The 113 Year Old Up to Date Sandwich Book (The fifth and final part)

Sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, John Montagu wanted to gamble and/or do work¹, and he asked for a lump of meat to be shoved between two slices of bread, and then he ate it, and, in so doing, created the sort of portable instameal that the world over has been happy to indulge upon ever since. 

¹ popular legend has it the former, one of his biographers, who admittedly would know what he’s talking about I guess, insists the latter. Although the dude gambled a hell of a lot so maybe it’s a little of both, who am I to say? 

By 1909, in fact, the sandwich was two things: impossibly variegated, and also stodgy and old-fashioned. Thus, Eva Greene Fuller came along, to rescue the impossible old-fashioned reputation thereof and to convince America that the sandwich was a foodstuff more than worthy of their time and attention (I may be extrapolating as to the author’s goals here). To do so, she assembled the Up-to-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich. The book is, as most old cookbooks are, a very interesting window into the way food was addressed in the past. 

1909 is before the supermarket, before most refrigeration, several decades before the interstate system made it possible to haul food across the country in any kind of timely fashion (although not before the train, which did some of this also), before automobiles, before the widespread availability of electricity, before, in short, anything that made the process of sandwiching anything like it is now. As a result, many things were just bang out of the question. 

The whole book is downright fascinating, a look at the many functions of sandwiches – some are portable meals (then as now), some are cocktail hors d’oeuvres, some appear to be cake-replacement style desserts. The book itself is divided into seven sections – Fish, Meat, Cheese, Nut, Sweet, Miscellaneous and Canapes² – and seems, to me at least, to be alarmingly comprehensive. 

² canapes being a kind of cheat, as these aren’t really all “sandwiches” as currently recognized, but either the category was looser 109 years ago, or Ms. Fuller decided it was close enough since it’s still “stuff on bread”.

While the first three parts were mostly about how weird all of this are, and 2022 saw an attempt at positivity, this is, in fact, just the end of the sandwich book. Next year it’ll have to be some other terrifying culinary proposition. Previous parts of this now-annual series can be found here, here, here and here.

And here we go. 

For these first few, I have to point out out that there is a sort of through line in the book of sandwiches that exist in two forms, with a difference that makes the two forms funny. This is the driest possible way to explain it, but it’s also why it didn’t actually work as a theme for one of these posts, so the ones that are the best are here now. 

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WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? To be clear, for a manly, robust sandwich, you’re gonna need a bunch of eggs. Since my idea of the opposite of daintiness is Gaston, I’m in. I don’t like that they say “egg paste” but I’m handling it. To make it dainty though, you use marmalade and then put it on the doily. I feel like the doily is doing a lot more work than the sandwich in the race to “daintiness”. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? This one is less about the sandwiches (it’s a little about the sandwiches though) and more about how these two sandwiches are presented in two different chapters under the same name. Now, making spinach and caper butter and then giving it to someone as a sandwich makes you an asshole, but the alternative is to follow an instruction that includes letting the butter (the only thing inside the sandwich) harden. So basically don’t do any of this, and no wonder nobody caught this error: who wants to spend any extra time thinking about these? 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? I feel like there should be a happy medium between “pureeing, creaming and buttering cream cheese and then making a soggy-ass club sandwich out of it” and “just slopping some cottage cheese on the bread”. The chives aren’t fooling anyone, Cottage Sandwich No. 2, if that’s your real name. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE?: This is a very, very pink sandwich, but still my first thought was “we should stop wasting everyone’s time and create a portmanteau,” but the ones I have are hard to pronounce (“Halmon?”) or just, like, misleading (Salhamon?). It’s rough out here, is what I’m saying. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? So like, the “surprise” in “chicken surprise” is that you can’t immediately see the chicken. This is a sandwich, so is the surprise that there aren’t very many capers? Also, why is the sandwich-describer making a point to mention that you shouldn’t use many capers? Is it to avoid attracting stray Bobby Hills?

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? Oh, nothing much, just a walnut, olive and celery uh…salad. Sandwich. On the one hand, this is like the garnish parts of a tuna salad without the tuna. On the other hand, this is a crunchy sandwich in two ways, and a squishy sandwich in two ways, and mayonnaise also. I suppose it’s a sandwich that could also be prized for its lubricity. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? As some of you may or may not know, I suffer from depression. Sometimes it gets pretty bad! And often, as a result of that badness, I, like a lot of folks, get bad enough executive dysfunction that it means that I have trouble being able to feed myself effectively in ways that are, well, sensible. All of which is to say: “ketchup and parmesan cheese on a cracker” sounds remarkably – uncannily even – like something I would make when I was unable to contemplate the herculean effort required to make anything else. Probably at some point after I’d run out of ways to trick myself into eating more peanut butter. So it’s not one I’m going to make for a party, is what I’m saying. Not a happy fun times sandwich, as such. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? Hey. Hey guys. Hey guys. Hey. Hey guys hey. Hey. Hey. Hey guys. Guys. Guys. This is buttered cheese. Guys. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? You know, there are a lot of things to say about a needlessly complicated bell pepper sandwich, but none of them are as noteworthy (leaving aside that they’re also nowhere near as alarming) as the phrase “[w]ork a small cream cheese until smooth”. It’s astonishing. I hate it. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? Ah, yes, back in my stag days, long did I yearn for  a sandwich of Roquefort, drenched three separate ways. I will agree with the originator that this does not seem like a sandwich you would eat if someone loved you enough to marry you, that’s true. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? Look, I can imagine this being a thing a person would do. A person. One, single person. What I’m saying is: someone did this and really liked it and then somehow convinced Eva Green Fuller to put it in this book, and I couldn’t be happier for them. Lemon sandwich. What a legacy. Saints be praised.  

