The Top 50 Albums of the Decade - Prologue

So, that was the decade. An odd one, really - it didn't even have a name for a start. The tens? The teens? I'll just have to call it "the decade" for this. There's been a lot of great music around over the last ten years and so, while I haven't written about music on here for a long time, I felt compelled to bring the best of it together. If nothing else, to prove that criticisms of today's music are as unfounded as they have ever been.

The list itself will be broken into three parts, the only rule being that no artist is allowed more than one entry - with one, I believe legitimate, exception. There was no attempt to provide a spread of years, but the result was actually fairly even: 2017 and 2018 just edged ahead with eight albums apiece.

Like many good lists, I'm going to start with a hastily slapped-together cohort of honourable mentions, so here they are in no particular order:

Lizzo - Lizzobangers (2014): larger-than-life and occasionally very weird debut from a rapper who went on to become so much more.

Janelle Monaé - Dirty Computer (2018): an exuberant and glossy sci-fi funk-pop work that blends lush harmonics with empowering swagger and occasionally very sharp social commentary.

Noname - Room 25 (2018): arguably deserves a place on the list proper, but ultimately lost out to a host of similarly cerebral, musically adept hip-hop albums. Superb flow and wordplay from the Chicago rapper, though.

Jay-Z - 4:44 (2017): the superstar at his most honest and vulnerable - and also his most concise. No filler for the first time in about 15 years.

SwuM. - Woke (2016): a playful and tuneful experiment in atmospheric electronica, mashing smooth synth sounds with some big beats and eclectic samples.

Tame Impala - Lonerism (2012): I slept on this for a year, but the Aussie psych-merchant's sophomore effort became the sound of my summer 2013. Hasn't aged massively well, but Elephant shall forever be a banger.

FM-84 - Atlas (2016): exceptionally tight, '80s style synth pop out of California by way of Scotland. Keeps things interesting with a range of vocalists and catchy choruses.

猫 シ Corp. - Cosmopolitan Dreams (2016): the pinnacle of the "mallsoft" sub-genre, transporting the listener to a consumerist utopia and adding some outrageous synthesised brass work. Muzak for a shopping mall existing both in the past and future.

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour - Out of Frequency (2012): irrepressibly fun slice of Scandinavian pop, with a decidedly '70s feel. As close as any of these got to being included in the list itself, there are a lot of brilliantly written songs on this album.

Rav - VESTIGES (2019): I've followed convention by disallowing compilation albums, but this rap retrospective gets a pass thanks to Pokemon name drops, relentlessly inventive musical backing and frank examinations of mental wellbeing.

And while we're here, I might as well throw in the top ten songs as well:

10. DJ Fresh - Golddust (2010): remember this one? Timeless.

9. Edward Scissortongue - Theremin (2014): it gets a bit silly from here, so I thought I'd add something serious and obscure - this is truly brilliant songwriting.

8. The Drones - Taman Shud (2016): the ever-interesting Gareth Liddiard uses one of Australia's great unsolved mysteries as a jumping board to explore the less-than-glorious aspects of his country's past and present, against a prickly musical backdrop.

7. Triggerfinger - My Baby's Got a Gun (2013): eight minutes, one chord, straight fire.

6. Louis Cole - When You're Ugly (2018): virtuoso funk with the kind of chorus that can get stuck in your head for the rest of your life and a message that everyone can get behind.

5. Viagra Boys - Sports (2018): SPORTS.

4. The Chats - Smoko (2018): in the decade where "mood" became a way to express the deepest of emotions, this song was more mood than any other.

3. Deca - Sailboats and Trains (2013): completely unironically, the best lyrics ever written (too obscure for YouTube apparently, find it here).

2. Gorillaz - Superfast Jellyfish (2010): the world is waking up to the issue of ocean pollution - Damon Albarn and friends were there a long time ago. Musically, absolute lunacy.

1. Yung Lean - Hoover (2016): still sounds like it was made on another planet, unlike anything that has come before or since.

And last but not least, the top three music videos:

3. Childish Gambino - This is America (2018)

2. Stormzy - Vossi Bop (2019)

1. M.I.A - Bad Girls (2012)

And so onto the list...

