Found Or Forgotten; 60 Years Of Great Music
For the second straight year, I’ve been blown away by both the volume and diversity of quality music that was released. Check it out!
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #9 in the series. My random number generator tells me that our next year to explore is 1982!
The Greatest Albums of 2016
Welcome to year two of Found or Forgotten. I covered eight years in 2016, which is actually more than I anticipated that I would get around to. At this blistering pace, I’ll be wrapping up in 2023! In all honesty, it doesn’t seem conceivable that I’ll be able to keep this going that long, but for the time being I’m really enjoying myself, and discovering tons of great music. In an effort to not drift further and further out of touch with what’s going on currently, I’ve decided to temporarily short-circuit my random number system and focus on the music of 2016. It was a great year (music-wise, at least) and a voluminous one.
I’m not willing to declare that we’ve reached a post-genre musical landscape, but we’re getting closer every day. In a year that saw new levels of divisiveness between the conservative right, disenfranchised minority groups, and straight up socialists, it’s a fitting testament to music’s power to unite that the best album of the year blended gospel with hip hop and was released for free. There was a resurgence of old school Native Tongues rap that now features Queen-kissed rock and crunchy guitar detours. A prominent alt-country troubadour channeled Elvis and covered Nirvana, while America’s favorite acoustic folk act released a glitchy electronic album, and our most traditional soul singer named his album for the Black Sabbath cover at its center. Meanwhile, across multiple releases, the lines between R&B, soul, hip hop and jazz have blurred so much as to be transparent.
All of this is a great thing. For someone like myself, who enjoys a wide breadth of musical styles, it’s gratifying to hear so many barriers come down. For those who prefer to color between the lines, they are being forced in some new directions that could spark appreciation for music they haven’t been exposed to before. 2016 rivals, and quite possibly surpasses, what was a stellar year of music in 2015. I encourage you to check out the top 10, but also the ample honorable mentions. You may discover something that speaks to you, even if it doesn’t fall into a category you typically identify with.
Coloring Book – Chance the Rapper
In 1996, when Andre 3000 coined the phrase “gospel rappin’” on Aquemini, he was simply espousing the idea of rap as celebratory truth-telling. It isn’t likely that even he, one of the all-time great visionaries of hip hop, could have anticipated the actual, successful marriage of gospel and hip hop as found on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. A young man of great faith and unlimited potential, Chance wears his heart on his sleeve through a series of nimble rhymes and warbled-but-endearing crooning. His joyfulness cannot be contained, whether he’s counting his blessings, professing his relationship to God, or reflecting on his tenuous yet loving relationship with the mother of his child. It’s easily my most played album of the year, the perfect panacea for the well-documented bummer that was 2016. It never fails to put a smile on my face and have me wiggling in my seat, content to escape for a few minutes from whatever might be weighing me down at the time.
Look, I get that just calling this gospel rap will turn off at least half of the people reading this, but rest assured that this isn’t D.C. Talk. It’s hip hop that is just as credible as releases this year from B.O.B., Vince Staples or 2CHAINS. Chance doesn’t just cast praise skyward for the whole album, he candidly approaches a variety of topics, from the pressure the record industry has placed on him to charge money for his work, to how his drug habits have changed, to drunk acquaintances farting on the passenger seat of his car. It’s the former topic that is the most fascinating. All of Chance’s albums have been released online for free, which must be frustrating as he becomes a hotter and hotter commodity that the major labels can’t find a way to monetize. To rub salt into their wounds, the album contains support from commercial heavy hitters like Lil’ Wayne, Kanye and Justin freaking Bieber, so you just know that label execs are still wringing their hands over the lost revenue. As he raps on “Finish Line”: “Labels told me to my face that they own my friends.” It’s for this reason that I won’t abide anyone giving Chance a hard time for the occasional Kit Kat commercial.
