The Ringer - The Best Albums of 2017—Bonus Material2017-12-06T10:00:05-05:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/165076412017-12-06T10:00:05-05:002017-12-06T10:00:05-05:00The Best Albums of 2017
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<p>Feist, Vince Staples, Margo Price, and more—these are the albums that stayed with us</p> <p id="w6oBIL"><em>To read about what this year’s albums meant to 2017, see Rob Harvilla’s accompanying </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/12/6/16740802/jay-z-best-album-of-the-year"><em>year-end essay</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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<h3 id="2DOXr2">10. Feist, <em>Pleasure</em><strong> </strong>
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<p id="mrot26">The song is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psTW6vzZOdQ">“Any Party.”</a> The line is, “You planned meeting me on your way home / And I tried reaching you ON YOUR NEW FLIP PHONE!” Loop just that part, crank it up, leave it on repeat for several hours, and revel in one of the precious few unsullied pleasures 2017 had to offer. Sorry, Japandroids. </p>
<h3 id="SMqcBV">9. Charly Bliss, <em>Guppy</em>
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<p id="ZndZU4">This young Brooklyn band’s sugar-shock pop-punk is a guaranteed Instant Good Mood, channeling ’90s Buzz Bin anthemia at its hookiest and most exuberant. There is plenty of prickly romantic anxiety here—“Am I the best? / Or just the first person to say yes?”—and some gleeful malevolence, too. “I laughed when your dog died / It is cruel, but it’s true,” singer Eva Grace Hendricks coos, shortly before launching into yet another supernova chorus that fuses brattiness and vulnerability into something indestructible: “I'm four years above 16 / I bounced so high, I peed the trampoline / I’m too sad to be mean / I’m gonna end up working at Dairy Queen.” Not with that attitude.</p>
<h3 id="Cpmd8a">8. Margo Price, <em>All American Made</em>
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<p id="GpSRcT">“A little pain never hurt anyone,” thunders Margo Price, a lethally sharp Nashville singer-songwriter who doesn’t have to cloak herself in pompous outlaw finery to prove that she’s both the best modern country music has to offer and the best of what modern country music hardly ever offers. There is bar-fight bluster and church-pew soul aplenty here, lighthearted tributes to “Cocaine Cowboys” and “Wild Women” alike, and killer one-liners (“Sometimes my weakness is stronger than me”) suitable for scrawling onto dive-bar bathroom walls. But the sharpest moments—the gently incendiary “Pay Gap” and the gorgeous Willie Nelson duet “Learning to Lose”—tackle big subjects, from economic anxiety to systemic inequality, in vivid, altogether human ways, with a righteous fury bubbling just below the placid surface. </p>
<h3 id="pAct5F">7. Vince Staples, <em>Big Fish Theory</em>
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<p id="RPJ7wA">“How I’m supposed to have a good time / When death and destruction is all I see?” When <em>Pitchfork </em><a href="https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/vince-staples-is-the-least-corny-man-in-america/">asked Long Beach rapper Vince Staples</a> what that line from the sardonic “Party People” meant to him, it triggered a fantastically combative and Liam Gallagher–esque back and forth that swung from “Do you consider music to be art?” to “If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t ask the question” to “I won’t say I have no problem, but the surrounding elements of the environment and the world don’t bother me. I never think about stuff, honestly.” <em>Big Fish Theory</em> clatters and lurches and mesmerizes, its beats ranging from hyphy to house to trance to grime, and Staples’s deep and deceptively casual thoughts deconstructing everything from rap stardom to the prison-industrial complex. It’s a profoundly unsettling good time that gives you a lot of stuff to think about. </p>
<h3 id="HrXOMX">6. Kendrick Lamar, <em>Damn</em>.</h3>
<p id="qpWKZM">At this point, who <em>isn’t </em>praying for Kendrick Lamar? As pure, dense staggering spectacle, this is the rap event of the year, an ocean of precise verbiage to float atop or drown in, from the off-kilter grandiosity of “Humble.” to the woozy licentiousness of “Lust.” There are no lengthy digressions to ignore, no track that doesn’t catch the light in a new way every time. (Spend some time with “Fear.,” wherein he runs through every conceivable iteration of his own death: “I’ll prolly die from one of these bats and blue badges / Body-slammed on black and white paint, my bones snappin’ / Or maybe die from panic, or die from bein’ too lax / Or die from waitin’ on it, die ’cause I’m movin’ too fast.”) There isn’t a better rapper with a bigger audience, nor another artist in any genre so committed to The Album as a Profound Statement. </p>
<h3 id="fccxj3">5. Jason Isbell, <em>The Nashville Sound</em>
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<p id="Q4PBIS"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyiEJaf-IzE">“If We Were Vampires”</a> has the most devastatingly romantic chorus of the year, and also the grimmest: “It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever / Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone / Maybe we’ll get 40 years together / But one day I’ll be gone / Or one day you’ll be gone.” In the Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price tier of putative country saviors with a modest but still insufficient amount of industry support, Isbell has the sharpest, surest way with words, which means he can write a protest song that doesn’t condescend (“White Man’s World”), and a song about contented family life that precisely articulates the dread lurking just beneath that contentment (“Anxiety”). A John Prine for the social-media age who can croon when he wants to and snarl when he has to. </p>
<h3 id="M6Q1KL">4. Spoon, <em>Hot Thoughts</em>