Midnight Robber

It's a funny genre, science fiction. I don't think any other can vary quite as wildly in terms of thematic or conceptual content, and yet remain so obviously what it is. I don't remember exactly where I first heard about Midnight Robber, or why I decided to read it now - but it's certainly a book that pushes the boundaries of the field even further.

The novel was published by Jamaican-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson in 2000 and takes a deep dive into a sub-genre I had never encountered before. While afro-futurism was brought to the mainstream by the Black Panther film a couple of years ago, building on a foundation laid mainly by '70s funk and jazz artists like Sun Ra, Midnight Robber is more accurately described as caribo-futurism. Set an indeterminate amount of time in the future - clearly a long time from now - the book details a planet named Toussaint settled by West Indian emigrants from Earth thousands of years before, who have developed a society based on their past values. Everything is controlled by a kind of cloud-based supercomputer named Granny Nanny, communicating with humans in musical form, and the settlements are a futuristic reimagining of today's Caribbean cities. This even extends as far as the language, the entirety being narrated in an adapted Jamaican patois, as it might have evolved over hundreds of generations. This made reading a challenge to begin with as, à la A Clockwork Orange, the reader is left unaided in figuring out a whole vocabulary of new terms, but Hopkinson doesn't make it impossible.

It's highly inventive stuff, but the novel is rather let down by its plot. It follows the coming of age of Tan-Tan, a girl living in this new world who is suddenly transported from Toussaint to the prison planet of New Half-Way Tree when her father Antonio - a mayor on Toussaint but undermined by an unfaithful wife - kills his wife's lover unsportingly in a duel and is banished from his world. New Half-Way Tree is a savage planet, a place of frontier justice and deadly alien beings. It seems as though the book will be an interesting character study as Tan-Tan reaches adolescence and tries to find her place there, and Antonio morphs from a father trying to do the right thing, to a depressive alcoholic, to an outright monster. But this never gets off the ground as Tan-Tan kills Antonio and flees to the jungle to live with the Douen, the planet's original, rodent-like inhabitants who are much more developed than the invasive humans give them credit for. But even this doesn't last long as Tan-Tan is eventually banished and becomes a pariah to all. There's fast-paced, and then there's disjointed. Hopkinson tries to wrap things up for her heroine as Tan-Tan seeks to save two lives for the one she took, and the ending does conclude things nicely, but the journey there just seemed far too erratic for my liking.

All in all though, the balance is just on the side of favourable, if only because this was such an immersive reading experience. I learned more than I ever thought possible about Caribbean folklore and traditions, enjoyed the unusual narrative style and had to admit that the twist ending worked quite well.

3/5

Futuristic Jamaican music? It's been done.

Wind, Sand and Stars

As a student of languages, I've always been of the opinion that, if you can, it's better to read books in the language in which they were written. As much as I believe in the value of translation, I also feel that this is the only way you can fully appreciate what the author originally had in mind. It was thus that I came to the writing of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - his legendary children's work Le Petit Prince was the first proper book I ever read in French; its basic style was just right for my GCSE-level knowledge and its existentialism-for-beginners subject matter set me up nicely for years of studying the rest of French literature.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was an enigmatic figure in my mind. I'd heard of Le Petit Prince before I read it, but I also knew that he was an inter-war aviation pioneer who lived to tell one of the most extraordinary survival tales of the early 20th Century. The two had always been a struggle to reconcile, but Wind, Sand and Stars has provided closure at last.

I'll admit from the beginning - I broke my own rule here by reading the book in translation. Probably a good move as well, as it became abundantly clear early on, even from the English, that this had been the kind of verbose, impenetrably abstract French that can be a nightmare to even unravel, let alone translate into idiomatic English. William Rees makes a good attempt at it but the result can be stylistically inconsistent and stilted at times. It matters little though, because it's not really the prose that matters here.