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? This never fit in because this is barely a thing, but if you weren’t aware of the origins of the idea of “tutti frutti”, it goes back to the nineteenth century. This seems insane to me, but not quite as insane as the fact that it started out as an ice cream flavor (which, of course, it still mostly is, but I thought it became one in the flavorizing orgy tht was the late nineteen eighties). Wild. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? While it’s true that this could, technically, be eaten as a sandwich, on Human Earth we call this “layering” and we do it with cake all the ding-dong time. NICE TRY, SANDWICH ALIENS. I’M ONTO YOU.

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? Oh, may it be tied with baby ribbon? Gosh, here I was wondering what I could use to tie my sandwich. I had to roll it up like a sleeping bag, you see. To keep the figs in. Thank heaven I’m permitted to use a ribbon.

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? THIS IS NOT A SANDWICH (singular) RECIPE, THIS IS ADVICE FOR HOW TO DISPLAY A LOT OF SANDWICHES. Good grief. It’s like words don’t mean anything anymore. 

WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW HERE? True story: 100% of the people I know who are allergic to ginger are from Canton, Ohio. Obviously that’s not where this ginger comes from and does not, in fact, mean anything, which brings me back to my original point about these not having a theme or, even, sometimes, a reason. 

The 2023 Billboard Music Awards

Alright, y’all. It’s time. Time for the Billboard awards! Now, ordinarily I only have a couple of things to say about the BBMAs: the first is that there are a billion categories (69¹ this year), and the second is that they traditionally come at a time of the year when they’re a bit more of a slog.

¹ up top my brother

But not this year. They have moved, because changes are afoot. 

I’ve been sort of expecting one of the minor awards shows to try this for some time, actually: sweeping changes in the production itself, rather than merely the presentation. I’ll get to some more about that in a moment, but first need to contextualize what makes this interesting a bit. One of the things I landed on when this site started was that it was interesting to keep track not merely of what was popular at any given time², but how various and sundry concerns have gone to the effort of telling you what’s popular. 

² a matter more of data and the sort of thing you’d want to keep track of on a spreadsheet, rather than on a twelve-year-old website in the age well after the time when that sort of thing was done. 

I’ve gone into all that before and won’t rehash it here, but it led me sort of ineluctably to the awards show³ as an interesting view in on all of that: what is it that people want the consumptive public to think is the right stuff to consume, a message that, in this case (meaning the awards shows themselves) needs to then be sent via an interlocking web of contracts and sponsorships and, well, there’s very little room in there for there to be anything of actual interest.

³ a longtime interest of mine, even before I was actually thinking about them in any sort of cultural sense. 

And yet, they continue to happen, year after year. Oh, we’ve lost some: whatever there’s whatever the  People’s Choice Awards are doing, and the Billboard situation may have already cost us the American Music Awards,⁴ not to mention one of the four (four) television awards shows devoted explicitly to Country Music alone has got to go⁵. We even missed a Golden Globes entirely and it didn’t seem to matter much (although we didn’t shake that one off forever). 

⁴ there is a fascinating look at a turf war in that article, showing the state of the awards-granting industry. I’m not going to dig all the way in on it, and the way that the rescheduling is either causing or receiving large reverberations, but it’s clear that this will not be the last large change in the kudocast-market. 

And so it became clear, even around the time I started writing about them, that this was going to have to become something different⁵, even if only because the record-selling economy around the music-based awards show has become something entirely different. The BBMAs seem to start there, admitting in a sort of hybrid press-release/faux interview that viewership is down, and using language like “the team…created a fresh format”. 

⁵ even if only in the sense that all television has had to become something different, although I would argue that it’s also in several other senses. My point rests at “television,” though. 

Most of this is ordinary flimflammery – every awards show starts off saying that this is the year the whole format is going to be blown up and reassembled, but what makes this particular telecast interesting is that they do appear, actually, to be changing some of the way they’re doing things. But there are some things here that are interesting, in basically two prongs.

The first is that, per the link above, they appear to be assembling the show out of pre-taped bits, that they’ve built in collaboration⁶ with the various performers and/or their own production people. They’re going to operate without a host, and the impression I’m given is of a highly-modular newsmagazine-style presentation. I’m not quite sure that’s how it’s going to actually turn up, but I can’t help but think that it’s a step toward not requiring people to be there where you are, and that the natural variances in content might help dictate which platform – their social media accounts, their streaming website, and Peacock – might receive which thing.

⁶ the specific marketingspeak includes the sentence “We’ll collectively develop each concept, build a bespoke execution plan based on that vision, and then jump in together.” Really, go click the link, it is truly a study in executive impenetrability. 

Of course, it could also all just look like it always does, but it’s interesting that there’s some press attention devoted to building up the new approach. They’ve also talked in the same link about the way they’re going about deciding upon the success, or “ re-evaluating the value proposition for the talent involved and the fans that both watch BBMAs content and consume artist content and music.”⁷, which also has some interesting implications: if we’re going to treat awards like multimedia events and evaluate them as such, that would probably also change the attendant corporate partnerships and what have you⁸. 

⁷ GAZE INTO THE VOID. GAZE INTO IT. 
⁸ it’s worth noting that their corporate partners thus far are Spotify and uh…Marriott. Genuinely, and I have now googled to confirm, I am unaware entirely of Marriott’s current ad campaign, so I’m glad to see that they’ve figured out a way to remind me, specifically, that they exist. 

That said, they’ve managed to reassure all of us that they’re still going to actually be an awards show, saying in fact, “We plan to reveal all winners on the BBMAs in a variety of ways.”, which seems both like something you’d say if you were not going to do so, and also implies the existence of secret unrevealed winners. Which, obviously, I love. 

In addition to the structural changes, there are also some rather more-mundane changes, albeit also large ones. They’ve added⁹ four K-Pop categories, two Afrobeats categories, a rock category, and two Hot 100 categories. 

⁹ ADDED! There WEREN’T ENOUGH!

