Albums, 2023

First, let me say the Pitchfork news is sad and infuriating. The time I spent at Pitchfork remains among my most cherished writing experiences. Everyone who edited a piece of mine made me a better writer (especially Jayson and Mark). I’ve been a reader for more than twenty years and for a time was a member of the family, a dream come true.

10. B L A C K I E catharsis only
What is “rage” music made by suburban kids?

9. Squirrel Flower Tomorrow's Fire
Ella Williams hails from Massachusetts, came of age in Iowa, is currently based in Chicago, and writes like Lucinda Williams. This might be sacrilege but idk I hear a specific strain of southern yearning in her lyrics. Her band (featuring MJ Lenderman) allows her songwriting to soar. She turns these phrases casually, poignantly, big emotions and payoffs happen between the words. RIYL: Ratboys, feeble little horse, Wednesday

8. Tinashe BB/Angel
When Tinashe went independent for 2019’s Songs for You and 2021’s 333, she shored up a diehard fanbase that had followed her from her mixtape days to “2 On” to the lapsed major label stint to, finally, an artist in complete control. (If only Roger Ebert [ctrl+f] was alive to witness her transformation.) All to say: this is the one that made me stan

7. NewJeans 2nd EP 'Get Up'
Twelve minutes of icy perfection. The triumphant formula is some mix of club influence, combined with intricate and soft melodies that defy oft-maximalist k-pop, and iconography that mythically celebrates girlhood. “ASAP” unlocks this EP—clock ticking as metronome, beat softly bubbling out from under “just for a minute,” comedown chimes in its final seconds. It’s the post-climax scene where the characters get together one last time before roll credits. This wistful affect is exactly from where NewJeans’ power is derived, a stunning testament to youth

6. Yo La Tengo This Stupid World
I’ve never been a “Yo La Tengo guy” but I respected them from a distance: this record finally pulled me in. This Stupid World offers the cosmos: opener “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” turns its gears over and over for eight minutes in a tight krautrock groove; the title track and “Brain Capers” are blissful shoegaze; somber ballad “Aselestine” is one of the most gorgeous songs of the year. This sprawling album goes toe-to-toe and wins against bands half their age and rewards repeated listens, a rich, vital, and invigorating text from a band in its fourth decade

5. HiTech DETWAT
A stark urge to bring fun, dancing, and fast tempos back to rap clubs, and bring hip-hop back to house parties

4. Peso Pluma Genesis
In a year with no definitive star, a 23-year-old’s unmistakable voice singing traditional Mexican folk songs was the closest we got. I played this entire record at a party over the summer and it locked in: this is the kind of music I heard all the time at restaurants, church bazaars, quinces, meat markets, corner stores, and it’s uniquely inspiring to have a younger generation write corrido ballads on their terms, using their palette. Genesis’s best songs are among the most undeniable bangers of 2023, big swaying choruses, virtuosic guitars, and unreal vocals. I don’t think the future of pop music is strictly regional, but maybe the future of pop is inspired by these styles, and Peso Pluma is a symbol of a fundamental change in the fabric of what we imagine the kind of music a pop star makes

3. Veeze Ganger
As fantastic as everyone said from the moment it appeared. The last time we saw it on this level was My Krazy Life nine years ago. (2015 Future doesn’t count because he spread his year of brilliance across three mixtapes and an album.) It’s not only a perfect vision of Detroit rap, but a slew of regions and voices (Babyface Ray, Icewear Vezzo, Lucki). Rap is still an intensely personal genre, one with a unique ability to showcase the artist in all their traits, stories, inclinations, flaws. Veeze is not only the best rapper in the world on this record, but the most honest, creative, inventive, nakedly personal. We don't get ‘em like this anymore, which is not a conservative statement about Real Hip-Hop but a laurel for a one-of-a-kind artist at a peak few others could dream of reaching