Wind, Sand and Stars is an astonishingly deep and perceptive treatise on the pilots of the 1920s and 1930s who finally brought the entire world within reach. de Saint-Exupéry entered the world from an aristocratic background - he had always felt ill-at-ease in his family's world and the call of adventure, or perhaps simply the chance to get as far from the south of France as possible, led him to train as a pilot delivering mail across Africa and South America. The book's early movements recount his training days, the comradeship and gallows humour of his fellow pilots, and an examination of why these men felt so compelled to take on such a dangerous career path; certainly, it was to the benefit of the human race. Things then move on to de Saint-Exupéry's experiences in the Sahara, and culminate with an at times excruciating recounting of his great escape. Lost in fog over the desert one night, he and his copilot crashed into a sand dune, wrecking their plane but otherwise coming through unscathed. But that was only the beginning of their problems - over the next three days as they survived on dew collected on their parachutes overnight and walked for miles attempting to establish where they were, both men began to wonder whether a swift death in the crash might have been preferable. The depictions of the agony of dehydration, the growing delirium caused by heat and the slow realisation that death will be coming soon are a hard read at times, but the author heads towards a surprisingly uplifting conclusion. The men's rescue by Arab nomads is recounted without much fanfare, but it is de Saint-Exupéry's subsequent philosophical cross-examination of his experience and its effects on him that wraps things up so well. In short, it all makes the problems of the everyday seem very insignificant, and yet he can't help but wonder if we'd all be better off for having lived through such an ordeal - it left him feeling more grateful for life than anything else.

It's all extremely French, but it combines its pure abstract philosophy with the distinction of concrete application to real events, and that's quite a rare thing.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry returned to the skies soon after, because he felt that that was all he could do. His plane went missing over the Mediterranean just under a decade later, and the world lost a great writer and thinker in the event.

4.5/5

The book is also a fascinating account of the history of one of the world's last true wild frontiers, and this feels like an appropriate soundtrack.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods

In my last review, I questioned whether I had been too lenient with my appraisals before concluding that actually they were just a reflection of the quality of book I tend to choose. The fact is, there is a vast ocean of literature out there that is just alright, neither groundbreaking nor inaccessibly unreadable, but which in the big scheme of things will probably not be remembered for years to come.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods is just alright. I can't remember how I came across it or why I decided it would be worth reading - it's been on my Kindle for a long time and I decided to start working through some of the books that have been sitting on there for a while, but I'm not sure why I downloaded it in the first place. Certainly, this 2013 debut work by Lincolnshire's own Gavin Extence has yet to earn much recognition beyond a shout-out by Richard and Judy.

Perhaps it was the plot which, undoubtedly, sounds intriguing on paper. As the book opens, our titular young man has been arrested by the Dover port authorities. His crime? Attempting to transport the ashes of a recently deceased old man and quite a lot of marijuana back into the UK from France. What follows is the story of how he ended up in that situation - beginning some years earlier when he became the second person in history to be hit directly by a meteorite. This event shapes Alex's teenage years - the resulting brain damage leaves him in a coma for two weeks, and with epilepsy for the rest of his life, and despite a few months of positive media attention he becomes something of an outcast at school, having missed so much of his formative time there in recovery. Things aren't helped by the fact that his home schooling comes at the hands of his unconventional mother, who runs a tarot card shop near Glastonbury. Following this period, on the run from his usual tormentors one day, Alex ends up in a chance encounter with a mysterious American widower, Isaac Peterson, and the pair enter an unlikely father-and-son relationship. Extence does well to foreshadow the book's ending/beginning here, as we know that Alex is carrying Mr. Peterson's ashes at the start. And things indeed start to take a much more serious turn as Peterson is diagnosed with a nervous system condition that means he only has a couple more years of increasingly restricted life left. The conclusion is weighty stuff indeed, playing out in Zurich where Mr. Peterson has decided he would like to end his own life with medical assistance.