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<p id="h5OlUR">I will never be able to pick my favorite Spoon album, which is a huge compliment to all of them. Britt Daniel has been an indie-rock star for two decades now, long enough to dismiss the notion of “indie rock” entirely: “It seems middle-of-the-road to me,” <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/inside-spoons-futuristic-hot-thoughts-skrillex-jam-w470899">he told <em>Rolling Stone</em></a> earlier this year. “Like people mean ‘junior-level rock & roll.’” <em>Hot Thoughts</em>, the band’s seventh straight excellent album of this century, does indeed feel like a huge leap upward and forward, the organic (all those shakers and tambourines and handclaps) fusing with the robotic (all those humid synths) to create a party where you can dance as suavely or as awkwardly as you like. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt0QFoqNlBk">“Do I Have to Talk You Into It”</a> is the one you want, swaggering and ramshackle, but with every piano note, every jagged guitar burst, every strutting drumbeat perfectly placed. It’s rock ’n’ roll with no qualifiers and no equal. </p>
<h3 id="Efb6ms">3. Alvvays, <em>Antisocialites</em>
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<p id="knRrp5">“What’s left for you and me?” Molly Rankin moans, lovelorn and cutting, her voice bathed in comforting and irradiating reverb. “I ask that question rhetorically.” The second album from this Canadian indie-pop outfit has a deceptively sweet and weightless air, the guitars jangling, the synthesizers whizzing like science-fiction lasers, and Rankin’s voice sliding up to a piercing soprano when she gets particularly heartbroken, or particularly aggrieved. We’re walking every station of the Smiths-album cross here, indulging in a feast of exquisite melancholy (“I thought of going in the lake and swallowing / Thought that I had unplugged the phone until it rang”). Something this deliberately retro shouldn’t sound so immediate, so revelatory; something this bracingly sad shouldn’t sound so triumphant. </p>
<h3 id="LU7X3t">2. Lorde, <em>Melodrama</em>
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<p id="DDPjJ4">I have not yet forgiven America for not making “Green Light” a massive, Song of the Summer–caliber hit; same deal with “Supercut,” actually. This was the best boldface-type pop album of 2017 by a huge margin, a <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/lorde-fires-back-dance-moves-snl-criticism.html">defiantly awkward dance party</a> for one, flaunting its eccentricities with so much intoxicating flair that the result feels universal. <em>Melodrama </em>is a quasi-concept album about being both famous and anonymous, about both wallowing in solitude and partying amid strangers, about reveling in your vulnerability and weaponizing your most intimate moments. “I whisper things / The city sings them back to you” is a bone-chilling way to describe the massive risks involved in getting romantically involved with a pop star, or a “Writer in the Dark,” or anyone, ever, at any time. This is the best-case-scenario depiction of the worst-case scenario. </p>
<h3 id="zR7oyJ">1. Jay-Z, <em>4:44</em>
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<p class="c-end-para" id="vaOQkA">Jay-Z is very, very, very, very sorry. And if that’s all he had to say on <em>4:44</em>, we would’ve played through it one and a half times, canceled our Tidal subscriptions, and forgotten all about it. But his 13th studio album is a stranger, thornier, far more compelling beast—a volatile mixture of wounded therapy talk, brash investment advice, heartwarming family business, and reasonably entertaining get-off-my-lawn grousing. Also, yes, he apologizes at great length and intensity to his wife, one of the few humans on earth who can outshine him, who can render him an underdog, and who can help him seize upon the improbable-comeback narrative that makes this the most bizarrely engrossing album of the year. With producer No I.D.’s skeletal soul goading him on, Jay celebrates his mother, Gloria Carter, coming out. He plows grimly, and messily, into the thicket of racial stereotypes on “The Story of O.J.,” which packs more personality into one word—<em>OK</em>—than you’ll find in plenty of full-length rap albums from punks half his age. And he concedes throughout that he’s disappointed his family. It’s an open question whether he’s aware that output-wise, for the past decade or so, he’s also mostly disappointed his fans. But this record is different: more vulnerable than anyone would’ve expected, and better than anyone had any right to hope. </p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/12/6/16740680/best-albums-2017Rob Harvilla2017-12-06T08:15:02-05:002017-12-06T08:15:02-05:00The Most Underrated—and Fascinating—Album of 2017
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<p>Jay-Z’s ‘4:44’ was supposed to be another corporate affair. Instead, it’s the best album of the year.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="6Zl1MZ">“I apologize / For all the stillborns / ’Cause I wasn’t present, your body wouldn’t accept it.” And there you have it: the hardest rap lyrics of the year. The most emo, the most metal. No dead-eyed 21 Savage threat, no croaked Future boast, no imperial Kendrick Lamar proclamation could compare. </p>
<p id="QxNY7A">Jay-Z, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/pictures/590b9cb231358e46e37021da/forbes-five-the-richest-i/#b94ff7fc026d">nearly a billionaire</a> and almost a half-century old—he turned 48 on Monday—sounds almost humble on the title track to his 13th solo album, <em>4:44</em>, as though he’s just realized that Age triumphs over Money for everyone, every time. He is apologizing to his wife, Beyoncé, for the infidelities and other personal failings that compelled her to release the wounded and furious <em>Lemonade</em>, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/12/5/16041766/the-best-albums-of-2016-5a8ad9054684">the best record of 2016</a>. Once the consensus Greatest Rapper Alive, he prostrates himself now as a humbled father of three, mourning the other children that could’ve been, had he been a better husband. The result, however improbably, is the best record of 2017.</p>
