#2This year, insofar as I can tell, the Voice has eschewed the State of the Union address format popularized by former Poobah Robert Christgau and attempted last year only as a "we've got to say something" mea culpa by replacement (and possible half-wit) Rob Harvilla; instead the ten topical pieces here get equal billing. Christopher Weingarten writes some blah-blah about the death or dearth of the "Rock Star" (coinciding with the death of a music industry now unable to underwrite $10,000 room service tabs, hmmm detective); not one but two essays on M.I.A. (I prefer Zach Baron's take); and even an Arcade Fire write-up, which is a nice close-but-no-cigar for the Canadians who were supposed to own 2007, but didn't even release the best record of the month (LCD dropped two weeks later). The champ, though, has to be Gregory Tate, who writes about black rockers without once mentioning Black Kids, which must be some kind of record in this day and age; to be fair to Black Kids though, "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You" (#105 in the singles) is a pretty nice slice of electro-jangle pop that proved they deserved a better fate than to be collateral damage in the ongoing Pitchfork v. Haters flame wars. Maybe in a few years with a little more seasoning.
Speaking of race and rock, this last piece, as you may have deduced, is a kind of response to Sasha Frere-Jones' jeremiad in the pages of The New Yorker bemoaning the lack of funk in indie rock. Indeed "A Paler Shade of White" was the rockcrit event of 2007; though I don't know of anyone who wholeheartedly endorsed SFJ's perspective, it's hard to deny the significance of the larger conversation he managed to kick start. Every dimension of the argument was contested: race versus class, what constitutes indie rock, what constitutes "black" influences (Win Butler of the Arcade Fire, a group cited as bordering on translucent by Frere-Jones, retorted by compiling an mp3 of black music he felt his band was ripping off). Nobody went away completely happy, but race, in music as in life, is a kind of a Rubik's cube, which we are compelled to pick up and screw around with every now and again, even if we have no real hope of solving the problem, the dimensions of which we can't even begin to agree upon.
In light of this discussion it is with some irony that I note the death grip of rock of both the indie and non-indie (dependent?) varieties on the upper reaches of the album and single charts. Hip hop had a shit year by most people's standards, and only Kanye West (#6) and Jay-Z (#18) managed to dent the top twenty albums, though I would attribute the exclusivity of these ranks to aged pre-Internet types not knowing how to obtain Lil Wayne's epochal Da Drought 3 (as well as the late release date for the minor-yet-excellent 8 Diagrams). The underlying conservatism of the Pazz & Jop electorate shone through in high placements for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, The White Stripes, and The Shins; like Nixon's Silent Majority these voters cut through the Internet chatter and voted for the same damn bands they always have voted for and will always vote for (only the Plant/Krauss and Springsteen records rate with me for reasons not sentimental). The creep is more subtle on the singles side, disguised by the Winehouse-Rihanna 1-2 punch, yet there they are: two Spoon sides, "Icky Thump" (at no. 11), "Young Folks" going top ten despite being practically ubiquitous in '06, and The Shins coming in at twelve for "Phantom Limb" (Wincing the Night Away was not evidently left for dead by everyone).
Strangest of all is the strange case of Radiohead, whose latest album is also their most inscrutable gesture yet. The story of In Rainbows is ultimately the story of its delivery, sent across e-mail as a bundle of mp3s for a price of the patron's choosing; a gesture at first rightfully viewed as altruistic, then subjected to the inevitable backlash as naysayers objected to Radiohead even granting customers the option of paying for the record, or knocked the band for claiming that the idea was original (they didn't). Sean Fennessey epitomizes the senseless derision when he comments that "Rappers have been 'giving away' mix tapes for years. Some are even better than In Rainbows. And they all have cooler cover art." This idiotic remark ignores the fact that a) Lil Wayne has gotten more than his fair share of hype for Da Drought 3's equally free distribution scheme (after all, he placed on this list without a proper release), b) rappers release mix tapes in large part because they can't get sample clearances and c) most mixtape cover art basically sucks. Fact is that Radiohead, who nowadays qualify as one of the world's biggest bands, released a new album by sidestepping the major label apparatus and practically giving it away for free; even Ian MacKaye never attempted that shit. So they got some publicity for it, big fucking deal, you chuckleheads are the ones who stirred the muck and tea leaves trying to figure out What It All Means in the first place. Hell, Radiohead went and did your jobs for you.
So a whole paragraph about In Rainbows and not a word about the music, which is pretty fitting, as I'm guessing that if the record suddenly appeared on Best Buy end caps October 3rd we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it. Radiohead pulled kind of a bait-and-switch: In Rainbows is definitely an artistic sidestep compared to the meteoric progression of The Bends to OK Computer to Kid A. Radiohead in many respects got a free pass on 2003's Hail to the Thief, which I maintain had an expiration date matching the day it was released: thematically, it perfectly encapsulated the air of global paranoia rampant in the wake of both 9/11 and the beginnings of the Iraq War, though musically even Thom Yorke mockingly referred to it as "Ok Computer 2". In Rainbows in that sense feels like a return to the humanist womb, displaying an emotional palette that extends beyond fear of technology, government, and other people. It's a good, comfortable record from a band that stopped making them (if they ever did at all); quality and career arc-wise, you could draw some pretty fascinating parallels with Wilco and Sky Blue Sky. In Rainbows is certainly better, but the only reason it's sniffing the top of this chart or any others is because of loyalty to the Radiohead brand, built on the backs of records far more exciting and innovative than this one. Close, but a cigar nonetheless.