There’s also a sort of difference in approach this year, at least tonally: two different press releases¹⁰ tout both the “uniqueness” and the mathematical inevitability (one even uses the term “data-driven”) of the awards, which seems needlessly confrontational and/or insistent, and also obscures that there’s really nothing transparent about it in any useful sense: they’re measuring popularity the same way everyone else does, by figuring out which numbers matter and then putting them together. 

¹⁰ look, I’m calling them press releases because, while they technically appear in a magazine, they’re in the magazine putting on the awards show in question. 

So, while it’s true that the Billboard Awards are, generally, one of the more entertaining broadcasts¹¹, they’re also interesting for reasons beyond the usual. Will it work? (no) Will they try something equally wacky next year? (yes, probably the exact same thing unless Peacock tanks, but mostly because it will increase “engagement” in a way that sells ads, even if it’s just the false positive of changing the measurement) Is there a third question? (no). 

¹¹ they rely heavily on performances, which helps

And, of course, there’s the usual award show business. They don’t appear to be giving any lifetime achievement/whatever else awards this year, but there is a race to the record. If Taylor Swift wins 5 more of these dumb things than Drake on Sunday, she’ll have more than anyone else, ever. 

So feel free to keep count or whatever. And away we go. 

Top Gospel Song
Despite my grousing, it remains the case that, while I’m willing to skip categories in book awards all the time¹², and leaving a bunch of categories out of my Grammy coverage, I declare a rightful winner in all sixty damn nine categories of this bad boy. So here it is, a rightful winner.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: CeCe Winans, “Goodness of God”

¹² art and general-publishing categories, mainly, because I almost never know what I’m talking about or evaluating there. 

Top Christian Song
To be clear, it’s not because I think I know what I’m doing here, but because the Billboard Awards are, fundamentally, ridiculous to the point of absurdity, and I feel confident displaying my own meagre knowledge in this way.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Lauren Daigle, “Thank God I Do”

Top Dance/Electronic Song
I like saying Bizarrap’s name. I’m sad that there isn’t a host that gets to say it. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Bizarrap, “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions 53”. I also like his wacky song naming convention. 

Top Afrobeats Song
This is the first of our new categories. It is true that Afrobeats, as a genre, has really taken on a lot of mass in the last years, and I always like it when that happens. Yay, in short. Very little of this is anything like my cup of tea, but it’s still nice that it’s here.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Ayra Starr, “Rush”

Top Global K-Pop Song
This is another of the new categories, and it is perhaps worth saying that golly, it took them a long time to add a K-Pop category.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: NewJeans, “OMG”

Top Latin Song
I will say, for all my bluster, I genuinely do like hearing some of these things that I’m not all the way up on. I’m sure that, as examples of their forms, they’re about as good as they are in the genres with which I am familiar¹³, but it’s nice anyway. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma, “Ella Baila Sola”

¹³ which is to say: “not good”

Top Rock Song
I genuinely was not aware that “I Remember Everything” had been a charting rock song at all. I associate it with other charts, I guess. Well, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth: this category is nearly always dreadful. It’s nice to have a break.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan, “I Remember Everything” (f Kacey Musgraves)

Top Country Song
I wonder if this is the entirety of the Zach Bryan reign, or if we’re going to get the rest of Zach Bryan next year in some odd quirk of eligibility.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach  Bryan, “Something in the Orange” 

Top Rap Song
The only rapper I actually like here is currently a money criminal, so congratulations Toosii!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Toosii, “Favorite Song”

Top R&B Song
I still don’t have a very intuitive feel for what came out during the eligibility period for all this, so these early categories have some real surprises! 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA, “Kill Bill”

Top Billboard Global (Excl. U.S.) Song
A heretofore unconsidered (at least by me) benefit of the rank stupidity of this David Guetta song is that it really probably doesn’t lose anything in non-English-speaking markets. That’s nice. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: I guess it’s “As it Was?” So: Harry Styles, “As It Was”

Top Billboard Global 200 Song
You know, I do understand why Taylor Swift reappears when you re-add Americans to the list – she seems very American, makes perfect sense¹⁴ – but I am a little surprised to see SZA pop back up. Ah, well, I shouldn’t mention things that make this process easier. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA, “Kill Bill”

¹⁴ I will leave the question of precisely how valid this viewpoint is as an exercise to be considered by the reader

Top Collaboration
I want to praise, separately, that I like pervy happy Sam Smith more than “Adele 2: Adelier” Sam Smith, and also that it remains that case that the David Guetta/Bebe Rexha song is shockingly lazy, and keeps getting nominated for awards. I want to praise these things separately, but I’m trying to keep the word count down, so I’ve abutted them here. I hope you understand.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Metro Boomin’, 21 Savage and The Weeknd, “Creepin’” (I mean, I wanted to compliment the other songs but they’re pretty bad, you see)

Top Selling Song
It remains perhaps the most frustrating thing about country music that “aggressively pandering to the most hateful of the base” is still a terrific way to move units. Burn it all down.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Taylor Swift, “Anti-Hero” (which is not that good, but at least isn’t about how much the singer hates anybody)

Top Radio Song
I mean, these are, by and large, less dismay-inducing, but the category itself is no less frustrating for that.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Taylor Swift, “Anti-Hero”

Top Streaming Song
Hey Zach Bryan fans, stop streaming and start paying Zach Bryan! Dang!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan, “Something in the Orange” 

Top Hot 100 Song
And, of course, as we leave the genre-bound categories, we find that we’re just re-shuffling the same few songs in various permutations. It’s almost like there are too many categories! I’ll see you later, when I have this exact same fucking gripe in the artist categories. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA, “Kill Bill” 

Top Gospel Album
Man, despite all my business above about not really knowing the genre, it still bums me out when the best-selling record in any given genre is a cash-grab dalliance by an estate. Sigh.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Maverick City Music and Kirk Franklin, Kingdom Book One

Top Christian Album
Man, I should go back and see how often I just give this one to Lauren Daigle. I bet it’s most of them. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Lauren Daigle, Lauren Daigle

