The Best Albums of 2000 - 2009 (someone please argue with me)

I've had sort of a boring week, and it has been a particularly frustrating month for music (Thom Yorke recording a track for the new Twilight movie soundtrack? Really?). My boredom and nostalgia for quality-tunes-past has converged in list form. The following is my rationale for my selection of the ten best albums of the past ten years.

I like making lists like this. It makes saying something like, "oh yeah, that's one of my top-five favorite [whatevers]" a lot more meaningful if you actually think about it beforehand. I generally throw down at least 20 possible choices right off the bat. And then, admittedly, I’ll trawl through other lists to make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything (in general, my musical memory is much closer to 5 years than it is to 10). Once I have a very large working list, I’ll start paring it down. But something struck me this time as I began to search: None of the albums really jumped out. I would look at an album, know that it I loved it, but I was never outright convinced that it belonged on a list. The field was too even.

This was not, in my opinion, a decade of seminal, genre-founding breakthroughs. In the last ten years, there was no Nevermind, Slim Shady LP, Back in Black, Talking Book, White Album or Zeppelin II.

This is not to say that there was any shortage of musical genius. On the contrary, I would argue that musicians have never been better. Listen to an Arcade Fire or Kanye West album and you can be rest-assured that the people recording today have set a ridiculously high bar. But the fore of musicality has moved beyond the creation of genres and styles, and into their amalgamation. Interdisciplinary composition is the new genre. Especially in the last few years, I have heard people complaining that it is becoming increasingly difficult to classify a new album. ‘Indie’, ‘pop’, or even ‘hip hop’ and ‘urban’ are cop-out blanket definitions that oversimplify the trend.

10. Lupe Fiasco – The Cool

There’s a line on Lupe’s first album – Food and Liquor – where he briefly describes his introduction to rap: “I used to hate hip hop, because the women it degraded, but Too Short made me laugh; like a hypocrite I played it, a hypocrite I state;, but I only recited half, omitting the word ‘bitch”. An American born Muslim and loudly political, Lupe Fiasco’s affiliation with hip hop culture is tenuous at best. But from his position at the sidelines of gangsterism, he has been able to affiliate himself with a much wider base of musicality than the likes of Talib Kweli and Mos Def. “Did you improve on the design? Did you do something new?”

9. El-P – Fantastic Damage

El-P is another rapper who has branched out in ways that would have been nearly unthinkable in the 90’s. He raps in schizophrenic explosions of argumentative dialogue; backed by an ensemble of samples – house beats, screaming strings, trap set rolls – that would make UNKLE blush. And again, this guy isn’t rapping about rims and 40s. El-P narrates his albums like the protagonist of a Palahniuk novel. He searches for hypocrisy and injustice in every nook and cranny of society, pulls it into the light and lyrically crucifies it. His work isn’t easy to listen to, and you’re probably not going to hear it on a dancefloor (it would seriously harsh a buzz), but if you give it time and thought, it rewards the effort many times over.

8. The Arcade Fire – Funeral

The arcade fire deserves to be on the list solely for having made the loudest, most stadium-ready album in recent memory. I like to think of them as the thinking man’s answer to Coldplay – glistening, ecstatic music, wrought with deceptive simplicity. I will admit bias on this one, though. I’ve seen the Arcade Fire live, and I’ve been in love with all twelve of them (or however many – there are a lot) ever since. Their festival sets are long, crescendoing epics that climax in the more up-tempo pieces of Funeral. Hearing the opening bells of ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ as 60,000 exhausted hipsters began humming along was a musically transformative thing for me. I still remember how utterly exhausted I was dancing along as the song imploded in on itself and nova’d out into its cacophonous finale. If Funeral has any faults, it has been to raise a bar for The Arcade Fire that they are very unlikely to clear again.

7. Atmosphere – Strictly Leakage

Strictly an EP, actually – not an album, but I’m making an exception here (and in one other place on the list). Atmosphere is always at the top of their game when they’re talking directly to their fans. Hell, they’re still considered “underground” after dozens of commercially successful releases and numerous mainstream offers for exactly that reason. They full-length albums are always wonderful, but there’s an element of discomfort to them. Slug and Ant are best when unforced – recording and performing for fun. Which is why this [13-song] EP is so amazing. The tracks are just things they had laying around. But the joy and irreverence with which they were recorded is very apparent. There’s a song about white kids who listen to rap, a 1-minute narrative about winning a hand of poker and another song about why bringing a girl back to your mom’s house is so undesirable. You don’t need politics when you have poetry.