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<p id="ugm24t">Tabloid prurience alone <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/30/16037644/jay-z-444-album-exit-survey-a2cdfa1b87c6">made <em>4:44 </em>a sensation</a> upon its release in late June, offering the spectacle of a very famous person groveling at the feet of his more famous wife. Track 1: “Kill Jay-Z,” wherein he goads himself into a psychological breakdown (“Cry Jay-Z / We know the pain is real / But you can’t heal what you never reveal”) and grimly imagines a future where his marriage fails completely and he’s stuck watching other men play football with his son. (Not very metal, but definitely emo.) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5srnNrICJo">Making just the song cry</a> would no longer suffice. </p>
<p id="BS1Bw2">But even lifelong fans might’ve worried that tabloid prurience was all Jay had left to offer. His last two solo albums, 2013’s <em>Magna Carta Holy Grail</em> and 2009’s <em>The Blueprint 3</em>,<em> </em>were largely soulless and corporate affairs. Even the highs got awfully cheesy—don’t forget that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCINmOZGV6Q">this</a> is still Jay-Z’s only solo no. 1 single—and the lows were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1_EDno-44M">abominable</a>. <em>Watch the Throne</em>, his full-length 2011 collaboration with fellow narcissist and frenemy Kanye West, has aged far better, its own <a href="https://genius.com/Jay-z-and-kanye-west-gotta-have-it-lyrics">“I’m planking on a million”</a> crassness nicely undercut by the occasional burst of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoEKWtgJQAU">sincerely goofy exuberance</a>. But Jay-Z the Artist had long ago been eclipsed by <a href="http://www.complex.com/music/2014/04/rap-lines-to-use-in-your-twitter-bio/jay-z-diamonds-from-sierra-leone-remix">Jay-Z the Business, Man</a>. His records now usually serve as loss leaders for his brand. </p>
<aside id="vzmpEq"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Best Albums of 2017","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/12/6/16740680/best-albums-2017"}]}'></div></aside><p id="qGn3f6">Which is to say that on <em>4:44</em>, the guy who’d once tried to sell us on the notion that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRlwg0T2Jyo">“30’s the new 20”</a> warily stared down 50, which is always just 50, no matter how many Basquiats you stash in your kitchen. “I think that rap in particular is a young man’s sport,” Jay told <em>New York Times </em>executive editor Dean Baquet in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/29/t-magazine/jay-z-dean-baquet-interview.html">a lengthy late-November interview</a>. “I stood in that window a really long time. But still, no, I don’t think people are looking to me as, like, The Thing.”</p>
<p id="bDSGwl">So upon first contact with <em>4:44</em>, you are forgiven for fixating on those relatively few moments when he addresses Beyoncé—and Solange, and “Becky”—directly. You are also forgiven for suspecting that all the other parts of this record would rank somewhere between disposable and deplorable. In short, what you probably did is fixate on “4:44.”</p>
<p id="KtBbcd">Good idea. First off, the extended sample—“Late Nights & Heartbreak,” from U.K. retro-soul outfit Hannah Williams & the Affirmations—is a killer, volcanic and aggrieved; Williams’s howls of “I’m never gonna treat you like I should” are piercing for the verb tense alone. </p>
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<p id="wA76AJ">The idea, per full-album producer No I.D., was to build a sonic backdrop so romantically despondent that Jay had no choice but to confront his own romantic despondence. “I created that beat to box him into telling that story,” No I.D. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/arts/music/jay-z-444-no-id-interview.html">told <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em></a>. “I put the sample from the singer Hannah Williams—it starts off with ‘I find it so hard / When I know in my heart / I’m letting you down every day.’ I remember him hearing it and looking at me like, ‘OK, fine.’”</p>
<p id="YWPllA">To hear his producer tell it, Jay rose to the challenge immediately—4:44, per the myth, is when he woke up in the morning, ready to record what he described to Williams as <a href="https://massappeal.com/hannah-williams-jay-z-444-inspiration/">the most personal song he’d ever written</a>. One that starts with him rhyming <em>apologize </em>and <em>womanize</em> and describing the genesis of a superstar marriage in almost forensic detail:</p>
<blockquote><p id="PfWhn5"><em>I said, “Don’t embarrass me” instead of “Be mine”</em><br><em>That was my proposal for us to go steady</em><br><em>That was your 21st birthday</em><br><em>You matured faster than me, I wasn’t ready</em></p></blockquote>
<p id="59PC8V">Relevant: Jay-Z is 12 years older than Beyoncé. The pathos and the desperation snowballs as the sample thunders on; he grovels extensively to his wife (“Thinkin’ of all the time / You wasted it on all this basic shit”) and to his children for the groveling he’ll be doing in the future (“My heart breaks for the day I have to explain my mistakes / And the mask goes away / And Santa Claus is fake”). Even if you’re a skeptic—even if you’re apt to dismiss all this as a pro-wrestling work, as two crafty superstars playing up their interpersonal strife <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2017/09/13/jay-zs-joke-of-a-music-service-tidal-is-actually-doing-really-well/#37fbda1b5c92">to keep their underdog streaming service afloat</a>—this is exquisite craftsmanship, tabloid drama on a prestige scale. “I was blown away,” No I.D. raved. “I just walked out of the studio and wanted to go find my wife and hug her. I told him that’s the best song he’s ever written.”</p>
