The 2022 MTV Video Music Awards

Hwaet! It’s video music awards season, so you know what that means!

I mean, it means the same thing that it means every single awards cycle of any type, which is that I’m here to judge their rightfulness. This year’s crop of available candidates is, if I’m being honest, pretty awful. Like, even the high points aren’t that high, and even the people here nominated that I like aren’t nominated for particularly good work. 

I suppose this makes August 2022 officially Downer August here on ONAT, which is, you know, a downer. 

That said, it’s not without joy, at least. Nicki Minaj is going to receive the now-revived Video Vanguard award! The Red Hot Chili Peppers are going to receive the Global Icon award, presumably for their contributions to global iconography. Kane Brown has officially become the first male country (for whatever value of country you can apply here) singer to perform at the VMAs. Maybe we’ll discover that Jack Harlow is good at hosting (he’s one of three hosts – the other two are perennial choice LL Cool J and Nicki Minaj), which would be nice, as it would mean he was good at something.

That was mean. I should be less mean.

Anyway, onward!

Best Visual Effects
I actually like the Kendrick Lamar video a lot, a thing I am now forced to see after spending the intro lamenting the general low-quality of the entrants and being mean to Jack Harlow, who also is in my second-favorite video here. I’m a jerk, is the upshot here, but, you know, that’s beside the point.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Kendrick Lamar, “The Heart Part 5”

Best Editing
I do not know from editing, particularly, as I have said before, but “Brutal” seems like it has the most editing (which is about all it’s got going visually), so I’ll give it to that one.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Alyssa Oh from Rock Paper Scissors (that’s how she’s credited), “Brutal” (Olivia Rodrigo)

Best Cinematography
I don’t like the “N95” video as much as the “The Heart Part 5” video, but I will say, probably for the dozenth time, that one of the things I like about Kendrick Lamar is that he really finds people to help him put the time and effort into making videos that look good. I mean, it’s probably the least of the reasons to like him, but when I’m sorting through all of this every year, it makes his videos really stick out.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Adam Newport-Berra, “N95” (Kendrick Lamar)

Best Choreography
I don’t have the numbers to hand here, but I would be willing to bet that, in the last ten or so years, FKA Twigs has been nominated in this category the most. She’s certainly got the most VMA nominations for “Best Choreography” compared to other nominations (which this year are zero). Anyway, “Tears in the Club” is a pretty good song, but as always, she’s a very good dancer, and the choreography is interesting and compelling.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: FKA Twigs, “Tears in the Club” (f The Weeknd)

Best Art Direction
Not being entirely sure what art direction always is in a music video, I’m going to assume it includes accurately-costumed and shot homoerotic prison settings and move forward.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Alex Delgado, “Industry Baby” (Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow)

Best Direction
I’m not sure how much of what makes All Too Well work (see below) is the direction, but I also don’t know how much of it is not the direction, so I’m going to err on the side of caution, here.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Taylor Swift, All Too Well: The Short Film

Best Longform Video
All Too Well is completely unhinged. It’s long, it’s vituperative, it’s got genuinely operatic execution given its fairly-pedestrian origins, and, as such, it’s all of the reasons that exist to either love or not love Taylor Swift. It’s like the whole of Taylor Swift in microcosm. One can spend fifteen minutes experiencing the ultimate extraction of Taylor Swift’s artistic essence, and one can probably come out of it with a full-formed opinion about the woman herself. Obviously, I’m a fan. It’s ridiculous in all the ways I want it to be, and none of that interferes with it being emotionally effective. With all apologies to Kacey Musgraves, who is in every single way a better artist (and made the second-best film in this category), and to whom my fanhood is more intensely devoted, Star-Crossed is earnest and effective and nuanced and messy, and All Too Well is monolithic and, frankly, insane. That makes it the winner here.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: All Too Well: The Short Film

Best Metaverse Performance
Twenty One Pilots and Charli XCX are the only ones who did this shit in Roblox, which means they’re the only two I approve of and, of those two, only one of them isn’t Twenty One Pilots.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Charli XCX

Album of the Year
For whatever reason, this category (as well as the next two) was announced way later than the rest of the categories. I’ll never understand why anyone does things the way they do them. Of course, I’m never quite sure why the VMAs have an album category, given that the albums do not, in and of themselves, have videos or whatever, but I suppose that ship has long since sailed.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Harry Styles, Harry’s House

Song of the Summer
Man, there are always like six thousand nominees for this category, and it always makes me laugh. They cast the widest-possible net here, presumably to make sure they don’t miss anything, even though every other category is a pair of clown shoes that someone has set on fire. That said, there are a couple of genuine actual good songs here, and the best of those is the Steve Lacy song. I don’t even have anything bad to say about it. It’s a good song.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Steve Lacy, “Bad Habit”

Group of the Year
There are also too many nominees here, which is weird, because you’d think with so many more things to choose from, we’d have some better options. Jeez. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Foo Fighters

Video for Good
It’s a shame that this is actually one of the better categories, at least in terms of the music videos all being entertaining, because I still think it’s, fundamentally, a silly category. Ah, well.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Kendrick Lamar, “The Heart Part 5”

Best Alternative
Back in the nineties, it was common to see people of all stars and stripes bitching about the use of “alternative”. Generally it was by asking “an alternative to what?” because they were being silly wags who were pretending not to know the difference between “alternative to” and “alternative from”, even though it’s pretty obvious when you look at it for a second. For those of you who didn’t live through the time: this sort of thing was shockingly common, especially among late night comics and the people that stole jokes from them. Anyway, this is an alternative to “me not bashing my brains out with a rock”. Machine Gun Kelly is adorable, but the song he did with Willow is very very bad. Måneskin are equally adorable, and their song less bad.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Maneskin, “I Wanna Be Your Slave”. Adorable! 

Best Rock
If Red Hot Chili Peppers weren’t fucking cowards, they would have released “Aquatic Mouth Dance” as the single from this record, and not “Black Summer.” They both suck real bad, but one of them is called “Aquatic Mouth Dance”, and that’s hilarious. Anyway, I like the Jack White song despite the Call of Duty connection. I mean, I wish he hadn’t, but one can’t always get what one wants.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Jack White, “Taking Me Back”

Best Latin
Not a great year for the best Latin category, either, it turns out! Not a great year, as such! Mainly because all of these sound alarmingly alike! Perhaps I am an old!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Anitta, “Envolver”. Such as it is.

