#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. 11/50

“Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd

DV:

It took longer than expected, but this was the year that The Weeknd reached his ultimate end state: as the heir to Jason Derulo and Bruno Mars’s crown, as our preeminent Michael Jackson follower with delusions of grandeur. Luckily - like the two of them - this is a position that comes from building your imperial phase around classicist dancepop jams. Abel Tesfaye can make as many elaborate drug-fueled neo-noir music videos as he wants, but “Blinding Lights” is the winner of this year’s award for song-most-likely to be played in between sessions at a conference where the keynote speaker discusses how they applied blockchain in their product development cycle and cites Doordash as a success story. And that’s fine! Soulless monsters can enjoy a banger in the style of Flock of Seagulls as much as anyone, and this is a big enough banger that it’s erased Flock of Seagulls from the memory of everyone who hears it. It’s a big enough banger that I’m afraid I like The Weeknd now, after a decade of successful resistance.

MG:

I can’t believe we forgot to mention ♪Jay-son♪ ♫De-rulo♪ in our exhaustive list of pop stars who sing their own name because despite what the beginning of this sentence suggests, his work is unforgettable. But I’m more interested in the Bruno Mars comparison because The Weeknd is this season’s Super Bowl Half Time performer, a distinction that perhaps cements the increasing irrelevance of the Super Bowl Half Time Show. Bruno Mars, on the other hand, is probably the last Super Bowl Half Time performer that belonged on that mantle. And the way their divergent paths have merged is confusing, to say the least, as someone who has followed The Weeknd out of the corner of my eye since “House of Balloons.” Abel Tesfaye has always been something that happens in the middle of the night when all your friends are offline and asleep and, so, no one is watching you and you haven’t slept well in days, with dry eyes and a wet brain you’re open to experiences that horrify you during the daylight. Bruno Mars, quite the opposite, is a 7 PM bedtime and suitable for all ages, no parental supervision required and no small parts! But, yeah, now they’re not really distinct and in some ways that’s sad because sampling “Happy House” in service of drugs and fucking in the basement is what I’d point to as the most influential piece of music produced in the last decade. In other ways, “Blinding Lights” is the muzzle flash The Weeknd’s gun always promised. He’s traded up over the years, from buckshot to slugs, and “Blinding Lights” takes place in the penthouse, the least edgy place in the world. All the grime and darkness are scrubbed and stripped and his work is now suitable for lease to Disney. If Tesfaye is really the committed nihilist we met on his first mixtape (and I suspect he is) then “Blinding Lights” is the perfect Trojan horse.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 12/50

“LICK IT N SPLIT” by Zebra Katz ft. Shygirl

DV:

Just to be extremely clear this is easily the most unexpected, unhinged song I heard all year. We covered Zebra Katz back in 2013 when he jumped on an Icona Pop remix no one remembers any more, and then we forgot about him, and then he delivered one of the best albums of 2020. LESS IS MOOR is an idiosyncratic tour de force that’s epitomized by “LICK IT N SPLIT”, where Zebra is matched with Shygirl - who had a hell of a 2020 herself! - to create something truly exceptional. It’s hard to even pick a highlight here, and the song moves fast enough that by the time you register each one another has come along. Maybe it’s Zebra Katz calling himself “Mister Geppetto” or referencing one of rock n roll’s first sex jams (Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-ling”) or just the way he snarls his lyrics like a cartoon wolf. Maybe it’s Shygirl nonchalantly running through, “Imma let you fuck but only in the next/ Twenty minutes if you try your luck” as if she doesn’t need to breathe. Maybe it’s just Sega Bodega’s pneumatic beat, which alternates between sounding like a factory operating at peak capacity and a Raymond Scott track destined for Looney Tunes. The beauty of this maximalist, undeniable banger is: you don’t actually have to pick.

MG:

Listen, you can put this on a magnet or write it on a post-it and stick it on your bathroom mirror: stars need the darkness to shine. Yes, I said it. Would it have been a lovely surprise to discover Zebra Katz picked up where Maxinquaye left off in any year after 1995? Sure, but the badness of this year and the preceding 25 years of Maxinquaye made this star shine particularly bright. I can’t underscore this enough, we had a lot of Zebra Katz songs to choose from when making this list! LESS IS MOOR is a gem! But I like “LICK IT N SPLIT” because without Shygirl, listeners would be without our Martina Topley-Bird and it’s this interplay between rappers that elevates the song from anxiety of influence to spiritual successor. Zebra Katz is everything Tricky is at his best -- extremely cool, deeply unaffected, and coming into his genius. But Shygirl is more than a voice for Zebra Katz to claim like he’s Ursula the Sea Witch. She’s not animating his thoughts or performing the role of his mother and in a song that’s all about what we can do for Zebra Katz, she’s the voice that dominates “LICK IT N SPLIT.” Ultimately, neither Zebra Katz nor Tricky, neither Martina Topley-Bird nor Shygirl are here to make us feel comfortable or understood. “LICK IT N SPLIT” is a raw song that separates the physical from the emotional and then pursues the physical with dogged dedication. In that way, Zebra Katz created both the darkness and the star.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 13/50