<p id="SjtPUY">Nonetheless,<em> 4:44 </em>could’ve faded with the summer, another high-profile release forgotten in a few weeks, if not a few days. But this record has a scrappy, eerie intensity that only darkens with time—a testament in part to No I.D., who provides deep-soul continuity whether the supporting voice is Stevie Wonder’s, or Nina Simone’s, or Frank Ocean’s, or Damian Marley’s, or Beyoncé’s. As for Jay, there are other high-profile conflicts to address (including <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jay-z-talks-kanye-west-feud-recording-444-in-interview-w498558">his ongoing cold war with Kanye</a>) and far more triumphant personal revelations—namely, on “Smile,” the fact that his mother, Gloria Carter, came out as a lesbian. Which’d be the most compelling moment on any other rap album this year, and might in fact be the most compelling moment on this one: “Cried tears of joy when you fell in love / Don’t matter to me if it’s a him or her.”</p>
<p id="IfvoeT">There he goes, crying again. This record isn’t entirely a therapy session: There is controversial sociology, and lots of <em>Just be a multimillionaire rapper like me </em>bootstrapping philosophy, and plenty of the low-calorie boasting that comes as naturally to Jay-Z as breathing, even amid his newfound humility. The result is volatile, and occasionally exasperating, and endlessly fascinating. It’s the perfect combination of comfort and discomfort: a harsh spotlight trained on an all-time great still coming to terms with his age, still reckoning with the fact he’s no longer The Thing, stewing and stumbling and evolving into something even better. </p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Z08iXg">To ride for a Jay-Z album in 2017 is to open yourself to the same cheap “LOL, Grandpa” jokes Jay-Z himself inspires—jokes that, in a weak attempt at deflection, you might have already made about him yourself. The most damning thing one can say about <em>4:44 </em>as a youth-culture-zeitgeist proposition is that in late November, it was <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/28/16710348/2018-grammy-nominations-winners-losers-jay-z-kendrick-lamar-ed-sheeran">lavished with Grammy nominations</a>, eight in all. Most notably, it’s up for Album of the Year, a first for Jay; should he win, it’d be the first rap album to take the prize since Outkast’s <em>Speakerboxxx/The Love Below </em>in 2004. That he might finally get his industry due only proves that the industry regards him as a legacy act, finally and definitively uncool enough to get the institutional respect he deserves.</p>
<p id="FasNp3">It makes sense; he is the elder statesman of this year’s Album of the Year field, by a lot. Two important things happened in 1996: Jay released his debut album, <em>Reasonable Doubt</em>, and Lorde, also an AOTY nominee, was <em>born</em>. Childish Gambino and Bruno Mars are likewise luminaries for totally different generations, following entirely different blueprints. And rounding out the category, of course, is Kendrick Lamar. </p>
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<p id="shrKtv">The case for Lamar’s <em>Damn. </em>as 2017’s one true masterwork is also, to my mind, the very polite case against it: It is towering and imperial and expertly verbose to the point of suffocating, a stuck caps-lock key in rap-album form. (There is a very excellent song called “HUMBLE.” that could be styled only as “HUMBLE.”) It is overwhelming in its excellence in a way that can sometimes just leave you overwhelmed. It speaks loudest to me at its calmest and quietest: The small universe suggested by the simple line “My daddy commissary made it to commas” or the way Lamar purrs, “Is it unconditional when the ’Rari don’t start?” at Rihanna on “Loyalty.” (The answer is no.) It’s not that there’s no nuance here—it’s <em>all </em>nuance, most of it rapturous. But the most prominent narrative thread here is still <em>OK, I give up, you’re the greatest</em>.</p>
<p id="K8lqSU">Future’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/arts/music/future-and-the-art-of-flooding-the-market.html?_r=1">tidal-wave double shot</a> of <em>Future </em>and<em> Hndrxx</em>, which went back-to-back as <em>Billboard</em> no. 1 albums in February, meant to overwhelm in an entirely different way, all nuance and most character development discarded, replaced by a numbing repetition that leads to the grimmest sort of transcendence. References to his recent failed relationship with Ciara abound, though even his song literally called “Sorry” can’t seem to stay contrite for long; he sounds more vulnerable, and more compelling as a fully sketched-out personality, the deeper he reaches into his past. Here, for example, is the nicest thing Future says about a woman on either album:</p>
<blockquote><p id="shGaby"><em>She ain’t leave when I was broke</em><br><em>She ain’t leave when I was broke</em><br><em>One thing that she didn’t do</em><br><em>She ain’t leave when I was broke</em></p></blockquote>
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<p id="atC5aW">The effect is magnified, somehow, by the fact this admission comes on Track 16 of <em>Future</em>, after you’ve been buried by the avalanche. That’s one way to weaponize the album format: turn it into a mesmerizing slog, a war of attrition. As for the year’s other top-billed rap full-lengths, you can revel in the totality of Migos’s <em>Culture</em>, or Lil Uzi Vert’s <em>Luv Is Rage 2</em>, or even Drake’s <em>More Life</em>, or you can just cherry-pick the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VUa99-tJqs">often</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrsFXgQk5UI">superb</a> <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/7hDc8b7IXETo14hHIHdnhd">singles</a> that drove them. None of those guys seem terribly concerned with being regarded as full-length artistes<em>.</em> (Well, maybe Drake, but it’s a relief not to have to think too hard about Drake for a little while.) For them, volume—and its attendant Spotify windfall—is its own reward, its own type of prestige.</p>