2. Wednesday Rat Saw God
a. This was my favorite movie of 2023. Every time I watched, its rhythm and texture took me on a journey. Three acts isn’t the only way to tell a story but it’s the blueprint. A story can be less about arcs and actions, more of an occasion. Rat Saw God tells its stories in this fashion: frontperson Karly Hartzman abandons our need for resolution, not out of post-modern, rock and roll inscrutability, but because she’s moved past formal expectations and chiseled her writing into palpable experience.

b. Anyone who considers themselves a writer knows the deepest respect you can have for another writer is jealousy. The first time I heard “Quarry” and its opening vignette about a “bitter old lady” in a “rain-rotted house” who complains “America’s a spoiled child that’s ignorant of grief/but she gives out full-size candy bars on Halloween” I had to pause and take a walk in 100 degree heat.

c. What makes Ganger so good is the myriad ways Veeze expresses himself, each line building on the next one into a heap of nonchalant revelation. (I tried working some choice Ganger lyrics into my blurb but they are best done justice viewed as a whole.) I hear it as a companion to Rat Saw God, two natural writers working shit out in their respective genres. Ganger might be the superior album, but I have Rat Saw God at #2 because it inspires the deepest emotion about another writer in me.

d. Bob Dylan is one of the most gifted songwriters of all time, but his best lyrics would barely pass muster in your average MFA program. This isn’t to suggest the holy grail of songwriters is secretly a hack or the average person in their twenties is a better writer than Robert Zimmerman. But poetry is poetry, music is music, and good song lyrics are good song lyrics. No matter how heavily “how many roads must a man walk down” moves the spirit, it’s best received within the context of a folk song. What does make Dylan and a few others special is their power to blur these lines, to presuppose you can receive song lyrics as literature if written and presented so the boundaries break and the words reach you in the same register as a poem. The “how” of this is elusive, but great artists deal in the mystical.

e. On Rat Saw God, exhaust is “hot breath looming off the grill;” driving is animated by “the wind changed pitch as the bridge went by;” a death at a fitness chain’s only notable observation is “people stood around.” Hartzman presents her lines and lets them talk to each other. When she describes being “passed out on a couch at a New Year's party” with a “never-ending nosebleed” you anticipate a dramatic climax of either further humiliation or ironic self-deprecation. Instead, atop the bullfighting imagery of the first half of the song, the bleeding doesn’t stop, the boys are playing Mortal Kombat (more blood), then she echoes Saint Augustine: “God make me good but not quite yet.” Sometimes you think you live your life a certain way then you find yourself blackout wondering what it means philosophically to be a modern person who still blacks out. If this sounds too lofty, consider the song references baptism in “tepid bathwater” and its title is both a reference to George Jones and ostensibly a play on words about someone believing/believing in bullshit. We tell ourselves stories you get it you get it.

f. When we think of punchlines in songs we think of Fabolous-ian groaners, but I think of this line from “Chosen to Deserve,” which, like dialogue from Succession or something, doesn’t consist of just one payoff but several mini-payoffs: “I used to drink/until I threw up/on weeknights/at my parents’ house,” each additional beat takes the initial premise further until the humor and pathos marinates a whole new emotion.

g. Driving through half the country this summer was amazing. No matter how similar all big cities are, the natural beauty between them floors me. The Bass Pro Shop inside of a pyramid outside Memphis is hours away from some of the most beautiful expanses in the country; the vast swallowing mountains of Appalachia sneak up on you before you arrive in the humidity of major cities; the hills of Virginia literally left us speechless. At the risk of oversimplification, this is the surface character of America: what’s observable from the car window. Manifest destiny made this country weird. Uniting the land from Maine to San Diego was unnatural (and genocidal). When the stage is set that wide, 250 years later it gets filled with TVs blaring outside of gas stations, practice spaces with bad electrical wiring, Dollywood, piss-colored sodas, life-saving drugs administered in backseats of cars, cold medicine taken recreationally, and, of course, endless Starbucks and Paneras.

