friends know I am big fan of female alt-country and this year Sarah Shook and the Disarmers delivered a big fat fuck-you to the male-dominated country music scene. Sensitive white young men like Marlon Williams and George Ezra saved my pop music universe from being dominated by women. I am a sucker for female lead singers and in 2018 numerous breathy, angelic voices saved me from the doom and gloom of America descending into a hell of babies ripped from mothers, greed, avarice and apathy towards the environment, and the general malaise of discontent, hopelessness, quiet desperation and anger that seems to run through our country today. Women like Meghan Remy (U.S. Girls), Lola Kirke, Jess Williamson, Hatchie, Vera Sola, Sharon Van Etten (sounding fierce on the new album), Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast) and Tessa Murray (Still Corners) are doing us a favor by adding tenderness, beauty and melody to a discordant and chaotic world screwed-up by men.
TO THE MOON AND BACK
There are songs we take for pure pleasure. Music that accompanies the 4 am rendezvous in strange, slightly dangerous cities where seductive alien-looking people speak in tongues and neon lights bleed like rivers on rain-soaked cobble-stone streets. Swedish band Fever Ray’s Karen Dreijer is a muse for such beautiful but damned souls lost in the night and might have delivered the best song of the year for me, the savage, erotic/poetic electro-anthem “To the Moon and Back”. The twisted, dark flamenco of Rosalia’s “Malamente” and the (imaginary) back-in-your arms relief of Cigarettes After Sex’s “Crush” are other tracks on the list in the same category of nitrogen-laced sugar-highs that deliver you to a place of euphoria and grace after a year of mostly hell.
This music in the link below is my holiday gift to you. Listen if you will. Repetition reveals hidden melodies. Music is medicine and magic and connective tissue. It rids you of hate and readies you for love.
I hope in the new year we will take good care of ourselves and also care for those who have no one else. I hope and pray you will speak and stand-up for those who do not have voice.