<p id="jaKUjG">No, the newest and youngest and most confounding stuff is still best consumed in bite-sized chunks, in RapCaviar binges, in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/arts/music/soundcloud-rap-lil-pump-smokepurrp-xxxtentacion.html">mystifying SoundCloud bursts</a>. It’s an unsettling but not unpleasant sensation to put <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9alXo1OXTec">Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang”</a> on repeat and laugh at the line “Your mama still live in a tent”<em> every single time</em>, without a clear idea of who exactly you are laughing at or with. It is a way to feel young again, and also impossibly old. The 2017 full-length that best captures that sensation, nervous energy crossed with bone-deep weariness, might be Vince Staples’s <em>Big Fish Theory</em>. A discordant anthem like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6iAzyhm0p0">“Yeah Right”</a> both courts old-guard rap stardom and dismisses it as an archaic death sentence, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa4vBlzMaeQ">from the album’s first moments</a>, Staples can sketch out a full character arc in seconds, going from Young, Brash Jay-Z to Wizened, Chastened Jay-Z in a few lines, as opposed to a dozen albums: </p>
<blockquote><p id="2NpvUl"><em>If I’m feelin’ funny, guaranteed gon’ flash</em><br><em>Cock back, blast, put ’em in a bag</em><br><em>Prolly gon’ regret it in the retrospect</em><br><em>Got a lot of problems I ain’t let go yet</em></p></blockquote>
<p id="yMqKKE">What’s missing from all those other records, though—the cerebral ones and the proudly thoughtless ones, the frivolous ones and the apocalyptic ones—is a solitary moment of negative space as sublime as the one on <em>4:44</em>’s “The Story of O.J.”</p>
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<p id="kImmYX">Here’s a prime example of how the cumulative weight of a multi-decade career can prove your continued relevance, not your obsolescence:</p>
<blockquote><p id="eB1rOC"><em>O.J. like, “I’m not black, I’m O.J.” </em><br><em>[Very long pause]</em><br><em>… OK</em></p></blockquote>
<p id="T1cJNe">The way he lets that pause hang in the air is the other candidate for Hardest Rap Line of the Year, a micro masterpiece of scathing wit. “The Story of O.J.” was <em>4:44</em>’s other immediately startling moment, a pointed treatise on racism and economics wherein he invites us all to get rich by doing what rich people did, himself included. Jay chastises himself for not investing in Brooklyn real estate and congratulates himself for investing in art instead. He urges us to resist the siren songs of strip clubs and Instagram. (He also, in his zeal to transcend ugly stereotypes, repeats one about Jewish people himself, earning a rebuke from <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/adl-rebukes-jay-z-over-jewish-lyric-in-the-story-of-oj-w491217">the Anti-Defamation League</a> that prompts some defensiveness in his <em>Times </em>interview: “You can’t miss the context of the song,” he insists, citing the other racist images on garish display in the song’s video. “You have to be like 5 years old or something.”) He is reaching, and overreaching, and fucking up, and most of the time apologizing for fucking up, and displaying enough self-reflection to suggest he might one day apologize for the other fuckups, too. </p>
<p id="zJngrO">You can argue that like Tony Soprano, Jay-Z has simply weaponized the idea of therapy, seizing on yet another set of tools with which he can tell us all exactly what we want to hear. His conversation with Baquet in the <em>Times </em>is full of odd platitudes, a little profound, a little clichéd. “Because until everyone's free, no one’s free, and that's just a fact.” “What you reveal, you heal.” “Without people, being rich would be very boring.” “The hardest thing is seeing pain on someone’s face that you caused, and then have to deal with yourself.” <em>4:44</em> thrives on that imperfection, that unease, that sense that he is still dealing with the pain he’s caused, and still causing it. </p>
<p id="DBWe2R">Jay-Z has been extremely famous for the better part of two decades now, and part of what makes this record so compelling is that we know way too much about him. He has thrilled us, and overwhelmed us, and abandoned us, and returned to us, and disappointed us, and bored us, and vaguely embarrassed us by embarrassing himself. With apologies to Future, or Vince Staples, or even Drake and Kendrick, nobody else in the 2017 field has a persona that massive and intricate and ripe for deconstructing. He is cheating, in a sense; he is leveraging the full weight of his history, and the more sordid aspects of it especially. But he makes the most of it, and he teaches superstar rappers how to evolve and age by exploding the myth that they’ll age gracefully.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="SgLhiA">Jay-Z ends <em>4:44 </em>by looking both backward (“Marcy Me”) and forward (“Legacy”), and for the first time in a decade, he sounds energized looking in either direction. In some ways, he’s just like anybody and blazed a trail anybody can follow; in other, crucial ways, he’s not like anybody else at all. For all its harangues about credit and investments and generational wealth, this record is deeply flawed as a map or a blueprint. As a piece of art, however, those same flaws push it toward something approaching greatness. “I’m the person that looked at the Mona Lisa and be like, ‘Man, that’s gonna be cool in 40 years,’” Jay told the <em>Times</em>. “I play forever. And so my whole thing is to identify with the truth. Not to be the youngest, hottest, new, trendy thing.” He won’t be cool in 40 years—he’s not cool <em>right now</em>. He’s striking a different, far more conciliatory tone these days, but he’s not quite telling the whole truth, yet. But it is striking to watch him chase perfection, chase forever. And thrilling to cheer him on as he fails.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/12/6/16740802/jay-z-best-album-of-the-yearRob Harvilla2017-10-19T12:29:24-04:002017-10-19T12:29:24-04:00Margo Price Is the Real Country Music Deal
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<p>Her<strong> </strong>second record, ‘All American Made,’ is one of the best albums of the year</p> <p id="igTc6G">Margo Price is on a mission to reclaim the term <em>economic anxiety</em>. In the death throes of the 2016 election, those words became a bitter punch line, shorthand for <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/donald-trump-and-economic-anxiety/496385/">the fierce argument about the true motivations of those who voted for President Donald Trump</a>. But Price is a sharp and deceptively soothing country singer adept at making phrases you’ve heard thousands of times radiate with new urgency, turning the political into something deeply personal. That’s evident throughout her new album, this week’s <em>All American Made</em>. Particularly the song called “Pay Gap.”</p>