h. My friend from Charlotte (ok ok it’s David Turner) finds it amusing Wednesday are from Greensboro, a claim that means nothing to me until he explains it. It’s a suburban (I’m thinking Katy/Woodlands/Cherry Hill) town, which briefly sends me into a tailspin: so they’re not a bunch of castoffs from the mud? Then my brain doubles down: this is good, actually, because all of America and all of our experiences are the same yet we’re convinced of their uniqueness. The biggest main character moment I had in years was returning to Houston to dismount from my job with dignity. I would drive my parents’ car that has no aux and no Bluetooth with a burned CD I made of this album, hearing “poured one out for all my guys” in the Bose speakers as I passed my elementary school on the way to work. Their art achieves something, geography means nothing.

i. Rat Saw God in all its shambly glory isn’t a self-mythologizing ode to the south or the old country or how Denis Johnsonian fucked up these people are, instead it’s a deliberate reflection on lives and stories neither celebrated or mourned, as Wednesday strains to capture it all before what’s left of them is as gory as a memorial next to a freeway.

j. I know MFA workshops were a CIA invention (allegedly) to keep writers focused on dishwashers and the “beauty of the mundane” during the middle of the century instead of thinking about nuclear weapons, state-sponsored coups in foreign countries, and relentless wealth-hoarding by elites. I once considered extolling the virtues of the everyday a vital component of my own writing. But I now view that philosophy with religious skepticism. We should want more. Life should offer more. We shouldn’t let the powerful lie as we see in broad daylight what they do. We’re almost certainly at the end of something, which isn’t to say we should keep things as ugly as they currently are, but we should strive for a better future, or at least document what we see. But what do you produce when there’s nothing left to witness? A vermin’s tales of supposed enlightenment.

1. Tisakorean Let Me Update My Status
Ice cream so good gang gang

50 Songs I Liked in 2023

Sexxy Red “Pound Town” / 41 “Bent” / Lil Yachty “Strike (Holster)” / That Mexican OT & Paul Wall & DRODi “Johnny Dang” / BigXthaPlug “Texas” / Ken Carson “Lose It” / Danny Brown & Kassa Overall “Jenn's Terrific Vacation” / Babyface Ray “Jackboys” / Ice Spice “Actin a Smoochie” / Flo Milli “Never Lose Me”

Tisakorean “Rando” / Ayoolii “Smackin Crackin” / Baby Drill “On My Conscious” / Bandmanrill & D4m $loan “Dam Son” / Cash Cobain & Chow Lee “Rump” / Rae Sremmurd “Flaunt It/Cheap” / KP Skywalka “Inna Mix” / Luh Tyler “You Was Laughing” / Karrahbooo “Running Late” / Anycia “BRB”

YoungBoy Never Broke Again “Bitch Let's Do It” / Young Nudy & 21 Savage “Peaches & Eggplants” / 2 Chainz & Lil Wayne “Crazy Thick” / Roc Marciano “Chris Angel” / Maxo Kream & Key Glock “Bonecrusher” / Starlito “Bipolar Bear” / Little Simz “Gorilla” / J Hus “It's Crazy” / Paul Wall “Shout Out to My Grower” / Mariah the Scientist & Young Thug “Ride”

billy woods & Kenny Segal & Quelle Chris “Soundcheck” / Wiki & Tony Seltzer & Zeelooperz “Fried Ice Cream” / Blockhead & Aesop Rock “Mississippi” / Oddisee “How Far” / Fat Tony “Make a Baby” / ZAYALLCAPS “$PREE” / Baby Osama “Build a Boy” / RealYungPhil & Gud “Make Moves Not Excuses” / xaviersobased “fix my mind” / John Glacier & Surf Gang “Mindmap”

Jordan Ward “Famjam4000” / Masego “Sax Fifth Avenue” / Terrace Martin & James Fauntleroy & Robert Glasper “Witchcraft” / Sampha “Only” / Tommy Richman “Last Nite” / Brent Faiyaz & Coco Jones “Moment of Your Life” / Liv.e “Clowns” / Amaria “Secrets” / Cleo Sol “Old Friends” / Baby Rose “Power”