Ultimately, as I’ve written before, I appreciate rhyme skills above all else when it comes to hip hop (although I’m cooling off on albums that don’t have commensurate production quality to support the rhymes), and that’s where Chance delivers the most. Ignore the religious connotations if you must, but this is just grade A rhyme-craft:
“Ain’t no blood on my money, ain’t no Twitter in Heaven I know them drugs isn’t close, ain’t no visitin’ Heaven I know the difference in blessings and worldly possessions Like my ex girl getting pregnant And her becoming my everything I’m at war with my wrongs, I’m writing four different songs I never forged it or forfeited, I’m a force to be reconciled They want four-minute songs You need a four-hour praise dance performed every morn I’m feeling shortness of breath, so Nico grab you a horn Hit Jericho with a buzzer beater to end the quarter Watch brick and mortar fall like dripping water, ugh!”
I love this clip of Chance the Rapper and fellow Chicago emcee, Noname (who dropped a really good album as well this year), performing on the last Saturday Night Live of 2016. This may sound hyperbolic, but it symbolizes the maturity that hip hop has attained as it passes out of its adolescent phase. Take a gander at these two nerds, dressed in silly Christmas outfits, rapping unabashedly about Jesus on national television. Twenty years ago, it would have been a sketch, not a legit musical performance. Make no mistake, though, Chance is the hottest property in the industry right now.
There’s no way the hip hop of my youth would abide something so un-self-conscious. In the nineties, Tupac was lauded as a poet visionary for writing a single song about loving his mother. In the glut of mainstream gangsta rap, more high-minded emcees had to wage an unending war for credibility to break free from the pack, to the point that you can almost feel the strain that Talib Kweli, Black Thought and their ilk were under to be “real” without espousing ideologies that they didn’t believe in. As great as those records were, they weren’t always particularly fun. Hip hop was serious business. Chance is the beneficiary of their struggle, for sure, but he also represents a more enlightened era. Rap is no longer the scrappy upstart to rock and roll, it has arguably supplanted rock as the most prevalent form of music we have, both in terms of mainstream acceptance as well as critical opinion. With that shift comes freedom, and Chance has embraced that freedom as fully as any other artist around.
Blonde – Frank Ocean
When considering my number two album of the year, I debated quite a bit between the wildly esoteric Blonde, and the more immediate pleasures of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Not to say that Lemonade is safe by any means; considering who she is and what’s expected of her, it’s a breathtaking left turn. But it’s not… this. Hazy, avant garde, paranoid, drum-less for long stretches… it’s easy to listen to Blonde and come away with the impression that Ocean has maybe surrendered a bit much to the various drugs he name-checks throughout the album. I kept coming back to two tracks, though, both titled “Solo”, and there was nothing else that came out this year that moved me or made me think quite the way that those tracks do. The first is a gorgeous vocal performance by Ocean over a spare organ melody, with vivid but elusive lyrics that I’m still parsing. The second is a brief track that features Andre 3000 spitting ~20 bars on his disillusionment with fake women, ghost writing in hip hop, and the police (“So low that I can admit, when I hear that another kid is shot by the popo it ain’t an event no more”). It’s as dense and though-provoking as you would expect from Andre. After a while, more and more tracks would emerge from the miasma and reveal themselves just as vital as that pair.
Ocean, whose Channel Orange was my favorite album of 2012, has become more prickly and enigmatic since his solo debut. One of Orange’s great strengths was the intimate soul-bearing that Frank put on display. You still get the sense that he is laying bare his deepest thoughts and emotions, but they are couched in far more scattershot metaphor and stream-of-consciousness than before. A snippet here or a phrase there will resonate powerfully, turning from the deeply personal confessions of Channel Orange into more universal but difficult concepts. I liken Blonde to a Radiohead album in that way; I interact with something like Kid A by sort of drifting through its alien soundscape and grasping on to something that Thom Yorke sings that moves me, but lacking the specificity to know if I’m really getting at what he intended. What you bring to music like this informs it tremendously, and while that can keep you at a distance, it can also reward you with something profoundly personal.
Subject to seemingly endless delays accompanied by complete silence from the artist, Blonde had a massive and ever-growing heap of expectations to live up to. Upon initial release this summer, I winced a little bit. I understood immediately that the bar had been set too high, and reconciled my own disappointment. Six months and many listens later, I realize our expectations weren’t too high, just too narrow. Frank Ocean gave us the album he needed to give us, and it is just as personal, heart-breaking and stunning as his debut.