<p id="5956ni">“Pay Gap” is breezy and gentle, bolstered by jolly accordion and the assured lilt of Price’s voice. She can summon the tart pugnaciousness of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwBirf4BWew">Tammy Wynette</a> or the bazooka-voiced grandeur of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FhVbyeWFvo">Neko Case</a> at will, but that only makes her moments of restraint hit harder. “Honey, I work so hard for my money / And I leave my baby at home,” the first verse begins, quickly winding up to the grim sentiment “But at the end of the day, it feels like a game / One I was born to lose / In this institution, a dead revolution is giving young women abuse.” </p>
<p id="RYgJkF">The chorus switches to waltz time, the vibe even gentler as Price coos, “Pay gap, pay gap / Why don’t you do the math? / Pay gap, pay gap / Rippin’ my dollars in half.” The second verse keeps the chill vibe despite getting both surlier and more historically specific, with Price scoffing at the very notion of “equal pay”; from the second chorus on, she switches the first line up to “Pay gap, pay gap / Don’t give me that feminism crap,” delivered lovingly, as though she’s singing her wedding vows. The last verse, in full:</p>
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<p id="fUkCjS"><em>No matter your religion, no matter your race</em><br><em>No matter your orientation</em><br><em>No matter your creed and no matter your taste</em><br><em>And no matter your denomination</em></p>
<p id="IDxFVM"><em>We’re all the same in the eyes of my God</em><br><em>But in the eyes of rich white men</em><br><em>I’m no more than a maid to be owned like a dog</em><br><em>And a second-class citizen</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p id="KcFpgb">“I don’t feel angry when I’m singing it, because that song is in a major key,” Price <a href="https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2017/10/16/margo-price-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/">told the website <em>Aquarium Drunkard</em></a> earlier this month. “It’s happy. It’s disguising the message with something a little more digestible that’s pumped full of sugar because of the medicine that no one wants to take. I think it actually makes me feel calmer when I sing that song, because I feel like, ‘Okay, I’m doing some small part to make people aware.’”</p>
<p id="66V9ez">Born in Illinois and based in Nashville, Price records for Jack White’s Third Man Records, which leads one to the reasonable assumption that she’s Jack White’s idea of a modern-day country singer: throwback-minded but fiery and forward-looking, an analog prophet for digital times. At 34, she’s lived just a little more, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/arts/music/margo-price-all-american-made.html?_r=1">a little harder</a>, than most young country singers; her songs might grapple with the loss of a child, or the loss of her family farm, or her years in the unsigned-artist Nashville wilderness. Her debut album, last year’s <em>Midwestern Farmer’s Daughter</em>, nonetheless played out like a triumph, and got her both plenty of critical attention and a gig on <em>Saturday Night Live</em>, belting out the bright and bumptious “Hurtin’ (on the Bottle),” and briefly transforming NYC into <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgylOni0JSI">Fist City</a>. </p>
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<p id="d0tR39">But this week’s <a href="https://n.pr/2wKLBNt"><em>All American Made</em></a>, buoyed by “Pay Gap” and 11 other songs that stir the sugar you want and the medicine you need into an intoxicating brew, is even better. It’s one of the best country records of the year, radiating both honky-tonk rambunctiousness and elegant church-pew soul, with tasteful bursts of gospel and country funk. Writing most often with her husband, Jeremy Ivey, Price has a knack for killer one-liners suitable for sewing into throw pillows or scrawling onto dive-bar-bathroom walls: “Sometimes my weakness is stronger than me.” “A little pain never hurt anyone.” “If you drink all night, you’ll be thirsty all day.” “Is winning really learning to lose?” Most of those are delivered with a wink, a shrug, an amiable lope. But when Price turns on the fire hose, as on the booming climax of “A Little Pain,” look out. </p>
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<p id="ykFZWK">That <em>All American Made </em>features a duet with Willie Nelson is not, in and of itself, remarkable. Willie, god bless him, has a habit of popping up anywhere, with anyone, with results that always soothe you but rarely shock you. But “Learning to Lose” tweaks the formula just slightly, the tone just a click more poignant than his usual guest-star turn. Price and Nelson’s voices mesh beautifully without quite interlocking, a rapport all the more convincing for how lonesome they both sound. </p>
<p id="KsGK4K">The resulting song joins “Pay Gap” in bucking against the system: “Everywhere I turned, the cards were stacked against me / And I wondered was it bad luck or just design.” Elsewhere, Price sings about losing her beloved childhood farm on “Heart of America,” which climaxes with the line “They took every field my family owned.” The rowdier “Wild Women” is a celebration of those women and a declaration that Price stands among them, though the price is high, and once again higher for her than it oughta be: “It’s hard to be a mother, a singer and a wife / But all the men, they run around and no one bats an eye.”</p>