Top Dance/Electronic Album
I want to make it clear that I’m just as annoyed at Drake and Beyonce being here as I am at Whitney being up in the gospel section. Equally annoying.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Illenium, Illenium

Top K-Pop Album
I know that “old man doesn’t get the youngs” is not really what we’re doing here, and that it doesn’t, ultimately matter, but I must, for my own peace of mind, ask: do people actually listen to K-Pop in album form? Like, are people listening to these albums all the way through? As a journey? I can’t imagine it! I hope it’s happening, and I salute you, K-Pop whole-album listener! You have a relationship to this music I cannot fathom, and I think that’s just swell.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: NewJeans, Get Up

Top Latin Album
Did you guys know that Peso Pluma is actually a throwback-y traditionalist, working in a style that nobody has bothered with for years? I found it out fairly recently, and was very happy about it. It also makes this category easier, because this is another set of things that I am just largely deaf to. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Peso Pluma, Genesis

Top Rock Album
Three country singers, an R&B singer, and whatever the fuck it is you call whatever the fuck Hardy is doing. Great showing for the rock category, as always. That said, two of these albums (Zach Bryan’s American Heartbreak and Steve Lacey’s Gemini Rights) are genuinely great, so I suppose I have less to complain about than usual.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan, American Heartbreak

Top Country Album
I mean, I suppose there really is nothing in the rulebook that prevents this sort of cross-genre stuff, it’s just that when it’s happened in the past I haven’t really liked the music, so I guess I haven’t noticed. Weird. Eerie.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan, American Heartbreak

Top Rap Album
True story: three of the rappers in this category have appeared in year-end ONAT best-ofs¹⁵. So it’s as a former consumer and fan that I say: this is all very bad and they should all do better.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Lil Baby, It’s Only Me

¹⁵ Owl Pharoah and at least Take Care are in there somewhere. And if that isn’t the most embarrassing sentence I’ve had to type all day, I can’t imagine what would be. Although more than the one Drake album would be pretty embarrassing. That’s why I’m not looking it up.

Top R&B Album
I feel like I’ve not been as vocal about how much I do like the Steve Lacy album here.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Steve Lacy, Gemini Rights

Top Soundtrack
True story: I was born in the summer of 1983, so I was in the market that was served by huge soundtrack albums in the 90s. Soundtrack albums used to be important. Anyway, it was nice to see that Greta Gerwig (born very slightly earlier in the summer of 1983) remembers the time, and did what she could.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Barbie: The Album

Top Billboard 200 Album
I didn’t expect there, if I’m being honest, to be so much SZA in the rightful winners, but it’s making some of these categories much easier.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA, SOS

Top Gospel Artist
SIGH. FUCKING SIGH.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: CeCe Winans

Top Christian Artist
I mean, I feel like there used to be choices in this category that weren’t Lauren Daigle. Ones that I felt like making, I mean. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Lauren Daigle. 

Top Dance/Electronic Artist
The places where the BBMAs land on “consistency” are always the weirdest places, you know what I mean? If you don’t, rest assured, it’s because I’m being gnomic for my own sanity. There are so many categories. So many.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Tiësto. Why not? 

Top Afrobeats Artist
So, a dude that was in Adam and the Ants and Sinead O’Connor’s band was in a band called Rema-Rema, and it makes me want Rema to make a Rema-Rema covers album. A remarkable batch of Rema-Rema remakes from Rema, if you will.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Rema, obviously. 

Top K-Pop Touring Artist
I mentioned earlier that I was surprised by how long it took them to add a K-Pop category, but I will say this for them: when they added K-Pop they add it all the way.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Well, once again I am forced to point out that the K-Pop machinery seems like a nightmare, and it all makes me very uncomfortable. So, you know, Twice I guess. 

Top Global K-Pop Artist
Oh also, why on Earth is global appended to K-Pop every time it appears here? It’s weird. I want it to stop.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: NewJeans

Top Latin Touring Artist
As god is my literal actual witness, this is the first – first – I am ever hearing about RBD. Dang.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Daddy Yankee

Top Latin Duo/Group
Grupo Frontera! Back once again! 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Grupo Frontera

Top Latin Female Artist
I mean, I will also say that I have a lot of complaints about the awards-show-bait end of the corporate music-sales spectrum, and that also there’s some overrepresentation of some stuff by dint of it being the best thing in the category, but I’m feeling generous and expansive, and must say: I still really like Rosalía.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Rosalía

Top Latin Male Artist
Hey this is probably the best this category has ever been! 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Peso Pluma

Top Latin Artist
With all that, they made it easier by keeping only one of the gender-segregated Rightful Winners in the all-in category. Easy all the way down. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Peso Pluma

Top Rock Touring Artist
Oh man, I don’t want to miss an opportunity to point out that Depeche Mode is awful and they make awful music. I can’t imagine what they do live, but I bet it’s fucking awful. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: It is, somehow, Coldplay. 

Top Rock Duo/Group
This just makes me wish there was a full-on free-standing rock duo category. It would be fun! Most two-person rock bands are, in fact, very good! Let’s get on this one! 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Foo Fighters. Blah. 

Top Rock Artist
Look, I know, I know, genre is a mug’s game and a marketing concern and blah and also blah, but like, in what way are most of these fellas in any way making rock music? Except Zach Bryan. I’ll allow for Zach Bryan.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

Top Country Touring Artist
I feel like Luke Combs has had a weird enough year that he deserves something, and a Billboard Music Award seems about right, I guess.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Combs. For his touring. Naturally. 