Best K-Pop
Oh god fuck it all to hell.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Seventeen, “Hot”. That is, if fucking it all to hell isn’t an option. Good grief. 

Best R&B
The Weeknd is, predictably, in several categories, albeit largely as a feature on not-very-good songs, so it’s nice to see him here, especially because that makes this one of the categories where I actually legitimately like something. Hurray.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Weeknd, “Out of Time”

Best Hip-Hop
True story that I may never have anywhere else to write about it: Latto technically won a deeply forgettable Lifetime-channel competition show, refused the actual win itself, and now has actually made the charts which is, certainly, something. The music is less interesting than that story. Also, it’s not like anyone was going to outrap Kendrick Lamar anyway.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Kendrick Lamar, “N95”

Best Pop
This close to the end of all this, I have basically what you’d expect to say about all of these, except I would also like to add that I kind of wish the Ed Sheeran song was just a cover of the truly amazing Boys Next Door song of the same name (which one might also know as a Cairo Gang song, a Birthday Party song, or a Courtney Barnett song). But, of course, it’s not. Because why would it be?

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Harry Styles, “As it Was” 

Best Collaboration
I feel like Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa making a song about how good they are at doing sex stuff is exactly the sort of pandering that this website is set up four-square against. You know, except that it’s kind of a down year for all this and, while this isn’t that kind of website, it’s not, like, the worst pair of people to do this sort of pandering, if you catch my drift.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Megan Thee Stallion & Dua Lipa, “Sweetest Pie”

Push Performance of the Year
I am an old man and, as such, have no desire to be cool enough not to pile on the bandwagon around Wet Leg. What a great band. Plus, they’re doing more than anyone in recent memory to correct the popular pronunciation of “Chaise Longue,” which isn’t pronounced like “lounge” no matter how much you dyslexic fucks flip the letters around in your heads. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Wet Leg, “Chaise Longue”

Best New Artist (presented by EXTRA Gum)
Oh hell yeah. If EXTRA Gum says they’re the best then goddammit they must be the best. Because EXTRA is the gum whose music taste I most trust. I mean, I think it’s voted on like the rest of them, but EXTRA is cosigning it. The gum, I mean. So cool. Great job.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Baby Keem

Artist of the Year
This is where the general “C+” quality of the people involved in this awards show really shows itself – every year there’s something to ground the VMAs, and that person tends to have their name typed a lot in this space, but man, like three of these people are fine. Completely unobjectionable, that sort of thing. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Harry Styles, such as it is

Song of the Year
My goodness, this is the worst this category has ever been. My goodness.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Lizzo, “About Damn Time” 

Video of the Year (presented by Burger King)
I’m not going to lie to you all – the “presented by Burger King” thing really threw me for a loop. If the gum thing in the Best New Artist was perplexing, this is downright baffling. So, I suppose it would only be appropriate if Burger King lent their institutional support to a deeply homoerotic prison video. Great job, Burger King.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow, “Industry Baby”

The 2022 Trainy Awards

So, last week I wrote about awards, and the sorts of reasons why one should (or should not) consider them – and, of course, because situating myself within the bounds of the sorts of things that I notice and think about is part of the whole thing, and because the gap in the summer when nobody is giving any awards at all is wide, here I am mentioning some things that I think are, in and of themselves, award-worthy. 

Or, at least, worthy of a sarcastic award where no actual thing is given out or otherwise changes hands.

This year is rather heavy on the fraud and the grift – as one would probably expect, and while I generally try to give out one positive one of these awards, there isn’t one this year. You may make of that what you will.

Onward.

Outstanding Achievement in Shared Delusional Thinking
I don’t want to talk about crypto. You don’t want me to talk about crypto. No sane, reasonable person wants to spare a thought for the ongoing collection of scams, schemes and generalized hallucinatory speculation that is Web3, and its associated coins and…look, I’m not doing it.

Except.

The world of crypto created its best thing yet (specifically in the form of making me cackle in deep glee) when a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (sort of, see the link) called Spice DAO, operating according to principles that no sane person would ever think were reasonable, made a truly expensive boondoggle of a mountain out of the molehill of an art book auction. The whole story is basically in there, but the upshot is: a dude with more money than sense impulsively bought a book, thinking that it would give him the rights to the material in the book, it didn’t, he got mad, the crowd that funded the group bought him out, and nobody made an anime adaptation of the work contained in Jodorowsky’s Dune. 

Now the DAO doesn’t exist anymore, the book is re-sold, and everything is as it was, except an enormous amount of not-money has been funneled elsewhere, presumably to go on to soak somebody else in some kind of fuckery. 

This is an unforeseen (hilarious) side-effect of the NFT dumbshits moving out into the world – there is now a class of overmoneyed dipshit who thinks that everything that costs a bunch of money conveys total ownership, despite this model being a wildly terrible way to do anything and creating its own problem (and, also, so far, not actually yielding anything in terms of, you know, stuff. It’s truly incredible how far down a rabbit hole you have to be to convince yourself that you’re actually way out in front of everyone.

Also, this has a sub-story, which is that in the middle of the story, we see the appearance by Remilia Collective, whose Milady Maker nonsense (google it) made the longlist for a Trainy on its own, but ultimately was too similar to this absolutely delicious story to warrant full inclusion. 

In any event, congratulations to everyone involved. You did nothing, but at least you made believe that you spent a lot of money doing it. 

And you probably got to burn down a couple of forests in the process!

Outstanding Achievement in Making Useless Things People Could, Theoretically, Actually Buy, I suppose
I guess you need an old man to perform an old man’s con. T. Bone Burnett has taken credit for inventing a thing¹ that represents a new way to pay too much money for stuff you already own. 

¹ I’m not necessarily casting aspersions on Burnett here, but I also don’t believe he’s done it all himself. 

It’s an aluminum disc that’s coated with lacquer, into which (I suppose) a groove is cut. Now, I’m not going to get into all of this, but this is, effectively, the way you make a master record in the first place – you run the tape through the mastering machine thingy² and it uses a cutting arm to etch the music (or, in the one technical diversion I’m allowing myself here, the analog of the music thus created) onto the lacquer. 