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<p id="QmFGV0">From Lydia Loveless’s <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6QtjEW9gIRiqShGnEGwCJB">“Midwestern Guys”</a> to Miranda Lambert’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwNY3N5iQ2I">“Bathroom Sink”</a> to more radio-friendly fare like Maddie & Tae’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MOavH-Eivw">“Girl in a Country Song,”</a> you can find other, newer country songs that eloquently lament a woman’s place in the world. In Price’s corner of Nashville, you can find other left-leaning or at least counterculture-friendly critics’ darlings like <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5AxGbeiWhiBoJBaS0whPQU">Todd Snider</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0AuEVHZgowAkI2J7QIKEHg">Aaron Lee Tasjan</a> or even golden boy <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/7/14/16078046/jason-isbell-the-nashville-sound-album-cbffed1e3c61">Jason Isbell</a>. But it’s still rare, and still a genuine thrill, to watch someone kick at the glass ceiling with Price’s aplomb and specificity. <em>All American Made</em>, with all its sentimental grit and musical restlessness, calls to mind <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/6/13/16036710/country-music-new-champions-9299388f7bda"><em>A Sailor’s Guide to Earth</em></a>, last year’s Grammy-winning hit from Sturgill Simpson, another restless outsider who scares up a goodly amount of Real Country Music praise but refuses to confine himself to a lane that narrow. It’s tempting to lament that Price will likely not get as towering a critical platform as Simpson, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/arts/music/kacey-musgraves-and-other-tomatoes-give-country-its-bite.html">certainly not much country-radio play</a>, injustices attributable to a cultural version of the same pay gap she sings so vividly about. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="QaaUSs">But to hail her as unfairly underrated is a backhanded compliment; as she and Willie put it, “Sometimes a blessing is a curse in disguise.” At its best, this record painfully and expertly sharpens the distinction between counting your sorrows and succumbing to them, between shaming your societal oppressors and allowing them to victimize you. “Sometimes I’m Virginia Woolf / Sometimes I’m James Dean,” Price howls on “Weakness,” as thrilling a declaration of strength as you could ask for, sung by a clear-eyed rebel more than capable of rallying you to her cause. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/19/16503868/margo-price-all-american-made-reviewRob Harvilla2017-09-14T19:29:09-04:002017-09-14T19:29:09-04:00What Spotify’s Rap Caviar Says About the Music Industry
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<img alt="Spotify's RapCaviar Live Show At The Tabernacle Atlanta" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QDnBHhn-VhYhtatDsq-yPYUqwDY=/0x0:4949x3712/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/56684097/830920194.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images for Spotify</figcaption>
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<p>Plus: an interview with Spoon’s Britt Daniel</p> <div id="iAKWxq"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/0nxolI4Mu8c58m5E3F5yZX" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="W4hvdf">Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald examine the current state of the music industry and the breakout success of Spotify’s Rap Caviar playlist (2:00). Then they are joined by Ringer staff writer Shea Serrano to discuss <em>Sons of Anarchy</em> and what he needs in his television-watching experience (15:00). Finally, Andy sits down with Britt Daniel of Spoon to discuss life on tour and his enduring musical career (33:00).</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2017/9/14/16310196/what-spotifys-rap-caviar-says-about-the-music-industryChris RyanAndy Greenwald2017-06-23T13:43:42-04:002017-06-23T13:43:42-04:00Vince Staples Asks Questions, Too
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<p>On ‘Big Fish Theory,’ the rapper’s compact second studio album, Staples ponders death, destruction, and market-price oysters with his trademark insight and humor</p> <p>The third-to-last song on Vince Staples’s <em>Big Fish Theory, </em>released Friday, is called “Party People.” At first blush, the song is strange — which here is not anywhere close to meaning “bad”; it is very, very good in fact — for a few reasons. Vince Staples <a href="https://noisey.vice.com/en_au/article/i-went-on-a-date-with-vince-staples-the-happiest-nihilist-in-the-world">doesn’t party</a>, to begin with. He doesn’t smoke or drink or use any other means of escape to an altered, less present state. The kind that makes leaving the house seem like a good idea, I mean. Secondly, “Party People” is tinny, morose, and industrial<em>, </em>but with a pace more frantic<em> </em>than anything on last summer’s <em>Prima Donna</em> EP. It sounds like a remnant from the early aughts when UK garage (pronounced <em>gare-ridge; </em>I’ll never get used to it) suffered a midlife crisis soon after finding mainstream success. It started stepping out in darker, baggier clothes, hanging out in cramped basements, calling itself “grime.” “Party People” <em>could</em> be that, but those drums — which somehow exist both in the past and the distant future at the same time — could also be Detroit techno.</p>
<p>The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but “Party People” is also despairing. It’s none of my business whether or not he wants to be, but Staples is <em>here</em>, still finding it hard to stop thinking about black erasure, the black cats he sees in the daytime, and first-class seats just being overrated. This is his fourth project in three years (the others, in order: <em>Hell Can Wait</em>,<em> Summertime ’06</em>,<em> Prima Donna</em>). He <em>should</em> be celebrating his impossibly high approval rating and ridiculous prolificacy. But instead Vince wonders, “How I’m supposed to have a good time / When death and destruction is all I see?”</p>
<p>On <em>Theory,</em> and as ever, there’s no hand-holding. Asked to explain that line in a recent and <a href="http://pitchfork.com/features/interview/vince-staples-is-the-least-corny-man-in-america/">thoroughly entertaining interview with <em>Pitchfork</em></a>, Staples asserted that it’s not a line, but a genuine question. And why would he ask a question he could already answer for himself? <em>You</em> answer it. He’s busy trying to figure out what to do with fame. Or rather, how best to survive it. As made abundantly clear by both the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxw1Zef3EO0">paranoiac <em>Prima Donna </em>short film</a> and <em>Theory’</em>s second single, “Big Fish,” neither critical acclaim nor world renown is strong enough to lift his spirits:</p>