“The Streets Where I Belong” by Annie

DV:

There are a few artists whose greatest gift might be their ability to sing their own name - a list that extends through Pitbull and Usher and Shakira and Jens Lekman, all the way back to Bo Diddly and the birth of modern pop music (not to mention rap, because we’d run out of space). This is fundamentally an extremely silly skill to have, but it’s also fundamentally wonderful to hear. Annie is very good at it. She’s good at it from “Chewing Gum” to “Hey Annie” to “The Streets Where I Belong”, where the opening line, “Annie, Annie, they're playing our song” tells listeners they’re in for something special. Here it’s because Annie’s other great-and-silly strength is the way she can transition so smoothly between coolness and vulnerability. “The Streets Where I Belong” is a memory, it’s a dream, it’s an impossibility. It’s a song about going home and feeling like it’s where you’re meant to be. It’s a song about missing the people you once knew there. The thing is: we can never return, we can never fully belong in the places where we once were. That community, that world, that ecosystem moves on without us - as we move along without them. We've always both changed, as hard as that is to grapple with. In “The Streets Where I Belong,” Annie comes back cool and ends up the opposite.Turning her peculiar power toward Johnny, the fictional guitarist, she asks for refuge the best any of us can: “Take it away.”

MG:

It’s a bit bold to posit this is the 13th best song of the year and then follow that up by saying it’s best appreciated by serious Annie fans, but that’s just the sort of thick-cut, flavorful pepperoni that this blog generously tosses on our pizza. To dig a little deeper into what DV says about artists singing their own names, Annie does it differently from the rest of the list. It’s her voice, yes, but she’s speaking as some sort of omniscient narrator calling “Annie” to the song. In “Chewing Gum” she sings “Hey, Annie” and coaxes from herself the story of how she loves ‘em and leaves ‘em. It’s a bit like an infomercial for a dubious product where it begins by positing that everyone struggles with opening cans or cooking eggs (no, they don’t) and then offers some hulking piece of plastic as the solution to the problem the infomercial invented. The manipulation is naive and childlike; if you buy that air fryer, you are a rube. If you’re hitting on Annie, you want to be shot down. But on “The Streets Where I Belong” the self-reference is brief, direct, affective, and adult. Annie has grown, grown nostalgic, but also collected enough experiences to be genuinely caught off guard by the flood of emotions music can trigger. She’s not just playing by herself here and the person calling her to the song isn’t her own invention but variously Johnny and the beauty queen and the DJ and her friends. Music connects us in profound, inextricable ways and it’s an obvious thing to point at but that doesn’t make a song like “The Streets Where I Belong” any less meaningful. It’s the obviousness of her journey through memory that makes Annie’s return to start feel familiar. Haven’t we all heard them playing our song?

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 15/50

“Tip Toe” by Sleepy Hallow x Sheff G

DV:

I have never and will never watch Insidious, but apparently they used Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” in that film? Instead of waiting for Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G to bring it to its natural afterlife as the extreme banger that is “Tip Toe”? Honestly this seems disrespectful! But I guess one generation’s kitsch is the next’s banger/creeper, sure, why not. What matters is that “Tip Toe” slaps, breathing new life into an old template. And a lot of that is down to producer Great John flipping Tiny Tim’s 1968 novelty hit: why speed up your sample when you can just find an original track that’s sung in a falsetto so ludicrous that it sounds like it must be pitch-shifted? But the other half is how smoothly Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G float over Tim’s unworldly vocal loop, their lengthy verses slightly loopy but always engaging. Sure, anything can be creepy if you edit it right - but “Tip Toe” is one of the most fun three minutes I heard this year.