6. Sigur Rós - Takk

The lead singer of Sigur Rós modified his guitar with a curved bridge so he could play it with a violin bow. He also sings in a language he invented because his native Icelandic wasn’t whimsical enough. The guy makes Bjork look like a pants-suit accountant… and he composes music so beautiful and emotionally challenging that his personal idiosyncrasies are the last things that come to my mind when I hear it. I’ve seen people, with no comprehension of what is being sung, brought fully to tears by this album. The music is something that transcends almost every measure of quality that you can attribute to artistic expression – it’s just something else. Put ‘Seaglopur’ on headphones, turn down the lights and try to disagree.

5. Radiohead – Kid A

Radiohead can really do no wrong by me (see ‘Honorable Mentions’ below). Thom Yorke is my musical hero and I have never disliked anything he’s put his hand to. With that said, Kid A is a step back from everything that had made Radiohead a critical and commercial darling of rock music. It is a tangle of static, clicks, screams and feedback – a bad acid trip of an album that begs you not to like it. People say, “yeah Radiohead is awesome... but have you heard Kid A?” There are no singles, no anthems, no club beats (maybe Idioteque). But Kid A is Radiohead at their most free and creative, and nothing can touch that. Even beyond the chaotic genius of the album itself, its recording served as a stepping-stone for the band – an adaptation of their style. After ‘Kid A’, ‘In Rainbows’ was clearly to follow.

4. Jay-Z – The Black Album

The Black Album is the nearest on this list to an old-school, iconic milestone. It marked the birth of swagger, yet another post-gangster direction for hip hop, and a new benchmark for one of rap’s most skilled and prolific artists. The whole thing plays like the crier’s song for some medieval King. ‘99 Problems’ was released in tandem with Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’ and the announcement of their pending nuptuals – a coup de grace for Hova’s status. ‘Dirt Off Your Shoulder’ birthed its own widely recognized gesticulation. ‘Encore’ has been mixed so many times that it has become synonymous with the practice. Lines from every song have made their way into street vernacular. There is a reason why Hova can say with every new release that he is the greatest rapper alive. While the accuracy of the statement is debateable; no one can casually deny it.

3. The Black Keys – Chulahoma

Chulahoma, the second EP of the list, is a short tribute to the late blues legend Junior Kimbrough. The last thing on the recording is a voicemail left for Dan Auerbach by Junior Kimbrough’s widow. Her voice trembles throughout as she compliments the guitar/drums duo on recording such a faithful adaptation of her husband’s work. I picked this album as one of the best of the decade mostly for what it represents; the efforts of The Black Keys to reinvent and reinvigorate the blues. Chulahoma is a devastatingly emotional and almost palpably visceral album, and that’s what the genre needs to be these days to stay relevant.

2. Kanye West – Late Registration

The guy takes a lot of flak for what a narcissistic jackass he is. As in, narcissism; a neurotic obsession with one’s self. In West’s case, I think it’s justified. Late Registration is a masterpiece of staggering proportions and the pinnacle in a trilogy of work (College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation) that I will be untouchable in its artistic breadth for the foreseeable future. There isn’t a club in the western world that didn’t have ‘Gold Digger’ on heavy rotation. There’s a song about his dying grandmother with a tuba baseline. Jay-Z raps about blood diamonds, Common sings about love, he even got Paul Wall, Lupe Fiasco and Adam Levine. The whole thing is drenched in soaring strings, Dre-esque beats, flawless harmonization and obsessively crafted production. It’s Las Vegas in a CD.

1. Radiohead – In Rainbows

When Radiohead releases an album, they do so – every time – with a mind toward disowning their previous work and reinventing their sound. They are a group that specializes in wringing beauty from discontent and, as Yorke has said on numerous occasions, allowing themselves to be comfortable would be to defeat the soul of their work. ‘In Rainbows’ is a marked departure from that paradigm, and a turn toward something completely different. Free from the EMI record contract that “strangled” their creativity (one wonders what the group’s body of work would look like had it been allowed to breath), Radiohead released ‘In Rainbows’ over the internet and told fans to pay whatever they thought it was worth - the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the lumbering, antiquated business model of the record industry. The songs on ‘In Rainbows’ are fiercely effulgent things, and with Yorke’s sideprojects siphoning the less compatible elements of his artistry, the band sounds like a whole again – unified. So while Radiohead may have forever abandoned the self-imposed pressure that compelled albums like Amnesiac and OK Computer, they freed themselves to make, in my opinion, the best album of their careers.