² look, I do actually know the terminology here, but it’s very easy for me to get in the weeds when I talk about this stuff, so I’m skipping all of it in favor of using informal, and imprecise language, because it genuinely does not matter

Whether this is actually what it is or not, Burnett can’t be bothered to say. He does claim, however, that “it’s the pinnacle of recorded sound” (a thing that notoriously depends more on the apparati of playback than the record itself), “it is archival quality” (since the only technical detail we’ve been given is that it’s produced the same way you cut material into a master in the first place then, well, yeah probably), “it is future proof” which it probably could be in the same way that any given record is, and it is “one of one” (which is basically the only incontrovertibly true thing here). That’s crazy! Why is he doing this?

Well, his stated purpose is that he wants to “reset the valuation of music”, and that’s where things take a turn to the positively-hysterical. I’m not going to relitigate the streaming music/paying artists/how much economy is in the listening argument, what Teebs is saying is that he’s tired of getting paid a pittance for the royalties he’s due on, say, a bunch of Elvis Costello records, or the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, or whatever, and he wants to be able to sell a couple-a these here very expensive Ionic Originals to some folks, and get a lot more money out of those. He wants to “reset the evaluation of music [that has value flowing into his bank account]”. In so saying, he’s accidentally let the veil drop a little too far, and said what he actually meant. Whoopsie. 

Except that he can’t stand by that, either, saying that this is going to “democratize high-fidelity”, a thing which is, in fact, already available to anyone who is inclined to want it anyway³. Other formats of music you can buy (like with some dollars, not a new mortgage or whatever), Teebs tells us, “originated from record companies, and record companies have alienated customers and the artists”. So if you think about it, a picture disc is totally changing that. 

³ I mean, there’s a price barrier to high fidelity, although less of one than there’s ever been, ever, but that’s also the case for the Ionic Original, so I’m mooting it out of this one

Outstanding Achievement in Staggering Contempt for your Fans
Man, the only thing the guys in Tool seem to hate more than being in Tool is the set of people who contribute to their economic well-being as people that enjoy Tool. There’s piles of evidence to this point, but the one that proved especially attention-grabbing in this album cycle is the $750 Limited Edition Vinyl of Fear Inoculum.⁴

⁴ it was initially reported as being $810, but that was immediately protested by the band’s spokesperson, who insisted that it was the much more reasonable $750 before the venue added their markup. So, you know, adjust your expectations accordingly. 

This does, however, create an interesting sort of moral dilemma, or at least an ethical one – does the knowledge that, for whatever reason, there is some set of their fans who would pay as much as, say, a night at Disney’s Grand Floridian, or, like a reasonably-nice Chapman guitar⁵ for a multi-record set that also features the pen scribblings of the people that made it somehow make it ok to sell that thing to them? 

⁵ I mean, I’m not actually buying either of those either. 

Maybe. I’m not really here to answer that – my general philosophy toward such matters is that if someone wants to sell something, and someone else wants to buy it, that’s pretty much between them, and I hope it goes well for them. That said, if you charge $750 for anydamnything just because you held a pen over it, you are almost certainly a buffoonish dickhead, who deserves to be laughed at. Furthermore, the naked audacity of it is definitely a message, and that message is: you people don’t deserve your money, I do.

I’m not going to get too far into the Tool-ness of it all, but I will say that there was a period of my life when I was considerably more enthusiastic about their existence than I am now⁶, and I can tell you: Tool fans are quick to quote the lyrics to that one song they wrote about having sold out as being somehow a defense of being fan-hating, money-grubbing dinguses. I am unsure in what way that would be a defense, but also: please don’t try to explain it to me. A bunch of people have already tried. 

⁶ which is equal parts me just not really being into their thing anymore and them deciding to stomp on the gas of their generalized rock-star assholery.

Special Achievement in the Things I Didn’t Actually Eat For You People
So, secondary to the now-traditional Subway Day here on ONAT is the fact of my long-time interest in the fates of Applebee’s (which you can read about previously for the entirety of my feelings about). One of the things I did not see coming was Applebee’s full-on transition to the sort of restaurant that has a drive-thru. 

On the one hand, this represents another spoke in the wheel of restaurants that reliedon a wildly unsustainable model of food provision turning over to dump one of these restaurants on the floor unceremoniously. On the other hand, maybe if I got Applebee’s through the drive-thru, I would expect less of it in the first place, and it might actually work out better for them. 

On the third hand, it’s both an interesting sign of the times and a fascinating business decision to downgrade to, functionally, fancy Wendy’s. I love that. That’s very funny. 

Special Achievement in Not Knowing What Else You Folks Would Have Expected
The woman who wrote “How to Murder Your Husband” is on trial for murdering her husband. Now, I don’t want to be all Nancy Grace about it – lots of people are accused of lots of things they didn’t do, and an accusation is not a conviction (or even evidence toward a conviction, really), but like, come on. 

Special Achievement in Hooboy – Honorable Mention/Misunderstanding Edition
Ok, so. Jumi Bello was going to make a book. It was going to be about a woman who becomes unexpectedly pregnant. People were very excited to read it. It made lists! People wanted to like it! It was poised to become a sensation!

Except she fessed up (first to her publisher, then to the world) to the fact that she had plagiarized some of it She wanted to write a book about how a woman deals with an unexpected pregnancy, and she hadn’t ever been pregnant, so she looked up some descriptions of the way that someone in that situation felt, and then dropped them into her manuscript and then never rewrote them. 

The essay is a sad thing. There’s clearly nothing she (or, really anyone) can do to salvage the fact that it happened. She is open about her struggles with mental health and the role that it would play in the sequence of events, and, by all appearances, is taking ownership of the situation that it all caused. 

And then the apology also got pulled. This time, she hadn’t confessed to anything herself, she just was found out having copied some verbiage about plagiarism and the way it operates from a website focusing on plagiarism, as discovered by the excellent writer Kirsten Arnett, and reported on by Gawker. 

It left LitHub, who were generous enough to offer the space to explain herself, in the position of also having (unwittingly) abetted her having apparently learned nothing (and thus having to pull the piece), and left the rest of us seriously bummed out – this story is deeply depressing, and exists as an award winner here mostly to hold in stark contrast to the next award. 

Special Achievement in Hooboy – the GOAT of Hooboy/What the Fuck Edition
So, it turns out there’s an Australian writer named John Hughes⁸, and he wrote⁹ a book called The Dogs. This one also unfolds in two acts, albeit much less ambiguously. At first, he was only caught plagiarizing from The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich, a goddamn fucking Nobel Laureate¹⁰. I guess if you’re going to steal, steal big. Fred Colon was right it seems. 