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Lemonade – Beyoncé
This may be the most voyeuristic album I’ve ever heard. Those seventies Fleetwood Mac albums probably come close, but in a pre-internet age, I doubt they offered the same level of transparency into their artists’ personal baggage for the general public. On Lemonade, Beyoncé chronicles the tribulations of being married to a serial cheater, and there is no secret who that cheater is. Even for someone like me who tries to avoid celebrity gossip like the plague, it’s hard to ignore the most prominent black couple outside of the Obamas. Let’s face it, your grandmother knows who Jay Z is, and it’s not because of The Blueprint. So it’s impossible to hear the accusations and dirty laundry without putting a face to the album’s antagonist, and the result is almost too personal, like your eavesdropping on a screaming match emanating from their bedroom.
Or really, it’s less of a match than a dressing down. Bey absolutely eviscerates her unfaithful husband, alternatingly fantasizing about never getting married and shout-singing that he can suck her balls. And that’s just on the album’s second single, “Sorry”. Her conviction and glaringly honest reaction to the betrayal injects her vocal with an electricity that invigorates the entire album. She is not the forlorn and weepy victim that we’ve heard in a million songs about a cheating partner – she’s pissed that she has to deal with this shit when she’s supposed to be out there grinding. Jay may be the one running the hip hop empire, but there’s no question who’s got the more valuable brand.
Much has been made about the breadth of musical styles that Beyoncé employs across the twelve tracks, and it is impressive. Such experimentation is often overly indulgent, with an artist operating merely as a tourist as they tackle each genre, patting themselves on the back for being so eclectic but never really justifying their wandering. In contrast, Beyoncé so completely owns her performance on each of these songs that you barely notice that they are so far apace from each other. It is without a doubt her finest achievement to date, and opened my eyes in a big way to what she might be capable of in the future.
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We Got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service – A Tribe Called Quest
It’s not unusual to find end of year lists littered with “legacy” acts like Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones or Paul Simon. While these folks are often producing fine albums late into their career, you can mostly write that off as a byproduct of the profitable cottage industry of telling baby boomers that their heroes are still better than anyone else who has come along. In 2016, there were actually some legit excellent albums by artists that were well past their prime: David Bowie, most famously, but also De La Soul who first turned heads in the late 80s. Nothing else this year, or any other year that I can recall, matches what A Tribe Called Quest has accomplished with their final album. Like, seriously, this is on par with Midnight Marauders and The Low End Theory… It doesn’t seem possible! D’Angelo amazed a few years ago with a stellar effort after a 14-year absence, but it has been a quarter of a century since Tribe was in their prime, and they managed to come through with a stunningly vital document of our times.
When I compare We Got It from Here… to past Tribe classics, I’m talking only of quality. This does not sound like a throw-back, or a nostalgia trip, but rather a modern rap record that takes the essential Tribe style and presents it in a very fresh and present fashion. It’s like Q-Tip, Phife and the crew just teleported in from 1993 and listened to the highlights of the past 25 years of hip hop before recording their next masterpiece. I really can’t stress how much every beat and every rhyme feel imbued with purpose. There is nothing half-baked or filler about this hour+ of soulful hip hop. And whatever fountain of youth that the Tribe has found, it has affected all of their guests. Busta Rhymes, Andre 3000 and Elton John all sound as invigorated and energetic here as the suddenly ubiquitous Anderson .Paak or Kendrick Lamar. I feel like I should call out specific tracks, but honestly, everything is essential. Just know that Jarobi is back as if he never left, Q-Tip (certainly guilty of laziness over the years) is the charismatic general he was born to be, and Phife Dawg… well, Phife Dawg did himself proud in his swan song. In many ways, it’s a travesty that the group won’t be recording again after showing what they are still capable of. Perhaps more importantly, however, they have added another layer of cement to an already bulletproof legacy.