Top Country Duo/Group
I had no idea Parmalee were still going. It’s a day full of surprises!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Zac Brown Band

Top Country Female Artist
Oh hey, Taylor Swift might make it to five after all!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Taylor Swift

Top Country Male Artist
I have run out of ways to say “it’s Zach Bryan”

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

Top Country Artist
And even when you throw the ladies in I’m still out of ways to say “it’s Zach Bryan”

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

Top Rap Touring Artist
I mean, it really probably should be called “Rap Tour” since there’s not really any way that Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa could be considered a single artist. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about the tour.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Snoop Dog and Wiz Khalifa

Top Rap Female Artist
Whatever else, Ice Spice came right out of the corner swinging, and that’s enough to do it here.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Ice Spice

Top Rap Male Artist
Have I already said “Good Grief” as an entire category writeup? Oh, look, ctrl+f says I haven’t. Great news. Good grief.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: 21 Savage

Top Rap Artist
Man, they opened it up to five and picked up two dudes, and none of the women made it into the category. I understand it’s the magic numbers system or whatever, but that still seems like a bummer. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Metro Boomin

Top R&B Touring Artist
It’s kind of weird to note that The Weeknd’s customary string of rightful-winnerships hasn’t started until now.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Weeknd

Top R&B Female Artist
It’s also weird, while I’m on the subject of things feeling weird, to have bounced off that Beyonce album so hard. I just can’t get into it, y’all!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA

Top R&B Male Artist
Ah, here he is again.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Weeknd

Top R&B Artist
It occurs to me that there might be some insight into the psyche of the algorithm-assemblers of the BBMA hivemind if one were to look at these categories – the ones where they take three from one of the gender-separated categories and two from the other – and looked at who was excluded in the contraction (in this specific case, Miguel). I’m not sure what you would learn, but it could be something.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Weeknd

Top Billboard Global (Excl. U.S.) Artist
I guess maybe it’s an off-cycle Ed Sheeran year, but it wasn’t until he came up here that I noticed that I hadn’t seen his name yet. Man. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Weeknd

Top Billboard Global 200 Artist
Additionally, I see Taylor Swift does make it into a global chart, because her non-USican fans celebrate her entire catalog. Very exciting.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Weeknd

Top Song Sales Artist
All the rest of this aside, it is telling that everyone here either has or has had a significant country music angle. It remains the case that, however it shook out, country music is where people buy their music the most. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Taylor Swift

Top Radio Songs Artist
I will further say that I’d really like these categories if we got the actual numbers that went into them. I am, genuinely, fascinated by which audiences are paying, which are streaming, and which are listening to the radio in whatever way that’s measured. Some of the differences sort of appear to be self-evident (the two here that are different from the previous category are SZA and The Weeknd, for example), but that’s not necessarily always the case. I need them numbies.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Weeknd

Top Streaming Songs Artist
Also this category adds Zach Bryan again. Streaming-centric listeners love Zach Bryan. 

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

Top Hot 100 Producer
Oh yeah, Zach Bryan also produces his own music. I forgot I’d run into him down here, also.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

Top Hot 100 Songwriter
You know what’s super interesting is that despite his strengths as a performer I think that lol I’m just kidding it’s Zach Bryan.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

Top Hot 100 Artist
Hey wait where’d Zach Bryan go. This is an outrage!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA

Top Billboard 200 Artist
Also, this year the Top Hot 100 Artist and Top Billboard 200 Artist categories are entirely identical. That’s dumb.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Still SZA, because it’s the exact same field. 

Top Duo/Group
Hey wait, is this the first year that three nominees for this award have come from the Latin categories? Hot crackers!

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Grupo Frontera

Top Female Artist
Maybe Olivia Rodrigo and Ed Sheeran can throw a little party for only having one nomination. It’s rare as hen’s teeth in the “pile every award on everyone” categoryfest that is the BBMAs

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA

Top Male Artist
Man, this has just sort of de facto been The Weeknd for so long¹⁶ that I had forgotten that I could type other names here. Luckily, I’ve gotten a lot of practice typing “z-a-c-h-space-b-r-y-a-n”.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

¹⁶ I think the only other major rightful winner is maybe Kendrick Lamar? Obviously lots of people win this every year who are unrightful, but that’s not what I’m doing here. 

Top New Artist
Seriously. I’m like, ready to teach a masterclass in typing Zach Bryan’s name.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Zach Bryan

Top Artist
Oh. Uh. Well. This is awkward. I really thought uh, this would be another Z-B situation. Gosh. I wonder why it isn’t? Ah, fate, she is fickle.

THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: SZA. Who seems like she might also be fickle. Like fate.

And there it is everybody! Another year on the books!

Shamelessly Punting: Every Single Thought I Have About “Now and Then”, the “final” “Beatles” song

Alright, so my initial question was “this is a song left off of a John Lennon album in the first place,” but it’s from 1975, which means it was probably left off Walls and Bridges, which is, frankly, even worse. This is a John Lennon song not good enough to have made it to a full version on a bad John Lennon album. 

The process of Beatles-izing a John Lennon demo is also how they got “Free as a Bird,” and they chose that song over this one. That song is not, in fact, a good Beatles song. It is, presumably, better than this song. 

It also didn’t make the Anthology cut because George didn’t like it. They found some playing of George’s on whatever unsuccessful attempt to cut this song they’d tried and, again, George also didn’t like it. That’s also not a great sign. 

I’m happy for Peter Jackson that this has happened to him. He seems to genuinely enjoy it, it’s certainly the opportunity of a dang lifetime, and I’m glad he’s out here doing it. The reverse-mixing part-separation technology is, likewise, very cool.

It is pointed out that Paul loved to dork around with the studio technologically anyway, so it’s even kind of Beatles thematically appropriate. 

Paul also has a long Beatles history of playing parts for other Beatles when he doesn’t like the way they played them, so whatever he’s doing with the slide guitar here counts there, also. Very 

Beatles. . 

There is a kind of uncanniness to Lennon’s vocal here. I’m not sure if it’s psychosomatic (because I know they had to train computers to be extra-computer-y to get his vocal free of the piano playing on the demo recording), or if there really is something computorial around the edges of the singing, but it really does sound overtweaked in a way that feels weird. 

