Posts tagged 2009
10. Bill Callahan, “Jim Cain.” Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle.
Now that 2009 is safely behind us, the inevitable top ten lists commence. I’ll start with music, posting a track every day and then a summary. There are certainly a few themes, either in music or myself.
Smog was an key member of the late 90s indie record store scene. Finding artists was still a challenge and the pursuit of quirk was key. Seriousness seemed taboo. Pavement certainly ran in these circles, but I think this time is better illustrated by an artist like Solex. A record store owner, she collaged samples of unwanted records into pop odes, feeding back her consumption into creation.
Smog* seemed to approach music in a similar fashion. His creations were lo-fi, almost haphazard. Out of tune acoustics were captured on four-track cassettes at home. As he moved forward, his production evolved but his song structure remained minimal, hinting at his past. Knock, Knock is my favorite (its lyrics are smart and wry), but The Doctor Came at Dawn is great as well.
Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle is his second album as “Bill Callahan.” Dropping the Smog moniker suggests evolving, or at least growing up. Certainly, this album is a more mature work. It feels more comfortable. The darkness of Doctor and the irony of Knock, Knock is traded for sureness and empathy. Callahan’s newest work brings to light how we’ve evolved: irony certainly isn’t dead, but sincerity is no longer taboo. Emotion isn’t a token, a branded category of “Emo,” but rather something spread over the music catalogue. (In infinitely less cloying and more palatable amounts.)
* Or Bill Callahan. Both Solex and Smog adopted band names despite their solo artist status
Nearly 10 years old.
It’s hard to believe the change in music over the last 10 years. Radio stations still defined the sound of the day. Burned CDs were only beginning to mount a stand against the big 4 labels. Napster was was magic: a glimpse of the future limited to the households that had ponied up for DSL or cable internet.
When the iPod launched it was met with questions. It was too expensive and served too small of a market. It would never catch on. Only in retrospect is Apple’s careful redefinition of the music industry understood. Carefully laying the ground with iTunes, which created libraries of digital music, a beachhead for the eventual device. The initial iPod, devised for early adopters to work out the kinks. The iTunes Store, with a limited selection, only arrived when the player had hit the mainstream. The whole apparatus remained Mac-only for longer than any other company’s patience.
The best: District 9 / The Hurt Locker / Let The Right One In / Moon
The rest: (500) Days OF Summer / An Education / Avatar / Away We Go / Bolt / Coraline / Creation / The Damned United / Drag Me To Hell / Frost/Nixon / Revolutionary Road / Star Trek / Up / Watchmen / Where The Wild Things Are / The Wrestler / Zombieland
The oldies: Alien / The Breakfast Club / Poltergeist
The drek: Franklyn / Transformers 2 / The White Ribbon
The screens: City Screen, York / Electric Cinema, Birmingham / Somerset House, London
I really dig the way Daniel Gray is presenting his best of lists. Check them all out in context.
Also, his best movies are all spot on.
“ Whether your metric-of-choice is book deals or raw numbers, The Kids Who Tumble graduated to big boys on the playground, not so much by stomping the other kids as by inventing their own game in the corner. Tumblr’s make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.”