⁸ I’m going to start here and say: dude seems pretty well-regarded and famous enough for this to have made major ripples, and I can only say that my general lit-fic blind spots are probably contributive to my general lack of knowledge about him. Mea culpa, to whatever extent that applies. 

⁹ I mean, I suppose in his limited defense, he probably wrote the numerical majority of the words

¹⁰ Also, obviously, someone of whom I have heard, in fact. 

Above, I suggest that “audacity” is the word to describe selling a record for $750, which leaves me with very little left in the vocabulary to describe whatever is going on here. Holy jesus.

He attributes the passages to a research error – that he had spent many years researching and compiling his notes for the book, and the passages he stole had gotten mixed in with his notes, thus leaving him with unedited chunks of someone else’s work.

As with the other plagiarism case, this seemed regrettable, but reasonable.

And then, cratering that explanation, came the rest of it. It turns out, actually, that he had happily repurposed all sorts of other works, and that, somehow, Svetlana Alexievich was not the most famous person he had swiped the words from, at which point this moves from “sad and terrible instance of a writer stealing from another writer, perhaps accidentally” to absolute fucking farce. 

Writing in his own defense in The Guardian, Hughes decided to finely-mince some nonsense and sprinkle it over an “appropriation” argument that holds so little water I’d be afraid to leave it alone in the sun, comparing himself to Dylan and, oh, here’s LitHub again to run it down, because at least in this one they don’t have to be the ones left out in the rain. 

The actual concerns with this, in terms of honesty and, you know, ethics or whatever, are limned here, in this Plagiarism Today piece¹¹, and the more-practical reactive concerns are here in this Guardian roundup of various literarians, but, of course, one does not earn a Trainy merely by doing something immoral, so I’m not going to get into all that. 

¹¹ The website that, in fact, Jumi Bello swiped a bunch of words about the history of plagiarism from. 

I do, however, want to address the sheer folly of jeopardizing one’s entire career on one’s mistaken belief that no one else has read the books you’ve read, or that anyone will believe that you’re remixing, or reappropriating, or sampling, or recontextualizing, or any of the other things that generally come with, say, credits or attribution or acknowledgment or anything else. 

It’s the same “It wasn’t me” argument that you can find in the mouth of any given eleven year old, complete with “if I was going to steal stuff, would I be that obvious?”, the go-to excuse for anyone who stole stuff and did, in fact, make it that obvious.

Great job, John Hughes the Australian, you’ve officially made me laugh harder than anything the Dead American John Hughes ever managed.

Outstanding Achievements in Follow-Ups
Back in April, I wrote about Flannel Nation (it was one of the infrequent “series of questions” posts), having taken the position that it was solely a poster, with no actual support, designed by a malfunctioning AI. And, well, it would appear that I was correct: First Everclear, then Filter, then Candlebox pulled out of the festival, citing the people putting it on having an inability to organize it well enough to get it off the ground.

I mean, they do so in ridiculous rock and roll marketing language, but, you know, nevertheless.

This is why you shouldn’t base your festival on a poster designed by a malfunctioning robot. That is all. 

And that’s it for this year! Maybe next year something with a little more juice and a little less perplexity will happen, so I can sink my teeth further into some stuff, but, as it is, it certainly was a wildly confusing period of time. Until next year, folks! 

A prelude to the 2022 Trainy Awards, or: Why A Ward?

So last year I took a year off from the Trainies – it didn’t seem, what with everything being the absolute worst it had been to that point, like there was a lot of space for, well, anything that I do here at all on this here site, let alone the thing where I laud the silliest and most ridiculous things to happen all year. 

And then, you know, things got worse. And worse. And worse. And, frankly, they’re probably going to get even worse still. Which manages to call into question what I’m doing even further. 

This here website is, in the grand miasma of things that exist on the internet, small potatoes, so you’ll have to bear in mind as I write the rest of this that I’m aware of what it is I’m doing. Some of it is going to sound like I think what I’m doing is louder or more visible than it is, and I feel I need to state that this here space was pretty much designed to do two things: 1) keep track of whatever thing I’m going on about, culturally and 2) make my friends (and anyone else that finds it) laugh. 

This site is, primarily, about the idea of popularity, and the ways in which popularity is displayed and, in many ways, manufactured. My particular interest here is not necessarily of-the-moment popularity¹, but rather the ways in which popularity becomes remembered/enshrined. So I write about Greatest Thing lists, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, most prominently, awards shows. Basically as many awards shows as I can squeeze into the thing without treading too far into fields where I don’t really have any knowledge², because the combination of pageantry and insistent corporate opinions is basically catnip to me. 

¹ although some of that is necessary due to the clout-establishing push-and-pull I’ll go into some detail about below
² or, occasionally, by blundering full steam ahead into fields I don’t care about

In any event, awards shows³ are an interesting display of corporate interests because they’re orthogonal to popularity, at least in theory. The popular things are their own reward – they make money for the companies that produce them and, in theory, the company then keeps producing them⁴, but there are organizations that exist to provide a sort of  leg-up into the idea of things that are “good” beyond their popularity⁵. The “good”-ness provides an economic long-tail relationship that recoups the money spent on it through its quality, rather than its direct popularity. 

³ for the rest of this piece, I will use the words “awards shows” one billion times, and by it I mean not n necessarily just the outward-presenting television aspect, but the whole ceremonial awarding of things by a decision-making body – that is to say, I consider the Golden Globes an awards show even though they’re no longer broadcast, but also the book awards that I read, even though those are in private ceremonies, etc.
⁴ the fact that this is getting weirder and harder to quantify – in probably just about the same degree that the popularity itself is getting weirder and harder to quantify – is a little bit beside the point here, but still worth acknowledging, even if only in a footnote. 
⁵ this is a distinction that I feel is worth exploring a bit, but I’m not going to do so in this particular piece. It’s also the case that there is a sort of trendlet in fans of an extremely popular thing complaining that it doesn’t also win awards – superhero movie people, primarily, but also certain wings of pop-music fandom – and that’s on deck to write about basically the next time it happens, but that is not this piece either. 

In any event, this sort of secondary-marketing aspect of awards shows is what provides the tension that, in theory, keeps them running (to the extent they are running, anyway); the awards-granting bodies have to convince people that what they are awarding – that the things that they’re advocating that you spend your time/money on because of their quality – are worth it. In order to do so, they also have to dovetail with the sort of things that any given viewer also thinks is going to have had value. 