Honorable Mentions:

Radiohead – Amnesiac
Radiohead – Hail to the Thief
Radiohead – ComLag [EP]
Drive-by Trucker – Dirty South
The Black Keys – Rubber Factory
The Black Keys – Thickfreakness
Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova – Music from the Motion Picture ‘Once’ [soundtrack]
Mos Def – The Ecstatic
Raekwon – Only Built for the Cuban Linx Pt. 2
Ghostface – Supreme Clientelle
Ghostface – The Big Doe Rehab
Fugazi – The Argument
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Spoon – Ga Ga Ga
The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
The National – Boxer
And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead... – Source Tags and Codecs
Bob Dylan – Together Through Life
Bob Dylan – Love and Theft
Ratatat – Classics
Justin Timberlake – Futuresex/Lovesounds
The Streets – A Grand Don’t Come For Free
M.I.A. – Kala
Lil’ Wayne – Tha Carter III
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Burial – Untrue
LCD Soundsystem – LCD Soundsystem
Jay-Z – American Gangster
Kanye West – The College Dropout
The White Stripes – White Blood Cells
Raphael Saadiq – Instant Vintage
Queens of the Stone Age – Songs for the Deaf
Lupe Fiasco – The Cool
Madvillain – Madvillainy
Danger Doom – The Mouse and the Mask

Pictures

My camera was stolen somewhere between Madrid and Seville a few weeks back. Thus the lack of pictures here and on Facebook. Little fella had been with me for two years, photographed a dozen countries and has crossed every line of longitude on the planet. It wasn't the best camera in the world, but it was dirty and scuffed and had a good story. So the reason I haven't talked about it before is because thinking about it makes me angry. Requiescat in pace.

Fortunately, my lovely and talented friend Andrea came to visit the other week (hint, hint, everyone else) and took better pictures than I possibly could have. So, a few shots of my adoptive city:


These are the walls of the old medina that I've written about previously. It's a partially walled section of the downtown area that was - back when the French referred to the port region as 'Useful Morocco' - the entire city of Casablanca. Now it's a busy market and dense residential area:


All this is about a 20 minute walk from where I live. And just on the other side of it, on the water's edge, is the mosque I wrote about earlier. It's a structure larger than St. Peter's Basilica, but instead of walking through downtown Rome to get to it, you walk through dilapidated slums. (My friend Anthony took this one):



And finally, a little local cuisine... All kinds of things are sold on the little food carts stationed on the corner of almost every intersection and pedestrian thoroughfare. But I am an uncultured American and was fascinated that some people eat snails.


You can get a bowl like that for about a dollar. And for the record, they are delicious.


More pictures to follow, I hope. I want to splurge some of my first paycheck on a new camera to abuse over the next few years. If any of you know much about photography, please drop me a line somewhere.

Random Things

• Not everyone speaks Arabic, French, Spanish and English, but they all speak Facebook.
  
  
• The third pillar of Islam is Zakat - the practice of alms-giving to the less fortunate. That is why I have to walk over or around 30 disfigured hobos every Friday because there is a mosque between my apartment and work.
  
  
• Camel sandwiches are not A) delicious, B) $2.00 or C) readily available at 11:00pm after I’ve already been drinking because they are in fact D) all of the above.
  
  
• My friend who works for Emirates says that Moroccan flights always run out of sugar because Moroccan people put a shit-ton of it in everything. I definitely believe her because she is very pretty. But also because many Moroccan people have missing teeth.
  
  
• Drinking is technically illegal in Morocco, so I have to buy all of my booze from the supermarket that’s owned by the King. Thanks, King Mohammed!
  
  
• Half of all taxis have “broken meters” with air quotes. The tourist price is 10 Euros, but the real price is 10 Dirhams, which is less.
  
  
• Imagine if the music video for “I’m on a Boat” were made in total seriousness and featured several cut scenes of questionably attractive bikini-clad women dancing by a pool for no reason. That is what every music video out of Lebanon and Egypt is like.
  
  
• The sheesha place by my apartment is charming. Their only flavour is apple.
  
  
• The bastardized Moroccan Arabic form of “two” is difficult to transliterate, but it sounds roughly like ‘Juzsh’, which kind of sounds like the terribly transliterated French word for juice, ‘Juszh’. I often receive two juices when I only wanted to order one.
  