Really, I can barely tell what George is or isn’t doing here.

And, genuinely, it’s not until listening to it a second time that I even heard anything Ringo was doing at all. 

This demo was, apparently, around for awhile. Not being much of a part of the John Lennon Demos community, I hadn’t ever heard it, but it feels like a pretty known quantity for the already-in-the-know. 

They’re already making noise about doing this with more stuff, so, honestly, what’s even the point? Good grief. 

Burn it all down. 

The Best Records of October 2023

BCMC – Foreign Smokes (I’m usually on board with Bill Mackay, but there’s something about this record – he’s the BM, and Cooper Crain the CC – that makes me even more um…on board. Even further on, I mean)

Mary Lattimore – Goodbye, Hotel Arkada (It’s a little weird, I suppose, to have a favorite harpist, but there you have it)

Sylvie Courvosier feat. Wadada Leo Smith, Christian Fennesz, D. Gress, N. Wooley, K. Wollesen – Chimaera (I would not have put this set of musicians together on my own, but I’m not surprised to hear that they sound incredible together)

Teenage Halloween – Til You Return (fundamentally, it is important to rock in Rocktober)

Reverend Kristen Michael Hayter – Saved! (for all that you probably know everything you need to know about this album, it’s also well served as the second part of a companion piece to the live record she just put out, ending the Lingua Ignota project. But even on its own it’s awfully good.)

The Comeback Trail: The Rolling Stones – Hackney Diamonds

Welcome back! Half of Rocktober was occupied by the last couple of book awards, so I’m here with a Rocktober catch-up: another missive from Andrew Watt, the current avatar of commercially-oriented rock music by old men¹, this time with everyone’s favorite commercially-oriented producers of rock music-flavored content, The Rolling Stones. (There’s also another one coming down the pike some day. You’ll see it.)

¹ in all honesty, a non-zero part of why I have an eye on Watt at all is because this record he made with Morrissey that Morrissey has been kvetching about being shelved because he’s guilty of some light white supremacy, hardly any all don’t you know, is going to be a real hoot to think about, so I’ve got to remember that he’s out here. I did, for my own reasons, skip the Eddie Vedder album, also. 

I’m not going to do the usual thing here and give you a people’s history. You know who they are, you know why they’re here. They’re the last men standing, in a lot of ways. Oh, there’s still a sort of shambling-husk version of The Who stumbling around under that name, and we’ve still got a couple of Beatles left², but basically the British Invasion is down to one band, and here they are. I think that’s about as much speed as you need to be up to to get to what I’m doing here. 

² one is even on this record!

That said, being the last one left is something, and the fact that the band exists at all, in any form is, really, something impressive. The idea that this particular set of 80 year olds³ has gotten in there and made anything that’s recognizable as rock-music oriented content (and it, for all that it’s largely uncompelling, is recognizable as rock-music oriented content) is impressive, and they deserve it. That’s why this is a full-on Comeback Trail post: there’s no reason to even question why people would want to listen to it. I wanted to listen to it, and I’m hardly what you’d call a serious Rolling Stones fan. 

³ which is to say, like, ten years younger than the oldest member of the Buena Vista Social Club

This seems like as good a place as any to get into what kind of Rolling Stones fan I am⁴. I like the same songs from their sixties period everyone else does, and get down to the serious business of liking them when Mick Taylor joins the band, at which point the band was genuinely lights-out great for three albums⁵, admirably effective for a couple more⁶, and then slipped to “pretty ok I guess” until 1981. Often one’s relationship to the Stones relies on one’s relationship to their second guitarist, and Mick Taylor was the one with more personality. Ronnie Wood’s Keith Jr. routine doesn’t do it for me. 

⁴ spoiler alert: the answer is “very specifically” and “not very much”
⁵ Let it Bleed, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out! and Sticky Fingers, with Ya-Yas joining not only the pantheon of great live albums, but giving us versions of their earlier hits that Mick Taylor plays on, and thus these are the only three Rolling Stones album anyone could ever possibly need. Thank you for your time. 
⁶ Exile on Main Street and Goat’s Head Soup. The former comes with the caveat that is a very large percentage of the fanbase’s favorite Rolling Stones record, which I am acknowledging here, and then also saying: it’s not only not that great, it’s barely a Rolling Stones record. I do like it, though. 

Leaving aside Charlie Watts⁷, I’m one of those people for whom Keith Richards holds most of the keys to enjoying the band. In fact, despite my earlier praise of Mick Taylor, it is worth noting that my favorite Stones record (Let it Bleed) is the record with the fewest contributions from anyone on guitar that isn’t Keith⁸. The Jagger partnership, also, is crucial: Keith Richards’s solo records are pretty dire, so I’m not sure what I pick up on Mick-wise⁹, but it’s an important partnership. Similar to the Let it Bleed observation, I must report that my favorite Rolling Stones song is “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”¹⁰, on which the other guitarist is, in fact, Jagger. So you see this is a very narrow band of appreciation I’ve got here. 

⁷ mainly because I feel the same way about Charlie Watts everyone else does: he ruled, and he was too good for the Rolling Stones
⁸ Mick Taylor only plays on some of it
⁹ to be clear: I think Mick Jagger is a fine and compelling singer, I just mean that very little of what I respond to in the band comes from him. 
¹⁰ perhaps uniquely, this is the only song that has ever been my favorite Rolling Stones song and is also the first song I ever remember thinking of as my favorite. Remind me to tell you a story about a cassette tape some time. 

In any event, my relationship with them notwithstanding, it’s clear to everyone that for a wide variety of reasons, large and small¹¹, they have very little in common with the band they were in the sixties and seventies. The thing that makes the Rolling Stones interesting to me is that they’ve pretty well established what it is they’re doing, and they’ve set it up so that they don’t actually have to do it anymore. 