Taking a step back, it’s important to acknowledge that the successful execution of an entertainment experience⁶ is an exercise in emotional manipulation⁷ – a narrative is being presented in order to generate a feeling. That’s fine, that’s what we’re, generally, signing up for – an opportunity to have the emotional experience of a thing, for whatever personal or private reasons that one might have. 

⁶ which I’m separating from the idea of an artistic experience because I’m focusing on the money-generating (and, secondarily, the nearly-inseparable “respectability”-generating) aspect of the thing right here, rather than the aesthetic/personal aspect of it. 
⁷ even a relatively-dry nature documentary relies on this, and even things like my beloved, tone-neutral How It’s Made is about the low-key satisfaction of finding something out. It’s emotional manipulation all the way down.

And so I put forward that the utility of the awards show, from this perspective, is to confirm to the viewer that their emotional state was, in fact, correct, or the state that they pretended to was correct⁸, or whatever. This is how the awards-granting body allies itself with the taste of the viewer – by confirming that they have the taste necessary for the alliance. . 

⁸ I try very hard to avoid accusing anyone – directly or by implication – of not actually liking the things they like, for two reasons: 1) it (somehow still! Even as an old-ass adult! Still!) happens to me all the time and it’s dumb and 2) it really doesn’t matter if the thing the person enjoys is the acknowledgment of their enjoyment, or the thing itself, it’s all basically the same in the end. 

Stated more directly: the awards show has to first convince you that it’s worth paying attention to by presenting its statements of “quality” or “worthiness” or whatever in such a way that you can agree with them, so that you will look to them for continued assurance of that same “quality.” the extent to which this is (or, indeed, has ever been) effective I leave to the individual to decide. Thus the awards show is an attempt to provide this information, and that makes it an interesting flexion point where you can, or at least I can⁹ see where the wheels are turning, at least in this one place.

⁹ or at least i like to think I can

My position here is that awards shows (and “best of” lists and the charts and whatever else) function, in and of themselves, as a sort of meta-entertainment, where the emotional manipulation is about you being right, or you being set on the right path, or however you want to categorize a confirmation of both your taste and your initial, non-meta reaction. And, if that were the whole thing, that would be the end of it – there’s really nothing wrong with people liking whatever they want to like for whatever reason they’ve got¹⁰, but it’s not quite the whole thing.

¹⁰ short of absurd edge-case reasons – obviously liking something because it abets you, say, murdering people is bad

The thing that brought me to it in the first place – to awards, to lists, to all of it – is that they end up being a part of the record for the things so awarded. However many people do or do not care about the Academy Awards, for example, when they happen, future people will still only have that sort of thing to go on when they are interested in what is going on in movies of that year. They have the charts to tell them what’s popular¹¹, and they have the contemporaneous awards (among a few other things) to tell them what is “good”. But outside of the popularity, outside of the things that are leftover as detritus, the existence of awards is a primary indicator of what people thought was good outside of things with mass-appeal¹², which means that, even if they aren’t quite the most-respected thing in the moment, they’re still things that win out over history due to the relative-durability of the official opinion so-enshrined

¹¹ this is sort of less fraught as a historical record – it is, after all, demonstrating what people are spending their money/time/streams on, even if the reasons for the popularity of any given thing are stupid or bad or incomprehensible. 
¹² without getting too far into the spongy morass of a swamp that is trying to define what “mass appeal” is and how, say, the Emmys would represent something different, although see below for some of it.

I’m not going to spend a great deal of time unpacking the cultural idea of the difference between “popular” and “good”. For one thing, the idea is so ingrained into the cultural discussion that it’s hard to tease it out (we have a basically constant low-level argument about, say, whether superhero movies are, in fact, movies¹³, to name one example), but also just because the point of awards-granting bodies is to draw cultural attention to something without taking its popularity into account¹⁴, which necessarily says that there are two different things here. 

¹³ I think there could be a really interesting anthropological line of thought if you looked at what was excluded from being considered “serious” art over time, and the things that it says. I’m not doing that here, though. This has already taken me quite some time, and I’m trying to keep the word count down. 

¹⁴ taking as evidence for this that every award doesn’t just go to the most popular thing every time, even though it sometimes does

The extent to which that difference matters, or should matter, I live as an exercise to the reader, because it’s so far beyond the purview of this space that I’m not really even going to consider it beyond laying out that it exists. 

Anyway, the point that all of this is driving toward is this: Awards shows are a way to examine how an entertainment entity wants to manipulate you, directly, into feeling about something¹⁵, by affirming your taste or creating some urgency within you to experience the things that they want to tell you to experience. And so examining – even examining in a jokey way – the ways in which that thing happens, and the means by which it works, becomes a way of examining my (and, I suppose aspirationally, others’) reactions to just exactly that manipulation.

¹⁵ With, once more, the caveat that they may not be successful – I’m not talking about their efficacy, just their general mien. 

The Trainies, then, are the natural outgrowth of all of that – in order to examine the ways in which the forces that provide corporatized entertainment, I must also offer my own stake in the position. This is done primarily through posts about music, the thing I spend most of my time enjoying and thinking about, but it’s also done, in a somewhat more oblique way, through the Trainies, where I keep track of the examples of trendlets, attempted trendlets, and massive displays of disconnection with the actual point, and then award them a tiny award. Trainy award winners are selected, primarily, on the basis of their ability to either fail entirely at the sort of large-scale manipulation necessary to win other wards, the ability to create something (a fandom, a social media following, a news kerfuffle) out of the dumbest things possible, ana attempt to sell people something with no value and, occasionally, about once a year, a successful attempt to do those things by unorthodox means. 

The idea, of course, being that the more you think about, say, why a record label wants you to pay attention to someone, or why a movie studio wants you to pay attention to something, or why a book publisher wants you to…you get it, then you start to think about why other people want you to pay attention to other things. Bigger things. Things that, say, you might want to have a firm grounding in/grasp of your own opinions and beliefs about, say. Nobody starts doing push-ups with the explicit intent of lifting a car off their baby, but if you want to be able to lift a car off a baby, you might start by doing a push-up.

Consider this whole experiment, then, a push-up. 

A Considered Look at the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Part 19

So, an ongoing feature of the site for the last few years has been a series of posts taking a Considered Look at various and sundry lists of things, and in this particular instance, Rolling Stone has delivered unto me A List, and the prospect of sinking the ol’ chompers into an arbitrary list of a once-dominant institution’s picks for greatness is simply too much to bear.