MG:

I also can’t speak to the quality of Insidious but “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” has always carried an air of the supernatural creep in its helium vocals and tinny ukulele, so I’m not surprised to find it made its way into a horror movie. I suppose I’m also not surprised to hear it on the dark and gruff (but also, ultimately, silly) “Tip Toe” because this sort of unexpected but flawlessly executed sample is one of post-modern rap’s chief thrills. What I feel is more of a relieved sense of “finally!” because pretty much anything DV or I could play during an all night 45s party deserves to find a new context where the grooves can’t wear out. Would I love to hear what Sleepy Hallow could do with Great John sampling “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”? Oh. Yes. “Spirit In the Sky”? “Some Velvet Morning”? Yes. Yes. Is there a single 60s one hit wonder I don’t want to hear reworked by rappers for whom that decade is as far removed as the Suffragettes were to the Beatles? Maybe “Sugar Sugar” but then I think of what Megan Thee Stallion could do with the idea of a candy girl and I’m all in. Our nonstop consumer culture presses upon us the idea that everything must be used and disposed of, the quicker the better, and that applies to art above all. We’ve stopped dismissing the work of producers who sample as thievery (small victories!) but I don’t think we properly appreciate how they take forgotten pieces of junk and polish them up for resale, giving otherwise garbage a second life.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 26/50

“My Attitude” by Flo Milli

MG:

I’ve not given up on Nicki Minaj. But I will concede she’s racking up Ls in a “damn, take a W” way and despite it never, ever, in the history of ever working out this way, I do still hope the baby helps her towards the light and leads her away from lists like ONTD’s compilation of artists that have one good album but actually suck. Until then! We have Flo Milli. I don’t know how you can talk about Flo Milli without mentioning the obvious debt of gratitude to Nicki Minaj and while her spunk and the natural ease of her flow (the way she pivots from the plainspoken “ohh, hol’ up/ don’t record, don’t record” to the rapped “it’s my mama calling me/ I gotta press ignore” is subtle enough to miss but equally dynamic and crucial to the song’s conceit) can be traced back, she’s staked out her own territory -- literally -- by introducing herself on her own terms. Flo Milli is no one’s guest. “My Attitude,” and its tone deaf delivery of the titular line, is a barbed wire fence around the zone and within that pen, Flo dominates. I have no doubt she could waltz onto someone else’s track and steal it out from under them (Drake seems like an ideal target for a well deployed “Monster”-style verse) but it’s better that she doesn’t have to.

DV:

When my daughters were younger they’d watch this show called Sofia the First on one of Disney’s TV channels. And we thought, this is great, this is teaching something! This show has a bunch of empowered girls as its main characters, and every episode they prove a bunch of naysayers wrong by breaking the mold of what a girl can be like. But then we watched them playing “Sophia” on their own and we realized: when a show is like 15 minutes of the other characters saying, “Girls can’t do that!” and 5 minutes of the girl characters doing it, they’d remember the 15 minutes and forget the 5. So when I hear Flo Milli start with “What is ladylike?” as if it’s a challenge, I think of Sophia the First, and how after almost a quarter century of ~Girl Power~ our presumed-best intentions have just managed to force kids into the same restrictive gender roles while patting themselves on the back along the way. “Ladylike” is garbage, it’s worse than useless, and the way Flo Milli demolishes it in “My Attitude” isn’t through a carefully focus-grouped refutation of the idea that “girls shouldn’t play sports” or whatever, it’s by dismissing it in one line and showing off for the rest of the song. She’s insouciant and silly and rude - a true inspiration.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 30/50

“anthems” by Charli XCX

DV:

The best song Charli XCX has made since “Boom Clap”, “anthems” isn’t subtle about tackling COVID-19 and the isolation that it brought. No, this is big and bold and raw and more than a little silly, but that is also an accurate description of me most days. Charli translates her angst and loneliness into an off-kilter, overdriven banger that locates obvious, meaningful truths somewhere between “I get existential and so strange” and a vocal processed to sound like it’s projecting through a tin can. "anthems” is the sound of bad decisions and worse consequences, of dark clubs crammed with people, of 3am and the night’s just getting started - or I guess to be accurate, it’s the sound of longing for that. “We might we might we might,” Charli chants in the bridge, her words blurring together; it’s the realest part of the song. The future is a contested place, and an uncertain one. My “might” is to hope we can have an ironic dance to “anthems” in a real live club, sometime before my knees fail me completely.