It's all a good set-up, interspersed with some genuinely good lines about life, death and the things in between that make it all worthwhile, and, funnily enough, a lot of direct and indirect references to the writing of Kurt Vonnegut, whose books start to form a parallel to the events surrounding Alex and Isaac. It's also quite a well-structured coming-of-age story, dealing with all the troubles that teenage life can throw at you. But my main issue with it all has to lie with the writing style - recounting event after event in a positively clinical fashion. The suggestion is that, as it's mostly Alex's interior monologue, we're being given an insight into someone who is likely on the autistic spectrum - but that's not an excuse to sacrifice artistic flair. The likes of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime manage to do a lot more with a lot less, and The Universe Versus Alex Woods falls short in a literary sense by reading almost like non-fiction for the majority of its passages. It makes the insertion of moments of true emotion or perceptive ideas somewhat ham-fisted, and is why ultimately I can't consider this to be on the same level of so many of the other books I've read over the last few years.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods is not a bad book by any means - it makes a lot of good philosophical points and sprinkles them with entertainment, while also approaching an extremely sensitive issue with the respect it deserves - but at the end of the day it has served as a reminder that my ratings system is probably about right.

3.5/5

I'm not a huge fan of Mozart, but I have to say Mr. Peterson does well in choosing this as the last piece of music he ever hears:

The Sirens of Titan

I recently looked back through all of my blog posts, and something occurred to me - am I too lenient with my ratings? It is extremely rare that I give a book less than 3.5 out of 5, with quite a lot scoring 4.5 or 5. But then thinking about it some more, I decided that it's more a result of the calibre of book I choose - I go out of my way to find works that are already considered to be worthy of praise, and it isn't often that I find reason to disagree. And yet, every now and then, I come across a book so ludicrously good it causes me to reevaluate any and all existing benchmarks I have created for myself.

Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan is one such book. Published in 1959, his second work is generally considered his first great novel, following the patchy Player Piano. And I have to admit that I chose it mostly based on its impressive Amazon rating. But that's as good a reason as any, and I quickly found that, once again, I felt compelled to agree with popular opinion.

The Sirens of Titan really is Vonnegut at his best - already a high bar to meet. It traces the fortunes of one Malachi Constant, the son of a billionaire Wall Street trader who made his money based on luck alone, after he is invited to the home of a reclusive aristocrat who appears every few weeks before disappearing into thin air after a few minutes. The aristocrat, Winston Niles Rumfoord (Vonnegut does have a talent for memorable names), famous for having been the first man to set out into space for the purpose of exploration alone, explains to Malachi that his appearances are a result of his having flown into a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum" near Mars, something similar to a black hole that has strung out his (and his dog's) existence across the Solar System and through all time. As a result he can see everything that has been and that will be, and informs Malachi that he will travel to Mars, where he will have a child with Rumfoord's wife, then to Mercury, then back to Earth and finally to Saturn's moon Titan, where Rumfoord himself has been primarily based since his accident, in the company of his alien friend Salo.

There follows a series of adventures whereby Malachi does his utmost to avoid all of these events but finds himself involved in them anyway. He makes a point of not going to Mars by refusing to go near the only active rocket in the world, but ends up being kidnapped by aliens and taken there anyway to serve in Mars's army - and the same goes for Rumfoord's wife Beatrice, who does indeed end up giving birth to Malachi's child en route. He believes travelling to Mercury to be an impossibility as the Martian army prepares to invade Earth, but his ship has been reprogrammed by Rumfoord - head of the army - to take him there regardless. A good thing too, as the invasion fails spectacularly and nearly everyone is killed. He is then recalled to Earth to act as the messiah figure of Rumfoord's new religion, created to unite humanity following the first conflict in which the world truly united against a common enemy. So Rumfoord was pulling the strings all along. But here comes the twist - as he sends Malachi, Beatrice and their son Chrono on their way to live out the rest of their days on Titan, it transpires that Rumfoord himself - and the rest of the human race - were merely part of an extremely elaborate plan to deliver a replacement part for Salo's broken-down spaceship.