  
• When I finally get around to buying clothes (less expensive than doing laundry), I’m going to buy a shirt with ‘Armani’ on the front and ‘Prada’ on the back. Those are real things.
  
  
• I heard a German guy tell a Nazi joke. “Have you ever been to France?” someone else asked. “No, but my grandfather was there for a few months and loved it,” he said before seeking out a high-five. Granted.
  
  
• Syria has the best food in the Middle East, Lebanon has the prettiest girls, Algeria doesn’t get along with its neighbors, no one likes that Iranian guy with the stupid name, Turkish people drink during Ramadan and the Israeli passport stamp is to a traveler what herpes is to a college kid.
  
  
• Casablanca is a city in transition. I see as many women in miniskirts as I do in birqas.
  
  
• There are guys who walk around on the streets with carts who collect garbage and sell it (to the garbage store?). They advertise their business by making a sort of honking noise every 5-8 seconds that is very loud and carries a long distance. This was sad at first because poverty is a vicious cycle. But the fifteenth goddamn they wake you up with their stupid fucking goose noise is about the time when you want to donate a glass bottle to their head from your 3rd story window.
  
  
• Peugot (a French automobile and man’s purse manufacturer) makes a motorcycle with bicycle pedals.
  
  
• I would love to write a book or short story, but the only time I can get something amusing on paper is when I write sarcastic little lists with no cohesive meaning or value. There’s probably some sort of learning disability associated with that phenomenon that I’m too lazy to look up.

Settling In

It turns out teaching is a lot like bartending. Efficiency is a important, but communication is key. Speak slowly; use concise, simple present tense sentences and active phrasing. Gesticulate. I am good at those things. So while I've never had a job quite like this before, it feels good. Now, at least.

It's difficult to describe - or even remember - how nervous I was for my first couple days of work. I think I've sort of blacked it out of my mind like I had PTSD; buried it under some twigs in my subconscious like the cover of a pit trap - something to stumble into later and deal with in therapy. It was the result of three compounding weeks of anticipation. Moving to (yet another) new country, finding an apartment, making friends, settling into the office, finding a gym, figuring out how I was going to do laundry, etc... Miniature adventures that I relish, but that totally sapped my mental energy in fairly short order.

On Sunday, I hung my empty backpack on the curtain rod above the French doors that open onto my small balcony. It doesn't quite match the red pastel drapes, but it couldn't be more appropriate to the worn motif of the room itself. Everything had a fresh coat of paint applied to it in anticipation of our arrival, but it all still feels old. The paint still has the newborn sheen that highlights the sag and imperfections of the walls. The furniture is dark stained wood. My dresser is an elegant, preposterously heavy old thing, but missing a few handles. Laying on my stiff mattress in the middle of the day, distracted by the insane noise of the street and soaking the duvet through with afternoon sweat, it feels like home.

Casablanca is a wonderful city. Like a good expatriate, I'm slowly working my way through a few Bowles novels, and spending as much time as I can wandering the streets, eating things off of carts. The place is a farcry from the gorgeous old cities of Europe and the Middle East. It doesn't have any old architecture, fortresses or landmarks. At least, none that haven't been cannibalized for some new purpose. The whole city is painted from the same palate of beige, gray and broken cement. But it feels like a crossroads. If the United States is the mixing pot, Casablanca would be the point directly above it where the various streams of humanity cross, mid-pour. French-speaking Africans from the horn of Africa, Arabic-speaking Africans from the Sudan and Ethiopia, Arabs of every stripe, Europeans, and a spattering of Americans and Chinese. They all live here and do business in the chaos that is laissez-faire as only Africa can manage.

So I understand why guide books recommend giving the place a miss. If you only have a few days, there's really no excuse for coming to Casablanca over Marrakesh or Fez. But if you're looking for a place to settle down for a couple of months to finish that novel, this is the place.

The Old Medina and Al Hassan II

Today I took a walk from my hotel, through the medina, to the city's landmark Al Hassan II mosque. It's a shame I didn't do it earlier. I really feel like I have a better understanding of this place now.

The route to the mosque from the hotel first takes you down a long, palm-shaded boulevard, capped at its north end by the American consulate. Multinational corporations are headquartered there and everything is well maintained. Traffic even seemed to be a little more contained and self-conscious than elsewhere in the city (it usually reminds me a little of Phnom Pehn, but with sand-blasted sedans instead of scooters). We walked a few miles down that street and detoured into the medina (which I talked about in the previous post). There are a number of entrances, but we walked in through the old, beautifully constructed gatehouse.