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<p><a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/vince-staples-interview-big-fish-theory.html">Speaking with <em>Vulture</em></a> earlier this week about what shape <em>Theory </em>would take, Staples said he’d been listening to “Guidance,” Travis Scott’s predictable foray into soca on 2016’s <em>Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, </em>every day<em>.</em></p>
<p>That may well be, but he had to have also been listening to Moodymann and Underground Resistance. <em>Big Fish Theory </em>is an impatient 12-song sprint. If it is dance music, it’s the kind of dance music best suited for the places people <em>end up</em> (packed warehouses on the outskirts of town) rather than the places people would normally consider <em>destinations</em> (all of which close at 2 a.m.). That’s owed mostly to Westside Ty, who’s been with Staples at least since Def Jam, and Zack Sekoff, both producer and product of Los Angeles’s low end beat culture. Together, aided by a bevy of intrepid 20-something beatmakers like Sophie, GTA, and Flume, they crafted a sound that feels appropriately urgent for Vince and his missives on class and racial politics, both of which the North Long Beach rapper claims <a href="http://www.cc.com/video-clips/0z745c/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-vince-staples---letting-the-listener-decide-on--big-fish-theory-">to never think about</a>. Then again, who would want to shoulder the weight of being the voice of reason for an entire generation? It sounds exhausting.</p>
<p>Rapping in athletic four-bar runs over “BagBak” — produced by Ray Brady, who is not a 20-something, but has worked with both the Black Eyed Peas and Santigold — Staples broaches gentrification, profiling, and mass incarceration, though it’s nothing so tedious as “conscious” rap. He screeches about not voting as if water is filling the main cabin, rivets bursting from a hull under too many atmospheres of pressure. Speaking of submarines, he’s never seen <em>The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou</em>. And “<a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/vince-staples-interview-big-fish-theory.html">it looks horrible</a>.”</p>
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<p>Vince Staples is still the guy who bats cleanup in the roasting session, and <em>Big Fish Theory</em> is not without its jokes. He goes to a date at the oyster bar and gapes at the bill (“745”). He says “My dick is strict for procreation” (“Party People”). The playfulness of a line like “Clap your hands if the police ever profiled” (“BagBak”) is both hilarious and dark; it’s the kind of gallows humor that’s won Vince a wide-ranging audience that constantly asks him for his two cents. (And with reason; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd_MsYiiW54">it’s usually pretty good</a>.) On “Love Can Be…,” Kilo Kish flutters around Vince, playing the part of a woman concerned less with the music than the lifestyle hanging off of it. Staples then borrows what I sometimes believe to be the <em>actual</em> realest shit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq866yFap_g">Jeezy</a> ever wrote: “I’ll never let a bitch Lil’ Bow Wow me!” Kish breezes gorgeously in and out of “Homage” and “Crabs in a Bucket” as well. But aside from Kish’s three holographic dispatches and Ty Dolla $ign reprising his Kiss Me Thru The CB role in a different <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxGvm6btP1A">song about feeling alone</a> when you’re with people, it’s easy to miss some of the other big names. A$AP Rocky says two words on “Samo.” I need help finding Justin Vernon.</p>
<p>Kendrick Lamar, on the other hand, is very easy to spot. On “Yeah Right,” which bites its thumb at rappers who wear loaned jewelry and don’t really own the cars they jail pose in front of on Instagram. The beat — the work of Sophie and Flume — sounds like a fighter jet turning into Starscream. It’s metallic, massive, and scary. Kendrick, who is a ruthless bully when he chooses to be, grabbed this beat by the ankles and shook out all its lunch money. Then, he gave it a swirly for good measure:</p>
<p>At the album listening event this past Wednesday at downtown Los Angeles’s Mrs. Fish, I saw two guys doing the default bench celebration (you know, the one where you’re just holding each other back). But instead of a dunk it was that Damon Wayans line that elicited the reaction.</p>
<p>I also saw Vince, but he was gone before I got a chance to talk to him about “Alyssa Interlude.” See, it begins with a sound bite from an Amy Winehouse interview that took place at one point in her <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/07/amy_a_documentary_about_amy_winehouse_reviewed.html">cruelly public</a> downward spiral: “I’m quite a self-destructive person,” she says, “so I guess / I guess if you give me some material.” I wanted to ask Vince if he’d seen <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39AibKDWbjE">that clip</a> of Amy Winehouse, aged just 14, singing “Happy Birthday” to a friend. Just to know if he ever rankled over how happy she seemed at the time; how Blake Fielder-Civil and drug addiction were such a long way off. Would I be correct in assuming he’s growing increasingly dissatisfied with the world and most things in it? That he thinks about life’s impermanence more than most people? He might have given me a glimpse into why he tacked on that <em>overwhelming</em> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-es4Q8AJaU">David Ruffin sample</a> to the end of the track. <em>Maybe</em>. But I’m pretty sure he left four or five songs into the listening.</p>
<p>The album is 36 minutes long, by the way. He doesn’t seem to have much time to waste these days.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/23/16039556/vince-staples-big-fish-theory-album-2e55579b6ca2Micah Peters