The Sirens of Titan is just an ingeniously written book. Its style is as simple as it gets - sentences, paragraphs and even chapters condensed down to be as short as possible, and yet conveying so much with so little. Roald Dahl would be a good comparison, and that's not intended as a criticism of either writer. The tone ranges from hauntingly poetic to bluntly ironic, and there are laughs to be had as well. Which is good because we're dealing with some pretty heavy subject matter here - ideas of predestination, free will, what it means to be human and the importance of humanity. Vonnegut wraps all of this up into a level of prose that could be read by a child, and yet a child reader would miss a lot. In fact, I'm sure I did as well - it's one of those books where the ending realigns everything you thought you knew leading up to it.

A brilliant reminder of the power of the written word in the right hands, and a book that demands another read. It's not quite as good as Slaughterhouse Five, but that's in my top three books of all time - and this really isn't far off.

5/5, and well deserved.

When it comes to doing a lot with a little, it doesn't get much better than these fellow mid-western minimalists:

This Perfect Day

Over the years, I've read plenty of things by writers considered among the greatest ever. Shakespeare, Goethe, Camus - even if I enjoyed their work to varying degrees, I could nearly always see why they earned as much acclaim as they now hold. And then there's Ira Levin, the greatest writer I'd never heard of. In Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, Levin was responsible for some pretty iconic works of 20th-Century fiction. And in This Perfect Day, he created one of the most puzzlingly overlooked.

Perhaps it was down to the fact that, by 1970, readers felt that the dystopian novel had already been perfected. Certainly, This Perfect Day veers dangerously close to the likes of Brave New World, with its society of genetically faultless drones, and 1984, with its all-seeing surveillance state. But these comparisons do it a disservice, as Levin manages to create a world just as prophetic as the cornerstones of the genre, and almost as inventive.

This Perfect Day pulls the classic trick of setting up a world that appears utopian, before gradually revealing details that help you realise it's actually the exact opposite. The world's society - or "family" as they call themselves - have been united for generations, increasingly genetically homogeneous and provided with regular "treatments" of drugs that keep them free of any disease, but also passive and satisfied with their existence. "Hate" and "fight" have become the dirtiest words imaginable, jobs are guaranteed and assigned to everyone, and the likes of homelessness and famine have been eradicated. All of this thanks to Unicomp - a vast supercomputer beneath a mountain in Switzerland that keeps track of each individual and decides the turns their lives will take on their behalf. But our hero, Li RM35M4419 - Unicomp assigns names too, from a choice of four per gender, but Li prefers to go by the nickname Chip - is a bit different. With one green and one brown eye, he's marked out as physically different from everyone else at birth, and it's not long before his behaviour starts to cause concern too. Chip shows a tendency for creativity; despite being pushed down the career path of a geneticist, his real passion lies in designing buildings, and he's interested in art as well - both pursuits rendered irrelevant by Unicomp.

This earns him the attention of a group of fellow subversives, who meet in secret to partake in activities usually banned - by tricking medical workers into reducing the dosage of his treatments, Chip is able to better appreciate the pleasures of smoking, drinking and reading for enjoyment. He also begins to see the problems with some of Unicomp's decisions - the fact that despite the lack of disease, everyone dies aged 62, and how, free of his chemical suppressants, he is capable of feeling aroused more than once a week. He also starts to wonder if there are groups completely outside society, living as people did in the days before Unicomp. In fact, there are - living on a few remote islands dotted around the world. Chip eventually escapes to one of these colonies, based on Mallorca, and starts to put together a team to destroy Unicomp once and for all. But it's once Chip and his gang make it to Switzerland and into the heart of the mountain that the book's real twist is revealed - the true nature of the islands and the real reason Chip was marked out as different, leading to a satisfying conclusion with plenty of explosions, subterfuge, and a surprisingly happy ending that neatly ties up an overall very well-developed plot.

And it's this plot that helps elevate This Perfect Day to the level of its predecessors; it's a plot-driven book, with Levin's socio-political commentary merely bubbling away in the background. The way he manages this is quite brilliant, dropping in hints and fleshing out the world where necessary, leaving the reader with a full picture by the end. It's a believable one too, a world where all possible data on everyone is stored by a faceless computer, and freedoms are gradually limited for the greater good - without people having been asked whether they actually want that. As Chip comes to learn, being free from all suffering is not the same as being free, and it's the two sides of that complex debate that This Perfect Day nudges us to consider.