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Love & Hate – Michael Kiwanuka
Michael Kiwanuka is a soul/rock hybrid. The artist he most reminds me of is Bill Withers, but there is a definite, guitar-forward element to his music. It borrows David Gilmour’s expressive atmospherics, but not necessarily his more traditional rock pyrotechnics. In fact, with the exception of the dynamic and funky “Black Man in a White World”, the songs on Love & Hate are pretty low-tempo. That doesn’t rob them of their impact, however. Kiwanuka is a master at conveying passion without resorting to flashy tricks or over-indulgent vocal gymnastics. The opening track, “Cold Little Heart”, takes a really long time to get going considering it’s the start of the album, but the build-up is not wasted. All of the wide open spaces and warm undercurrents of guitar work to bolster Kiwanuka’s smooth but low-key vocals, so that the whole album commands your attention without ever raising its voice, so to speak. It is easily producer Danger Mouse’s most restrained effort to date. It’s a wholly unique and fully formed brand of soul music, and it feels like a career launching point for a promising young artist.
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Sea of Noise – St. Paul & the Broken Bones
When clips of St. Paul & the Broken Bones’ NPR performance started circulating a couple of years ago, what stood out immediately was the Wilson Pickett slash Al Green vocals of lead singer Paul Janeway. It’s an unusual sound to hear from a contemporary artist, particularly one as portly, white and bespectacled as Janeway. Their debut album was solid fun, but the band seemed content to be a good facsimile of a 1960’s Stax artist. On Sea of Noise, they are still wearing that influence on their sleeves, along with some others, but the difference is they are able to parlay that into a forward-looking and original sound.
While Half the City was primarily a showcase for Janeway, Sea of Noise is a much more balanced record. That means that there is no face-melting vocal performance in the vein of “Grass is Greener”, but that the songs are far more interesting and unpredictable as the band breaks out of their anachronistic comfort zone. Incorporating gospel and disco into their more straight-forward soul repertoire, St Paul & the Broken Bones deliver tracks that are complex and uplifting, particularly on the standout “Waves” and “Sanctify”. Janeway steps back from the spotlight, but doesn’t rest on his laurels, delighting with subtle modulation in his vocals and frequently channeling his inner Barry Gibb. I was happy to have a throwback soul unit to follow with a legit badass singer, but I’m much more excited to know that they have developed into versatile artists with the capacity to surprise.
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I Will Not Stop Singing – Zomba Prison Project
A week couldn’t go by in 2016, it seems, without a deeply personal and well-crafted album being released by an American soul artist. In addition to the albums dominating my top ten, there were really good efforts from Alicia Keys, Anderson .Paak, Maxwell, and others. None of them, however, can match the simple beauty of the music made by these Malawi criminals. The second album released as part of a project designed to give voice to the prisoners of the horrifically over-crowded, co-ed Zomba Central Prison, I Will Not Stop Singing delivers uncut human emotion straight to the vein. While the songs are predominantly in the Chewa language, English titles provide enough context to understand the underlying message of each one. Whether they are mournful, hopeful, uplifting or dejected, language proves to be no barrier to prevent you from connecting to the various artists who perform. Some of these folks may be murderers and thieves, but some are criminals only insomuch as Malawi law criminalizes homosexuality or “witchcraft”. It’s impossible to know which is which, nor does it matter. What truly lands home is that we all benefit by not discarding the imprisoned, regardless of the context of their imprisonment. All people, even those that make mistakes, have gifts to contribute to the world, and when we marginalize them and refuse to allow them to use those gifts, it isn’t just they who are punished. Ok, pretty heavy stuff for a silly music blog, but I do encourage anyone with interest to purchase this album and the one before it, as proceeds directly benefit the legal defense and rehabilitation of these inmates.
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Midwest Farmer’s Daughter – Margo Price
Margo Price is the rare artist who debuts with a fully formed worldview. A fixture of the Nashville music scene for more than a decade, she brings a hard-won cynicism and impudence to her music that she effortlessly folds into one of the more traditional country releases of the year. She has an edge that allows her to distill the message of a tried-and-true break-up song with a lyric like: “I killed the angel on my shoulder with a fifth of Evan Williams.” At first blush, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter is a straight-forward and classic country album, the type of thing that has gotten her compared frequently to Loretta Lynn. It’s an apt comparison, though I hear just as much Emmylou Harris in the slower numbers, but tying Price to the pantheon of great female country artists of the past is kind of missing the point. She has her own voice, lyrically and musically, and that becomes evident with anything more than a cursory listen. Take “Hands of Time”, the excellent lead-off track: It has a narrative that is classic country all the way (poor girl’s dad dies, family loses farm, she vows to buy it back and gift it to her mom), but in form it is much more kindred to “Tangled Up in Blue” than something out of Sun Records. Elsewhere, there are little jolts of reverb that come in from nowhere but add welcome depth to the sound, and these kinds of touches, along with Price’s unique voice as a songwriter, position her as much more than the latest prestige act.