The list is exactly the sort of high-minded ridiculousness that I’m deeply enthralled by. They touted that they had 300 people vote in a staggered points-assigning system, with several thousand albums in consideration, and tabulated it numerically. 

So does this mean it’s a reasonable version of a consensus list? Do they succeed? Does what they’re doing even make sense? Let’s find out!

I’ll be evaluating every album – all 500 of them – to let you all know exactly how right or wrong the folks that return Rolling Stone’s calls are

Links to the previous sections are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9,  Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17 and Part 18. Previous Considered Looks can be found starting here and here.

Jay-Z – The Blueprint
WHAT IT IS: I’m now going to share a “fun fact” about The Blueprint: it was supposed to come out on September 18, 2001, but this was back when albums being bootlegged was a scourge¹, and they moved the release date up exactly one week, to the 11th, which was, you know, a hell of a time to put out an album even if you weren’t a New Yorker. 

¹ look, there’s a lot to say about this, but I’m not going to say it here. Maybe eventually, just: if you don’t know about it, there was a lot of handwringing about it. You can probably google something like “Eminem pirates bootleg” and see some of the coverage which was, perhaps predictably, largely about Eminem

WHY IT’S HERE: Well, it eventually overcame its deeply tragic release date², which is nice. That’s probably because of all the greatness of Jay-Z’s height, this is the um..most great. I’m good at making words go together. Anyway. “H.O.V.A”! “Girls, Girls, Girls”! An Eminem feature! “Heart of the City”!³ That song whose name I’m not going to say but would be, according to the ONAT style guide, called “Jeighba that neighba”! It’s just a great album with a bunch of great songs on it, really. 

² Unlike, say, Glitter

³ genuinely, if you want to know where Kanye came from, this is the best song he produced before he made an album of his own and man, it still works. His 2022 brainworms don’t make is 2001 production decisions any worse, I tell you what. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Yes

OutKast – Aquemini
WHAT IT IS: If your favorite Outkast album isn’t Stankonia, it’s probably Aquemini

WHY IT’S HERE: It’s a the best Outkast album to a lot of people because it’s the time they most acted as a duo – before this they don’t quite have it all together⁴ to this extent, and everything after this marks them basically separating slowly. This is the Outkast-iest of Outkast albums, essentially. 

⁴ that’s not to say their first two albums aren’t great, just that this one has them firing on all cylinders

BUT IS IT GREAT?: It is

Bob Marley and the Wailers – Legend
WHAT IT IS: It’s the highest-ranked best-of, if nothing else. 

WHY IT’S HERE: I mean, it’s here because it’s got all the Bob Marley songs that everyone knows on it. Them’s some great songs. I do wonder, sometimes, about the Legend series (?) of albums⁵, and have now looked them up, and, frankly, will not be reprinting my findings here. Not because they’re interesting or salacious, but because they have nothing to do with this album. That said, I still don’t have much to say about it beyond “Bob Marley’s best songs are some real good songs” 

⁵ Lennon Legend was also around a lot at the time

BUT IS IT GREAT?: It is

Ramones – Ramones
WHAT IT IS: the Ramones’ first album

WHY IT’S HERE: Because it’s the Ramones first album. Who doesn’t like the Ramones? And, having proven that everyone likes the Ramones, my follow-up question is: who doesn’t like The Ramones’ first album? 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: It’s among the greatest

Paul Simon – Graceland
WHAT IT IS: The album that made Ladysmith Black Mambazo famous in America. Well, this and Sesame Street. Although this probably got them on Sesame Street, now that I think about it.

WHY IT’S HERE: I have no major beef with Paul Simon. I don’t even really care that he played South Africa when he toured this record⁶. I have, over time and with a mellowing that age has given me, come to appreciate some of his work, even. But this album has, for nearly my entire life⁷, been inexplicably beloved in a way that I simply cannot explain. Sometimes when I don’t get it, I at least can hear what I’m not hearing, or what’s keeping me out of it (see below w/r/t Talking Heads), but in this case, not only do I not hear anything particularly special, but I’m not even sure what it is that I’m meant to be hearing in the first place. So anyway, that’s why I credit Ladysmith Black Mambazo. 

⁶ it was a matter of some controversy at the time

⁷ I was nearly three when it came out. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Nope

Prince – Sign O’ the Times
WHAT IT IS: The album on which Prince fired the Revolution, the first album on which Prince sang as Camille, and by far the most dated Prince album. 

WHY IT’S HERE: I mean, people love this record, and there’s plenty of weird and interesting stuff once you get past he godawful drum machine and the ridiculous Fairlight. The hits are good, especially “U Got the Look”, but I have no idea what elevates it hundreds of places above the much-better Dirty Mind or 1999. Nostalgia is a poison, but it’s also the only actual explanation for this. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: I really only like the albums Prince made with the Revolution, so I’m comfortable saying “no.” 

Nas – Illmatic
WHAT IT IS: Nas’s debut album, and probably the only one that’s indisputably great. Probably. 

WHY IT’S HERE:Almost nobody arrives this good and this fully-formed, and while Nas has had his moments in the time since, nothing has been this effective. Illmatic also sort of forms a springboard of all sorts of things that would go on to dominate the way people talked about rap music for oh, the next decade or so: what was an wasn’t worth doing as a rapper, what made “real” rap, that sort of thing. Part of this is because Nas was, for 40 or so minutes, seemingly capable of anything, and it was very hard to argue that what he was doing was the right way to do it. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: I mean, I called it indisputably great above, and I stand by it. 

A Tribe Called Quest – The Low End Theory
WHAT IT IS: The second A Tribe Called Quest record, and the one that hangs together the best as a record

WHY IT’S HERE: It might be because I am, perhaps, the only person that thinks that of A Tribe Called Quest as a singles band, and lots of people love it. I think it’s here because “Scenario” is great, and helped make Busta Rhymes famous. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: I have spent a lot of time explaining that, as much as I admire ATCQ and especially what Q-Tip does as a producer, it is not really something I spend a lot of time with, so no.

Radiohead – OK Computer
WHAT IT IS: I am a rounding-error away from 40, I have a beard, and I like guitars. As such I am more-or-less incapable of being impartial, objective or even reasonable about this album. Please proceed to the next part of this entry with that in mind. 

WHY IT’S HERE: Because it’s impossibly, hyperbolically, wildly, incredibly great. It’s so great that I could have kept listing adverbs there forever and felt good about it. Radiohead did a great job sort of assimilating all of the mainstream-rock stuff and finding new ways to put the elements together in a way that made it hard to tell how much of it was, in its bones, extremely likable rock music, actually. I’m going to stop typing now.