This Perfect Day deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as the greats of 20th-Century dystopian fiction, not least because it does a much better job of being actual fiction than so many comparable works.

4.5/5

Couldn't think of anything beyond this.

Good as Gold

As I have already established on this blog, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is my favourite book of all time, and while I have read a lot of very good books since, nothing really comes close, for me, to its staggering complexity, profundity, humour and pathos. So it's only natural that I should eventually get round to reading some of Heller's other books, to see if he could do it again. Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, was a good attempt: almost on par in terms of its brilliant dialogue and lampooning of American politics, but let down by a lot of rather bland passages relating to the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island. Good as Gold is Heller's other well-known book, considered by many to be his second-best. It also focuses a lot on the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect going in.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised. It's no Catch-22 - what is? - but it also mostly avoids the mundanity of the least interesting parts of Closing Time. Good as Gold follows the misadventures of a man, Bruce Gold, trying to find his place in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, increasingly post-segregation America. He doesn't find it easy: working as an academic and occasionally publishing books and articles, he is shunned by his family who, while proud of his achievements, seem to think that he thinks that he's above them. But he's also shunned by members of the elite circle of society he has been forever trying to break into who, whether openly or not, always think of him as beneath them.

As the novel opens, Gold is stuck trying to get a book about "the Jewish experience in America" off the ground. The trouble is, despite having lived it, he can't seem to decide what that experience actually is, nor will anyone provide him with a clear answer. It is during this period of writer's block that he ends up churning out a shorter article of questionable merit and content, which of course ends up making him famous - not that anyone bothers to read it. It's here that Good as Gold really gets going, as Gold is invited to Washington where a high-ranking government position may be waiting for him. It turns out that the president is a big fan of a review Gold had written of the president's autobiography, and enjoys reading said review when people around him are talking about "agriculture, housing, money, starvation, health, education, and welfare, and other matters in which he has no interest" - like in Closing Time, the satire here is just far too on the mark. Anyway, the scenes in Washington are as close as Good as Gold gets to Heller's truly best writing, introducing a succession of increasingly outlandish and memorable characters, all with some darkly comedic analogy to convey, and all of whom, directly or indirectly, want to remind Gold of his place as a Jew.

Because, no matter how much he may try to escape the fact, Gold's story always endeavours to remind him of his origins. A verbally abusive father, a mocking brother, five bickering sisters and their assorted partners, a stepmother who gets madder by the day and a wife who just doesn't seem to care any more are omnipresent throughout the book, whether in the foreground or in the back of Gold's anxious, overthinking mind. There are his childhood companions too, all of whom are less educated and talented than him, and all of whom have been a lot more successful in life. So while Gold does his best to break the cycle - attempting to elope with the daughter of a billionaire, penetrate the very highest level of government, and move in those elite circles that have never accepted him - he finds himself drawn back to his old Coney Island neighbourhood, and a succession of excruciating dinners and parties with his family, in rooms where everyone hates each other but is too proud to say so directly. I can't pretend to understand the American Jewish experience, but I suspect that this is what Heller is trying to convey with these plot lines, and he does it well.

Good as Gold isn't without its flaws: some of the prose drifts far enough into abstraction as to be unclear, Heller misses the chance to fully develop his satirisation of academia, and there's a whole section dedicated to how terrible Henry Kissinger was which, while it makes a lot of valid points, just feels out of place. But all in all there's a lot to like: the ludicrously eccentric billionaire Pugh Biddle Conover, who has forgotten everything but how to be racist but still comes through for Gold in the end, Gold's contact in Washington Ralph, who reels off one-liners with practically every line, the description of Gold's fitness regime that destroys his body but leaves him feeling in peak condition... and most of all the relentlessly brilliant dialogue, conversation after conversation of tragically funny misunderstanding between people that reflect the frustrations of life so well.

Good as Gold is a bloated, confusing mess - and that's what makes it so good.

5/5

There's a lot of discussion here about whether any Jews had truly been successful in America. The field of music is noticeably absent from that discussion.