¹¹ as large as “they’re fabulously wealthy people who are about to live right up until the end of the world” and as small as “Keith has arthritis now and it changed the way he played guitar”

I’ve been somewhat dismissive to this point (all that business about “rock music oriented content” and whatnot), largely because while it’s inarguable that what they’ve made is music, I’m not sure it’s any sort of impulse beyond the need to have new content to use to stoke the fires of the economic engine that keeps them all fabulously wealthy. They’ve toured a few times since their last record, obviously, but in this case you have to drum up some more interest. What better way to do that than a batch of new songs, songs that show off their new replacement drummer, songs that get people saying things like “they are as good as rockers half their age” and “they’ve still got it.”

The great David Yow, in an interview with Andy Falkous (also great), was talking about his band, The Jesus Lizard, occasionally touring in “re-enactment” form, and describing his band as “the best Jesus Lizard cover band in the world”. It’s hard not to think about that sort of thing when confronted with the existence of the Rolling Stones¹². But of course, that makes money only so long. The Rolling Stones are going on and on and on, so we need to find new ways. And so you wind up at the record as loss leader: you put some actual effort in on making a record¹³, and you are rewarded by getting a bunch of songs for the middle part of your set, in between the songs that you’re playing, because you don’t have to learn anything to do so, to crowds that have convinced themselves (rightly, wrongly or whateverly – I’m not interested in changing anyone’s mind here) that this is, somehow, contributing artistically and viably to the world. 

¹² who, even at their best, were not half as engaged or communicative with their material as the Jesus Lizard were 
¹³ and the record, as unsatisfying as it is, clearly has some effort in it. Mostly on the part of the non-Jagger/Richards participants, but you know, it’s not a completely lazy endeavor. Not completely. 

And thus we find ourselves at the fans. The machine is lubricated by giving the people what they want and, despite my inability to understand why, there is a large and dedicated set of people for whom this arrangement is, in fact, what they want¹⁴, which is nice for them. I mean it – it’s great that there’s a set of people who enjoy the work of a band who is doing something no one else has ever done¹⁵, and if I’m unable to see what they’re getting out of it, it’s also not my money they’re siphoning out of bank accounts with the force and speed of a cartoon anteater, so I’m content to let them have their thing. The Rolling Stones, improbably, genuinely seem to have an actively-engaged fanbase, despite every available fact of the Rolling Stones’s existence. 

¹⁴ NB that I almost never understand why people like anything. That’s why I operate a website about why things are popular: because it never makes any damn sense to me, intuitively. This goes as far as the Rolling Stones, sure, but really, is the central question of this entire website. 
¹⁵ I would imagine that I’ll be in a very similar boat in twenty or so years when U2 does basically the same thing – there’ll probably be a similarly-dodgy record with whoever the Andrew Watt of 2043 is (and there’s no way to rule out it actually just being Andrew Watt), but I’ll be on the other side of that one. Also, I will once more point out, in case you’re feeling persecuted or that I’m missing a point: I did not write about the Eddie Vedder album for, once more, personal reasons. 

Anyway, after their blues covers album of several years ago, they teamed back up with their twenty-first century Guy in the Chair, Don Was, because who else would you call if you were a dinosaur that needed to be walked?¹⁶. Those sessions fell apart¹⁷, and Paul McCartney recommended Watt, whom he had been working with¹⁸, and who decided to do the thing that producers always say they’re doing, and reinvigorate the process so that it can be completed. 

¹⁶ thanks folks tip your waitresses
¹⁷ although they did yield a couple of recordings of Charlie Watts playing that ended up on the record
¹⁸ for more on this, as well as a much more thorough takedown of Watt than I’m going for here, enjoy J.R. Moores at The Quietus

In order to complete it, and in order to signify the momentous occasion properly, Watt did what he always does: he called everyone he could think of and invited them to the studio. Here’s where the signifying starts to wildly pick up. We have Charlie Watts’s last known performances! We have four original Stones on one song, because Bill Wyman left his sarcophagus to play on one of the songs Charlie plays on! We’ve have Paul McCartney playing a bass solo on the album’s ostensibly-rockin-est song (the ghost of the Beatles teaming up with the revenant Rolling Stones. Just in time for Halloween!). We have Elton John revisiting his session player days on a couple of songs, isn’t it cute? We have Stevie Wonder coming in as a special guest-star piano player, which is fun! We have Benmont Tench playing yet more piano, because why on Earth shouldn’t we? We have the new guy, who has been in Keith Richards’s band for seventeen billion years! We have Lady Gaga, because I guess that’s what she’s doing now! Each guest appearance comes built in with a marketing hook and a gimmick, thus displaying the capitalistic efficiency with which the Rolling Stones conduct their business. Can you believe that Jagger even hollers at Paul McCartney in a mean impression of his own accent? Can you believe that Lady Gaga might have not even come by to sing but that she did it anyway? Can you believe that Elton John just played piano like a professional piano player? Can you believe that Stevie Wonder played and also sang? With Lady Gaga? Can you believe Benmont Tench wasn’t busy ? 

Of course you can, but the idea is that these are the questions you’re supposed to ask, and that’s the stuff you’re supposed to be thinking about. If nothing else, it’s impressive how consistently they’re able to guide the conversation: seemingly every single review¹⁹ needs to mention these things, because the Rolling Stones have had several decades of pointing to the things that people need to see in order for them to still represent the same rock band, in defiance of all reality²⁰. 

¹⁹ including this one! 
²⁰ indeed, the whole thing would be less annoying if the idea that they are somehow defying age and probability by doing it, rather than them simply being rich enough to treat themselves like a full-on corporation, complete with extensive marketing and advertising, wasn’t repeated quite so many times.