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Yes. 

The Rolling Stones – Let It Bleed
WHAT IT IS: It’s the one with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on it, which my notes indicate was, in fact, my first favorite song, or at least my first favorite non-children’s song.

WHY IT’S HERE: It’s the more-popular of the Stones “country” albums⁸, and is considered such despite not having, you know, any country music on it. That said, a look at the track list will show that this album has a whole bunch of songs that everybody knows, and that are among the best and most interesting of the Stones’ career, especially “Gimme Shelter.” If you ever want to get good and mad at the music industry, may I recommend looking up Merry Clayton. 

⁸ I wrote about Sticky Fingers a shockingly long time ago, given how much better that album is than this one

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Oh, maybe. It’s got its moments, like most Rolling Stones records of the time. 

David Bowie – The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust…
WHAT IT IS: The best of David Bowie’s straight-up rock records.

WHY IT’S HERE: Well, David Bowie is already catnip to the RS voting crowd, and his best straight-up rock record is definitely going to work there. There’s also a pretty good concert film associated with it, that makes it sort of easy to write about and remember. Plus it has a bunch of his bigger hits on it. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Sure. It’s not always my bag, but I think it makes it over the line. 

Talking Heads – Remain in Light
WHAT IT IS: It’s probably Talking Heads weirdest album

WHY IT’S HERE: I have written at length (including last time they were on this list) about how I sort of wish that I heard the same band that people are telling me about when they describe Talking Heads. Even everything I know about the making of this record – recording long grooves that get carved out into songs, trying to get over writers block by not really writing stuff, all that – makes it sounds like something I feel like I should like. And yet, here I am. Anyway, I’m basically alone in that opinion, because here it is. I suppose that’s not an answer to “Why”, but I don’t have one of those. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: No

Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde
WHAT IT IS: The seventh of nine Bob albums on the list, which I mention mostly because it’s also his seventh album. A real “seven” situation up in here. 

WHY IT’S HERE: I mean, it’s Blonde on Blonde. It basically lives on these albums. I have so little to say about it, I talked about the number seven in the other bit. Historically, this is the first of the albums he made in Nashville, with Nashville studio musicians. Also historically, it’s the one with “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” and “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat”, among others.

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Oh it sure is. I just don’t have anything to say about it that hasn’t been said a trillion times already. 

Dr. Dre – The Chronic
WHAT IT IS: Dr. Dre’s debut solo album, following the dissolution of NWA.

WHY IT’S HERE: Dr. Dre was, if nothing else, an enormously influential producer – rap records sounded more or less like this record for a bunch of years, and, really, there are still people out here today aping G-Funk⁹-style beats. It’s also notable for giving the world Snoop Dogg, which is also a considerable legacy. 

⁹ that’s what he called it. I don’t name things, and I certainly would never name something that. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: No surprises here, but it’s not my thing. I suppose its greatness (like just about anything that’s made it up this far) is hard to argue with in and of itself, but as a listener, I pretty much like the Snoop Dogg bits and a couple of other songs, and can live pretty happily without the rest of it. Influential and important, but I don’t know about great as a thing to listen to in 2022. 

Michael Jackson – Off the Wall
WHAT IT IS: The first Michael Jackson album produced by Quincy Jones. 

WHY IT’S HERE: I mean, the answer to this is pretty much the same for all the MJ albums that made it up here: half the songs are hits, and the whole thing provided a blueprint for radio R&B for basically all of the time it’s existed. As far as the rest of what there is to say about Michale Jackson, well, it’s been said, and it clearly isn’t keeping him off the list. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: I like the disco-ier parts of it, which is true of most R&B albums made in 1979. 

The Beatles – Rubber Soul
WHAT IT IS: Back when I were a lad learning about the Beatles via lists like these, Rubber Soul was the delineation point between “silly pop band Beatles” and “serious rock band Beatles”¹⁰

¹⁰ this won’t make any sense to anyone who didn’t own physical music, but I find the red album/blue album divide easier to manage, but I wasn’t consulted when they formed the consensus. I think it’s Billy Joel that drags the dividing line all the way back to Help!, and the only real purpose of this footnote is to make the point that people used to talk about this stuff all the time, and even things that seem agreed-upon really aren’t. 

WHY IT’S HERE: Hey man, you’ll not find me making anti-Beatles arguments, actually. I kind of like their middle period, where they were still operating as a band that played primarily live (they stopped touring like, six months after this album was released), but they were also getting more interesting about using the studio and whatnot¹¹. It doesn’t have the strongest set of songs – although that’s a curve they’re being graded on against themselves, basically – but, because it’s still a Beatles album, it still makes these lists. I dunno. 

¹¹ about which see a couple of entries below this one

BUT IS IT GREAT?: This is another one that I have no issue with calling “great,” but definitely think there are considerably more than 34 albums that are better than it. 

Stevie Wonder – Innervisions
WHAT IT IS: Stevie Wonder woke up one day, decided to stop being a child pop star, and became an essentially-unrivaled genius. 

WHY IT’S HERE: I would wager that the only reason that Stevie Wonder doesn’t have a Beatlesian stranglehold on this list¹² is because he has enough albums that are great that they split the vote. Innervisions is enough to get over that, probably on the back of its superhuman second side. I mean, there’s nothing at all wrong with the first side, but the back half of this record murders almost everything else. 

¹² “only” four of his classic-period albums made it in here

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Oh very much so, yes. 

Amy Winehouse – Back to Black
WHAT IT IS: It represents fully fifty percent of the songs that Amy Winehouse released while she was alive. She only made two albums, see. And a third posthumous one. So, twice as many as Jeff Buckley. I dunno. 

WHY IT’S HERE: Amy Winehouse had a really cool voice, which has been much remarked-upon, and she died tragically young, which probably also helps, and, although I don’t usually like to do this, it’s worth noting that Mark Ronson has since produced a squillion radio hits, and his work is all over this album. So, you know, it’s here because it sounds good, it has a tragic, easy-to-remember back-story and is very much the sort of thing that makes these lists. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: I mean, it’s fine. It’s way too high on this list for not offering much more than it does (it’s not for no reason that I compared her to Jeff Buckley in the joke up there – they both were very good singers with a very good ear for songs, and they probably should have ended up in basically the same place. Or, better yet, give Winehouse Buckley’s spot and have done with it). 