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A Seat at the Table – Solange
In any other year, A Seat at the Table would have a good chance at being the top soul album. In 2016, it comes in as my sixth best, which is pretty astonishing in terms of the volume of quality soul & R&B being released. I actually have it pegged as the most likely release to move up my list over time, as further listens peel back the onion a bit. Solange has a lot on her mind, and her angst (sample song titles: “Weary”, “Mad”) certainly echoes what a good portion of the country was feeling in the legendarily divisive year we just experienced. Of course, her worries didn’t just pop up, they are part and parcel with her identity of a black woman in America (other sample song title: “Don’t Touch My Hair”). Rather than coming across bitter, however, she chooses to hone in on how to move forward, inviting some of the people who inspired her to take part in the many spoken word interludes. Those interludes, a skippable part of most albums, are scored with the same elegant, minor key electro-funk that blankets the rest of the tracks, and they integrate seamlessly with the greater whole. Solange’s vocal comes across slightly restrained, but there is a palpable passion and vulnerability just below the surface as she searches for… something. Answers, solace, affirmation. I mentioned that the onion was not thoroughly peeled yet. Despite some heavy themes, and taking precious little time out for love or other common R&B pursuits, the album feels like a warm hug in the middle of a blizzard.
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A Sailor’s Guide to Earth – Sturgill Simpson
After Sturgill Simpson created a huge buzz with his outlaw-on-mescaline masterpiece, Metamodern Sounds of Country Music, he could have easily gone back to the well for his follow up. Instead, he chose to follow his muse, this time in the form of his recently born son. A Sailor’s Guide to Earth plays like a series of instructions to the boy as he grows into adulthood, with Simpson imparting his guidance and hard-earned wisdom through each song. It’s a great concept for an album, and I’m surprised no one has ever done it before. He has traded the trippiness of Metamodern Sounds, reverb-drenched rockabilly and esoteric religious concepts, for an Elvis-in-Memphis horn section and an extended metamorphosis metaphor that likens his son to a pollywog. Ok, the trippiness is still there, it’s just different. Sturgill is keenly reverent to country music’s past heroes, but doesn’t follow any of its established rules. When he struggled to place himself into the headspace of his seventeen-year-old self for a song, he just decided to cover the music he listened to at that age, namely Nirvana’s “In Bloom”. After winding the album down to its natural conclusion with two dazzling ballads (“All Around You”, “Oh, Sarah”), he pulls a tonal 180 and drops a shit-kicking rocker to close out the proceedings. Of all of modern country’s anti-pop traditionalists, Simpson remains the most unpredictable.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock: Blackstar – David Bowie; Victorious – Wolfmother; Walls – Kings of Leon
Soul/R&B/Funk: Here – Alicia Keys; Yes Lawd! – NxWorries; BlackSUMMERS’night – Maxwell; Malibu – Anderson .Paak; Changes – Charles Bradley; The Heart Speaks in Whispers – Corrine Bailey Rae
Electronic: Wildflower – The Avalanches; 22, A Million – Bon Iver; 99.9% – Kaytranada
Metal: Slow Forever – Cobalt; Hunted – Khemmis; Oathbreaker – Rhea; Kodama – Alcest
Hip Hop: The Life of Pablo – Kanye West; COLLEGROVE – 2Chains; Elements – B.O.B.; untitled unmastered – Kendrick Lamar; Telefone – Noname; Anything but Words – Banks & Steelz; and the anonymous nobody… – De La Soul; Genesis – Domo Genesis; Prima Donna – Vince Staples; The Hamilton Mixtape – Various Artists; Run the Jewels 3 – Run the Jewels
Folk/Other: A Moon Shaped Pool – Radiohead; Love Letter for Fire – Sam Beam & Jessica Hoop; case/lang/veirs – case/lang/veirs
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