And that’s not all! There’s also the spectacle of a website that doesn’t work, as well as an overly-winking fake ad with the album’s godawful²¹ title. They released the Wonder/Gaga song as a single, and then there it was, along with playing a brief handful of songs at a relatively-small venue which also climaxed in a Lady Gaga appearance. They released a music video where Sydney Sweeney does the video vixen thing²². They did an album announcement with Jimmy Fallon, kicking off a surprisingly wide-ranging battalion of interviews²³. In short, all the stuff you’d need to do to remind people that you’re alive and charming and that those are the things they should be thinking about, and not the music. Then there’s the decisions you have to make afterward: the record is released in a dizzying variety of formats, including alternate covers for every single MLB team and FC Barcelona²⁴, and really, it’s a good thing they gave you all that stuff to hang your opinion on so you don’t even have to listen to it to make insane declarations. 

²¹ but since explained to human fucking death. We get it already. 
²² a decision that meant that every fucking review links to the video
²³ which battalion, for my money, climaxes when Ronnie Wood revealed that Mick Jagger told him Don’t worry if you don’t think it’s the best thing since sliced eggs, Ronnie, just play it.” Indeed, the best thing since sliced eggs, an acknowledged great thing that everyone agrees is great and thinks about all the time. Fuck me.
²⁴ who also did this for Drake, which I think we can all agree makes for a weird duo. I wonder if anyone has both of them? 

This also lets the aforementioned fans get it on it: telling the stories, talking about the things that the stories mean, talking about the significance of the whole thing. Charlie Watts handpicked his successor²⁵, snickering at the bit about going off to Brazil, all of the stuff from a couple of paragraphs ago, and, of course, that this is their best record since the wildly-overrated Some Girls²⁶, if not the best record made within my lifetime. Of course, perhaps funniest of all, it could also just be the best Rolling Stones record of the last two decades, which might just about be accurate. 

²⁵ it’s said he said to Keith that if anything happens to him, Jordan should have the job, but it’s also hard to wonder how much of that is hand-picking and how much of that is trying to pave the road for when Charlie finally quit for good. He never actually did, but he quit the band  a lot, albeit always in ways that meant he played on every record and every tour. 
²⁶ this last opinion being so widespread, and so frequently restated, that at least one reviewer tried to beg people to stop saying it, and also included this gem, too good to pass up: “It’s a dereliction of critical duty to overpraise art…Given that ‘Some Girls’ from 1978 wasn’t a patch on those imperial-era late Sixties and early Seventies Stones albums, laying on the hyperbole for ‘Hackney Diamonds’ is a bit like saying that the Chicken Cottage burger and chips you had last night was the best dinner you’d had since your Big Mac Meal”

So what about that music, then? Oh, it’s fine, I guess. I mean, it’s actually quite bad. Some of it is genuinely bad. But I’m not a fan, and therefore not a customer, so my opinion amounts to being basically the same as my opinion of, say, Polaris GEM. I don’t buy golf carts, either, so who cares if I don’t like theirs? The best I can say for it is that stretches of it were better than I thought they’d be, some of it doesn’t sound as phoned in as they sometimes do, and some of the spectacle (Charlie Watts! Paul McCartney! Bill Wyman) is touching enough to make the journey through the album easier. 

But that’s about it. “Angry” is everything you would expect out of a Rolling Stones single. “Get Close” has an ok riff, and some pretty good sax, and Elton John enjoying himself. I might even listen to that song again someday. “Bite My Head Off” (the one with Paul McCartney) is dreadful, Keith’s “Tell Me Straight” almost works, and the rest of it is just kind of a wash, until the clamoring, scream-singing, false-ending clamor of “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”, a song that manages to bring out the worst in everyone playing on it. Unaccountably, people seem to love it. 

Of course, at the end of it all, it sounds like the people involved wanted it to sound. For all their talk of how Watt was pushing them forward, and Ronnie Wood’s especially-effusive praise for how genreless and unbound the music was²⁷, and despite Mick’s insistence that they didn’t want to make too many references and wanted instead to make new music, this is pretty much made up, entirely and exclusively, with sounds and moves that the Rolling Stones have already committed to tape several times over, and for decades. 

²⁷ a thing that if you could, if you were less excited about the thing, chalk up to a sort of relentless need to have a variety of songs ready for commercials, which is a major thrust of the Pitchfork review of the album, and which I’m basically inclined to agree with. 

It’s hard not to get caught up in is, for me, the central image of the whole thing: Watt’s claim that he wore a different vintage Rolling Stones t-shirt every single day of the recording. He spent a lot of money, you see, and he was in the fold. So he made sure they sounded exactly like the Rolling Stones, without upsetting the Rolling Stones’s idea that they were doing something they hadn’t done, or at least without damaging the credibility of them saying so, whether they believed it themselves or not. 

But of course, all of it is there to provide the Rolling Stones family of products their means to make more money, and, as such, there’s not a whole lot of point to trying to carve out a unique or interesting opinion in the first place: the Rolling Stones are, in fact, able to run over and flatten just about any opinion, because, well, they are who they are.

And so I leave you as they did, and how most of the reviewers did. It’s hard not to think of this as at minimum a transitional period, but of course, these are eighty year old men. There’s something hanging over the proceedings, and that something is “four fifths of a century”. It is, in fact, just under the amount of time it’s been since Muddy Waters first recorded “Rollin’ Stone Blues”, which the two constant members of the Rolling Stones tackle here. It’s often mentioned in reveiws as being a coda after the wail-and-stomp of “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”, but honestly, it might be the only thing in this century they’ve done that I liked, if only because in their rush to get it done and appease the people who think they should’ve recorded it by now, they didn’t fuck around with it, and there’s always going to be something nice about people who have done something for so many decades just…doing it.

Every record can be made interesting by trying to imagine how it sounds to someone who doesn’t hear the same way you do – thinking about the process of making it, and the things it would mean to someone for whom this is part of their biography, or at least their journey through their own biography. In this case, though, that’s just about all it’s got, and, indeed, it’s all the Rolling Stones are still trading in. They used to be somebody so hard that they can convince a whole bunch of people that it never ended.

It’s a talent, in its way, but it sure doesn’t make the music sound any better to me.