The markets within the medina are the best things I've seen since I got here. It was commerce - unadulterated and honest - as only a third world country can show you. In Western supermarkets, you buy tomatoes that were picked green half a world away and ripened stop sign red with ethylene gas. In Casablanca, the fruit bore the muddy fingerprints of the farmers who picked it. The faces of meat vendors were obscured behind a static of flies; you walked to the thudding, discordant metronome of cleavers on wood. The fish stalls were humid with stench - the bottoms of my shoes still smell like the tide. Small children kneaded dough on doorsteps; young men sold $70 "Armani" jackets (pre-haggle price); pyramids of spice in long, multi-colored rows. And so much noise.


The homes above the storefronts pulsed with movement. Shadows flitted up and down slanting stairwells and unseen children were audible. The people who lived there were very poor. (Though, it's worth noting that they are not the poorest in Casablanca. The slums - an area that provided the city with thirteen Afghan-trained suicide bombers in 2003 - are about an hour from the city. Around a million people live there.)

We walked out of the medina on the side nearest the ocean. A row of fruit stalls broke into a long expanse of empty ground where men sat and ate amidst piles of garbage and dusty avenues of foot traffic. Broken buildings flanked the space and the breeze at our backs kept the smell of the market with us as we walked. The only thing that made the empty plot of land more unusual than the bustle of the market adjacent to it was the grandiosity of the mosque the loomed above it.


The Al Hassan II mosque was built by the former King of Morocco to commemorate his 60th birthday, and to give Casablanca the distinctive landmark it seemingly lacked. It is on the sea wall about four blocks from the squalor of the medina homes, perched on a bed of stone that had been manually reclaimed from the ocean. It was designed by a French architect and cost the citizens of Morocco five hundred million dollars. It is an enormous, grand, stone blimp hangar of a structure. It is inarguably beautiful and impressive... but again; out of place.

We poked around the courtyard but didn't go in (in fact, non-Muslims can't go in without a guide). The west-facing sides of the minaret are discolored with weather damage. There were other tourists there. One might argue that they would not have chosen Morocco as their destination had it not been for the world class landmark. But I wonder.

Is "Casablanca, Morocco" really the city with the big mosque? I'm going to say 'no'. This city's draw should be literature and history. How many of those kids I saw in the medina making bread on doorsteps could have earned university degrees for $500 million? I'm no humanitarian - it just strikes me as bad economics.

Finding Beer

I don't think I'd drink if "let's go get a beer" wasn't the beginning of so many good stories. I was sitting in the lobby of my hotel with a newly befriended colleague. He made the suggestion. So began my second night in Casablanca.

"You should have not been in that neighborhood past dark," my boss said fourteen hours later. "You guys are insane."

The neighborhood in question is the one immediately outside the walls of the old medina - a walled district that houses some of the city's poorest residents. By day it is a dense, frenetic marketplace. By night, it is an eerily silent stretch of darkened storefronts and infrequent foot traffic. Anthony (my thirsty coworker) and I didn't encounter anything we perceived to be dangerous, but its potential was nearly palpable. Also, there were no bars.

The idea was to find a place where we could sit and enjoy a pair of cold beverages. The plan of action was the traveler's default: Walk until we found something. It's a good plan because even if you don't find what you're looking for, you'll quickly develop your bearings in a new city. As was the case that night. We certainly discovered where not to be at 2:00am.

Casablanca is a different city at night. People work, eat, honk their horns and converse in the streets well past dark - as late as midnight in some parts of the city. But then a switch falls into the off position and it all evaporates. No cars, no people, no noise. Street lights stay on, dutifully illuminating vacant sidewalks. It can be disconcerting.

Before I make it sound like I'm more reckless than I am (or as a post-script now that I have); there wasn't really any danger (, mom). I know what a dangerous neighborhood in a poor country looks like. As does Anthony (a man who worked for several months in Hebron and Gaza). But it was an interesting exploration of the city. You can't really know something is like in the dark unless you look.

Updates Forthcoming

I have like three updates written on my laptop, but I'm pretty sure I've been blocked from the hotel network. Apparently when my eyes see "free wifi", my brain reads "free bandwidth to totally monopolize and steal music with". The system administrater seems to have disagreed. But otherwise, everything is fine. I'll probably end up taking my computer into the office tomorrow and posting from there.

Also, ù§èé²àç French keyboards.