MG:

Here in the, sort of, trying-my-best state of Illinois we attempted to pass what lawmakers called “The Fair Tax.” It was an income tax on the highest bracket and it was rejected. The opposition to the fair tax was called “The No Tax Hike Amendment” and, confusingly, neither wording appeared on the ballot. I might have seen some commercials for the fair tax but I don’t remember, they didn’t stick with me. The no tax hike amendment commercials were much more notable because they were filled with distinctly Midwestern dog whistles, particularly the use of the phrase “a load of crap.” It’s something I never hear outside my prairie world and it’s as specific to the region as any dese, dem, or dose. It’s also restrained and understated. A load of crap is not bullshit and definitely not fucking bullshit. It’s a load of crap, just get on with your day. I am a load of crap and “anthems” is my dead opposite. It’s loud, bratty, immature, and barking. Frankly, I find “anthems” annoying and skip it most times it plays but if there’s anything swinging through this slump I call life has taught me it’s that received wisdom and the old ways are also a load of crap, so I offer my cheers to Charli XCX on crafting what is somewhere, but not here, the best song of the year.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 33/50

“Afterglow” by Kitty

MG:

For the most part, this was a year where we were forced to get well acquainted with our own interiority. It was a confrontation for even the most dedicated introvert and I can’t imagine, truly, how hard it must be for the dyed in the wool extroverts. What limited social contact we were afforded often took place across great distances, rows of tiny faces in tiny boxes, and because you can’t make eye contact with a screen it felt like even other people were an extension of our fractured psyches. Our list reflects the claustrophobia, the anxiety, the ever present unhappiness that followed us around like algorithmic rainclouds. Except here. “Afterglow” is a song that takes place inside a head and it’s full of warmth and light and, above all, comfort. It’s the antithesis of what resonated and it’s the essence of Kitty to be a revelation out of step with the masses.

DV:

Between the jangly guitars, shuffling percussion, and the way she uses scratching to punctuate each transition, Kitty’s produced the best Sugar Ray song of 2001 here. “Afterglow” is as instantly catchy as any turn-of-the-millennium pop smash, but since it is a Kitty song that production’s paired with a characteristically incisive, complicated lyric about the endless empty space between thought and talk. These are small scale, personal stakes, but Kitty finds true meaning in them. Mark McGrath could never have managed that, could never have even conceived of it, to the extent that I’m not even sure this is an attempt at pastiche. Regardless, it’s hitting a strangely familiar wave. “Baby, I know/ Quiet isn't poisonous/ I think I’m enjoying it/ In my dream," Kitty croons as the synths chime brightly and her vocal widens into multi-tracked heaven. The lines between reality and fiction are blurry, but there’s also beauty in the liminal and unknown.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 43/50

“Catch Yourself Falling” by Nicolas Godin ft. Alexis Taylor

MG:

Why, in a year where nothing was easy or fun, nothing, did yacht rock find its re-entry point in our world’s atmosphere? I try to remember that its halcyon days are the very same as the serial killer’s in order to keep some perspective on what is otherwise music’s rococo period but it almost feels like a worse omen than when it was simply a harbinger of excessive leisure. And that’s probably how it should feel -- terrifying, to be clear -- to hear the dulcet sounds of “Catch Yourself Falling” unstuck from time. It’s meant to be a sort of soothing background music, something that won’t draw attention from a mountain of cocaine or clash strongly with the natural sway of ocean waves, but the very fact that it asks us to listen a little less overtly, to suspect a little less of its motives, is just enough to pirate my attention. Indeed, “Catch Yourself Falling” is a total nightmare, salve only for the disturbed.

DV:

Yacht rock may belong to an era of Reagan and Bateman in the popular imagination, but it’s also worth noting that the 80s never really ended - not just politically but culturally, as we remain incapable of going more than a year without a major pop star turning to the decade for inspiration, arguably because we remain incapable of imagining a more futuristic sound than glossy synths, arguably because we remain incapable of imagining a future at all. Yacht rock is just a gentle wave in this decades-old tide, breaking softly as it approaches the shore. And like the 80s, loneliness and alienation are eternal themes. “No one hears your call,” Alexis Taylor coos softly; and worse: “Open your eyes/ You’re wearing no disguise.” Maybe you think the challenge is to know yourself, but it’s really to live with what you find.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 45/50

“Persona Non Grata” by Bright Eyes

MG:

