Looking for the Perfect Beat

I pride myself on knowledge of the pop universe, but I suppose mine is more of an amateur historian’s approach – to put it plainly, it takes me a long time to warm to new music. Usually I’m too busy trying scouring the past 50 years of pop history to be bothered keeping up with the moment, which, depressingly, is kind of why I gave up my aspirations as a professional music critic. Even with concerted effort, I’ve heard and absorbed maybe 30 albums that came out last year; if I wrote about music for a living, I’d have heard hundreds. So I didn’t think it was fair to put together a “Best of ‘08” post when I barely knew what was out there.

Not that I didn’t try to catch up, but – and, as a proud foe of the old cliché that music keeps getting worse, I hate to say this – I wasn’t sufficiently impressed with what I found to keep going. In the first few weeks of 2009, I tried to amass a reasonable sampling of last year’s notable albums, and to the extent that I kept my ears from wandering I was plainly frustrated: did any great records hit stores in 2008? The list of critics’ picks that I’ve admired and actively enjoyed is substantial, but I’m such an asshole that I won’t come away sated until I’ve fallen in love; if there was an “In Rainbows” or “Under the Blacklight” among last year’s releases, I didn’t hear it. And for the first time I’m wondering if part of the problem is the dread “loudness” – dynamic overcompression that makes every note of every song on a CD sound distorted, producing an aural barrage that never lets up and ultimately induces you to hit the “skip” button. I’m no audiophile, but after reading a couple of tremendous articles on the practice, which is damn near everywhere these days, I’m convinced that it is partly to blame for my apathetic response to so much new music. That TV on the Radio album – impressive as hell, I agree, but thanks to the obnoxious mix I’ve never really warmed to it. Almost the opposite happened with the infamous “Chinese Democracy”; 13 mediocre songs that hardly screamed “Album of the Year”, yet every time I put it on my defenses fell instantly – the damn thing sounded great.

That’s not to say compression ruined everything I heard – beyond the maddening vagaries of contemporary record production, there just wasn’t much to love. Vampire Weekend, Hercules and Love Affair, Santogold – all excellent, none a revelation. Raphael Saadiq’s “The Way I See It” was a lovingly detailed platter whose striking simulations never quite escaped the turntable-I-mean-ipod. Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” was indeed a surprise, but not because of any notable improvement in Chris Martin’s craft – more like, maybe that Brian Eno really is a genius after all. But these well-meaning Englishmen lack a unifying vision beyond expanding their own aural universe ever so slightly, and if Eno’s embellishments succeed beyond any reasonable expectation – and they do – they signal not an advance but a retreat into formalist pleasures first realized by Eno and his small army of art-rock coeaquals three decades ago.

Grasping for a tentative hold on the zeitgeist, I spent some two months learning to hear Lil Wayne, pop music’s Man of the Year if anyone was, and it was time well spent. Not only did I come to understand all the fuss about the erstwhile Dwayne Carter, but mainstream pop circa 2008 started to make sense to me again – which after at least a half-decade of contemporary radio/MTV or what’s left of it slipping me by was something of a relief. Wayne’s only one artist, though, and while the exuberantly annoying “A Milli” remains my pick for Single of the Year “The Carter III” itself is no masterpiece. Engaging, yes, and full of great songs – something to behold considering it was all but unreadable to me when I first picked up a copy in April. I’m glad to know the dude, but I don’t intend to show the same love for every purported genius who comes down the pipe until my ears agree with those of the few kingmakers amidst the blogosphere who still get paid. It could happen in 2009. But maybe it won’t.