Beyoncé – Lemonade
WHAT IT IS: I’m not calling it for Beyoncé quite yet – she might have surprises – but as of this writing, this is sort of the Apex of Beyoncé.

WHY IT’S HERE: It’s great! Often I talk about not liking things for the same reason as people, or whatever, but this is a case where I feel we all pretty much ended up in the same place. Hot sauce is a bat! It’s the name of her bat! Very good reveal, Beyonce! In less exlamatory fashion, one of the things that I think makes Lemonade stick out is that, while it’s not the only album that Beyonce has also released as a visual experience alongside, the storyline¹³ and accompanying visuals of the Lemonade uh..movie(?) thing(?) made a lot of this a lot easier to recall. Also, it really is very good. 

¹³ her sister had just attacked Jay-Z in an elevator for what we all assumed turned out to be his philandering. If you weren’t around or aware of it at the time, it was a whole-ass thing. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: It genuinely is

Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
WHAT IT IS: Ok, so, one of the things that makes this sort of list weird is that they’re trying to do a sort of “all of music” thing with this – some of that is the nature of the fact that a bunch of people are voting on it, some of it is the nature of this rewards a kind of semi-tokenism, but in any event: the idea of trying to figure out if Kind of Blue is, indeed, better than Lemonade but not as good as Are You Experienced? is the sort of thing I would find myself completely unable to explain to a curious alien. 

WHY IT’S HERE: I mean, it’s a great album. It’s the album where Miles Davis laid out that, in fact, he was better at this than almost anyone else. Miles Davis had already climbed all of Jazz’s mountains, then he found out about Modal jazz, then he assembled a sort of dream-team of a band, then they all made a better modal jazz record than anyone else had. After this, Miles got experimentally-minded, and while some of that is better than this, this is a pretty reasonable guess at “the one most people would vote for in a list like this” which, indeed, it is. It’s definitely more than um…two albums better than Back to Black, say for example. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: It’s nigh-untouchable. 

Jimi Hendrix – Are You Experienced?
WHAT IT IS: Jimi Hendrix’s first, best-known and biggest-selling album.

WHY IT’S HERE: It’s got the lion’s share of the Jimi Hendrix songs you know, and it isn’t a weird studio experiment (Electric Ladyland) or an overstuffed double album (Axis). So it’s at the top of that particular pile¹⁴. Easy-peasy.

¹⁴ although the other two studio albums – Band of Gypsys, as I mention every time, didn’t make it – are, in fact, on the list, and I’ve already written them. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Yep

The Beatles – White Album
WHAT IT IS: The longest, most ridiculous, and probably best, Beatles album. 

WHY IT’S HERE: I mean, if nothing else, if you’re at all interested in the Beatles, you have to grapple with it. It’s got “Yesterday” on it, and “Blackbird,” but also “Mother Nature’s Son” and “The Battle of Bungalow Bill” and, famously, not “Hey Jude.” It’s got “Julia” and “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and also “Good Night” and “Glass Onion”. John and Paul tried to out-blues each other (John won with “Yer Blues”), and also to out-rock each other (Paul won with “Helter-Skelter). Charles Manson thought they were telling him to murder people (in conjunction with Jim Morrison). “Revolution #9” invented basically half the music I listen to these days. George Harrison only got a few chances and beefed it hard on one of them. It’s a lot to deal with, so it sticks out in the mind. But really, there’s not much else like it, taken as a whole. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Yes

D’Angelo – Voodoo
WHAT IT IS: It is the third of the D’Angelo albums here, and I have to tell you: that fact surprises me, but I couldn’t really tell you why. 

WHY IT’S HERE: Because of the three D’Angelo albums that made the list, this is the one that was probably the easiest to decide on. This is another outpost from the Soulquarians set I keep mentioning¹⁵, and, while it’s not my favorite of them, it’s definitely easy, if one casts one’s ear around the R&B made since then, to hear how many people were taking notes. 

¹⁵ I was a teenager when the Soulquarians were happening, and obviously it left a huge impact

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Sure, although I don’t know when the next time I’ll listen to it of my own volition will be. That said, “The Root” is possibly D’Angelo’s best song, so it’s got that going for it. 

Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
WHAT IT IS: It really is, probably, the only actually-good album the Wu-Tang Clan ever managed. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think it’s true. 

WHY IT’S HERE: This is another album that gets written about so often I don’t feel like I have anything insightful to add here, so I’ll say: for an album that spends an hour on ten rappers, it doesn’t ever feel overstuffed or over-long, a thing that is not true of any other Wu-Tang group album¹⁶. Also, you know, it’s the one with “C.R.E.A.M.” on it. 

¹⁶ There are some Wu-Tang adjacent solo albums that are very good, at least one of which I’ve written about here previously. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: Yes it is

Patti Smith – Horses
WHAT IT IS: Patti Smith’s debut album

WHY IT’S HERE: I think every single review, retrospective, or otherwise-written piece talks about the album’s opening line, so I’m going to do something else and point out that her selection of songs – her own and the covers – are a tremendous and effective introduction to the stuff she’d go on to do. There are other debut records that serve as a sort of sampler-platter of what’s to come, but Patti Smith staked out the territory she would spend her career occupying (more or less), and told us exactly what it was from the word jump. It’s impressive. Also, I’ve just realized that this is my website, and I don’t have to follow even my own rules, so: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” is the greatest opening line in history, and the cover of “Gloria” that it introduces is so good it almost makes me appreciate that Van Morrison existed. Almost. 

BUT IS IT GREAT?: It really is

The Best Records of July 2022

Nina Nastasia – Riderless Horse (the backstory is almost unbearably tragic, and it seems that it shouldn’t mark an occasion to rejoice, but it’s been so long since there was a new Nina Nastasia album)

The Sadies – Colder Streams (RIP, Dallas. The world is considerably worse for you not being in it)

Black Midi – Hellfire (Black Midi are a band that continues to grow on me over time. Whether that’s because their records are getting better, or because I’m spending more time finding out just how intricate they are is beside the point. This is great.) 

Moor Mother – Jazz Codes (It’s not often that someone this wildly prolific is also this consistent)

Mat Ball – Amplified Guitar (Mat Ball plays a homemade guitar in a very specific way, and so while there are aspects of this that do sort of sound like the guitar track to a Big|Brave song, it’s also the case that there’s nothing wrong with that, and this record still has plenty of surprises)