The singular Bright Eyes lyric, undeniably, even well past the myopia, small cities, and doomed young love of early albums like Fever and Mirrors, is “to me.” Or maybe it should be stylized as “to MEEEEEEE,” emphatic and warbling, a Conor Oberst delivery. I’m unashamed to admit Bright Eyes still means a lot, to me, to MEEEEEE, even though I’m...middle aged? No longer categorically desirable to advertisers? It’s fresh, but I’m desperately terrified of aging and one of my self-soothing techniques is deliberating on the worst case scenario and then accepting it swiftly. Perhaps I’ve crossed a new threshold with my most recent birthday, either way, my pain over the passage of time is well documented here. In the old times, I took the “to me”s for granted, perhaps because I was so self-absorbed then that they were functionally indistinct from my own inner dialogue. As this pandemic wears on, I feel myself regressing, back, back, back, to a time even before Bright Eyes, a time of deep self-absorption, and it’s here that I can really hear those “to me”s as loud and clear as they’re meant. I learned that “me” is a small word, a small thing, this nagging little thing that is always either embarrassing or criticizing. But something with such cruel weapons isn’t small.  I am not “to me” as I fade further from the outside world and everything that domesticates me. I am “to MEEEEEE,” wild, feral, out of control, and caged. “Persona Non Grata” reunited me with a past self I thought I’d outgrown. It reunited me with coping mechanisms and communication modes I thought I’d improved. And with no end in sight, no future on the horizon, and Bright Eyes a backwards bridge, I try to find some caulk for my cracked foundation.

DV:

No offense to MG, who is a Bright Eyes PhD where I am a mere dilettante who loves “First Day of My Life” and would probably-but-not-definitely recognize Conor Oberst’s voice in a crowd, but my favorite part of “Persona Non Grata” is the “you.” Every “me” requires one, and if that “me” is specific to Bright Eyes then a “you” is eternal in pop music, but it’s not often that “you” lands quite like it does here. It’s the way Oberst can’t quite seem like he believes it, the way he sings, “And now you/ You wanna be true" like “you” are halfway between a curse and a prayer. Like there’s nothing to believe in any more. Does it seem more or less real than when he’s asking, wondering, grasping, “And you/ Want me to be true”? Maybe there’s no answer to either question because this is half a conversation, maybe there’s none because pop music is a machine designed to collapse “me” and “you” into each other as neatly as it erases the line between artist and audience. But I find Oberst’s “you,” quivering and tender and questionable, as compelling as any word I’ve heard from him before.

[groovesnjams]

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

nO. 49/50

“Now I Don’t Hate California After All” by Carly Rae Jepsen

DV:

No one pays closer attention to continuity than Carly Rae Jepsen: five years after “LA Hallucinations”, here’s a sequel - and some character growth. Much more than 2016′s Emotion Side B, this year’s sequel to Dedicated seemed like a fully-formed artistic work: from back-to-back revisions of the same concept (a hell of a flex) to a longer runtime than the album it’s supposedly a companion to, it’s a statement as much as a record. So why not close the record with a 70s-esque throwback about how drugs and sex have helped her make peace with the city she once hated? There’s no one to stop her, apparently. And so over a reverbed, exotica-tinged production, Carly returns to LA for a re-evaluation and realizes it’s not so bad. “Maybe this is temporary, I don't even mind”, she sings - as if even when she’s high she can’t stop herself from recognizing the transience of all things - but the lightness in her tone sells it as real. Carly had a typically-weird 2020, ranging from a bad Valentine’s Day single to some good feature work and standalone singles, to an album-length statement disguised as a hodgepodge of leftovers. Unremarked, she’s adapted to the conditions of the streaming era - and the pandemic - as nimbly as anyone else, to generally-stronger artistic returns and generally-weaker commercial ones. This quirky return to an earlier theme remains my favorite, a catchy reminder that Carly doesn’t need bombast or trend-chasing to deliver meaning.

MG:

“Now I Don’t Hate California After All” reminds me of nothing so much as Animal Collective’s zany b-side “Baby Day.” Or, perhaps more charitably, one of Nick Cave’s ersatz covers. Yes, I’m damning one of our many queens with faint praise, but it’s not as faint as you think. “Baby Day” is one of the best Animal Collective songs (even if it anticipates their current strip mall parking lot carnival phase in some minor ways) because it’s unselfconscious in its exuberance. And Nick Cave’s covers are strange diversions in the labyrinth of fascinations. So, “Now I Don’t Hate California After All” is a mode of Carly Rae Jepsen’s expanding oeuvre that I don’t expect to hear very much of ever again but it’s also a glimpse into what she’s interested in, not necessarily what she thinks she’s best at, or what she thinks is good. Of course, even as it detours from what is recognizably Carly Rae Jepsen, it’s still eminently poppy and intriguing. The brain loves making sense of a puzzle and because of that, I appreciate the storytelling and narrative crumbs offered here, but I’ve long since accepted that I’ll never really know anything about CRJ. She’s at her best when she’s dealing with a magnified abstract like a super-specific emotion unstuck from the events that give it context. Here we have the opposite -- a challenge to her fans and herself. Though what, exactly, CRJ is is an enigma, this still manages to confront my expectations in an appreciable way.