Best of the Year, Pt. 3

Ten more songs, these ones are really good though

Dec 20, 2024

I’ll be honest with you, folks: I’m worried about the entertainment business. I worry selfishly, because I really like my entertainment, and would like it to continue to exist - in a form that I recognize as such - for my continued consumption. I should say up front: I’m not worried that great music, movies, art, etc. will cease to exist. But there are troubling developments concerning the conditions under which it’s being produced and distributed, storm clouds gathering over an already strained and unfair system.

It is no secret that making a professional living in the music industry has become a fantasy for the vast majority of working musicians. The trickle-down-if-you’re-lucky economics of getting artists paid within the ecosystem of streaming services is a sham, as we have known for a decade now. The math does not work out. There is, simply, no going back.

On the movies and television front, it’s also a grim picture. Last year’s parallel strikes from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA did some important work in securing protections for writers and actors against the tide of AI-generated screenplays and performances that are at this very moment crashing against those levees, looking for loopholes to leak through. But the rise of streamers within those industries has also brought lower paychecks and diminishing returns (and standards) for the talent, the production crews, techs, VFX artists, and anyone else who is, at least for the moment, necessary in the manufacturing of content (though rest assured, those companies are always innovating, looking for opportunities to do more with less).

I read two long-form pieces this week, both about specific streaming services, that crystalized some of my thinking around all of this as it relates to the continued enshittification of those services and of the entertainment itself (crystalized in the same way that uric acid crystalizes in the body and turns into gout or kidney stones, i.e. painfully). The first was an expose in Harper’s, from the great music journalist Liz Pelly, on how Spotify has willingly, eagerly, flooded its playlists with anonymous/fake music (think chill-out ambient, downtempo jazz, lo-fi beats, etc.) to save money on royalty pay-outs. The second is a comprehensive look into the historic rise of Netflix and the company’s re-brand as a cheap, generic content factory. Both are excellent and thorough and deserve a full read-through, and both arrive at the same grim conclusions: that “quantity over quality” as a business model has proven itself in the markets, that audiences are only half paying attention anyways, and that the more generic and frictionless they can make the molds for their forgeries, the better their earnings reports will look to shareholders at the end of the year.

Pelly warns convincingly that the proliferation of phony background music on Spotify not only hurts artists and the industry, but perverts and erodes our relationship with music itself:

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

As Exhibit A in support of that argument, I’d like to call this horrific YouTube compilation of Christmas music to the stand:

This video, which purports to be a collection of “vintage Christmas classics,” has over five million views. A cursory scan through it will reveal to any active listener familiar with the genuine source material that it is, in fact, a garbled and unholy mess of AI-generated reinterpretations of classic Christmas songs. YouTube is polluted with these kinds of scams, ostensibly there to scrape a few ad dollars from the algorithm. But how many people are really listening close enough to even notice, let alone care?

At Netflix, there is also a directive in place to encourage passive viewing among subscribers, having pioneered and perfected the “auto-play” model. Will Tavin, the author of the n+1 piece, reports that, after speaking with several screenwriters who worked on Netflix original films, “a common note from company executives is ‘have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.’” The studio that once touted itself as a home for bold, original storytelling and even invested in auteur-driven work like Okja, Roma, and The Irishman has (having boxed out its competition) come to the conclusion that the most profitable way for it to operate going forward is as an assembly line exclusively producing cheap, lowest common denominator schlock that is designed to be forgotten, churned out and then subsequently buried to sustain the illusion of a vast, varied, and constantly shifting library.

Do you remember how exciting your first experiences with Spotify or Netflix were? I certainly do. The overlapping joys of choice and convenience, the rush of “world-at-your-fingertips” power and possibility. All of that feels far away now, as that thrill has worn off, curdled into expectation, and as the experience of using those services seems to have steadily gotten worse over the last decade.

These companies are not inherently anti-art, but they certainly don’t value it - and why should they? Not to paint with too broad a brush, but for all the faults and corruptions of traditional industry, being in the music business once seemingly required some degree of concern for music itself, just as people in the movie business seem to care about movies on some level. These streaming services are not in those businesses. They are technology companies, born out of a Silicon Valley ethos to disrupt, to move fast and break things (our brains, in this case). Their allegiance is to the architecture, the shelves; the quality of the work they contain is of distant concern, or more likely of no concern at all. This is how we get streaming companies artificially inflating their libraries with low-budget slop that flattens and homogenizes the experience of consuming entertainment (a trend that is all but assured to accelerate with the rise of AI-generated music and film), betting on the passivity and incuriosity of their subscribers, and repeatedly steering them towards the path of least resistance. It’s a bet they seem guaranteed to win, with both companies thoroughly enshrouded in “too big to fail” armor, and neither likely to have a Scrooge-esque revelation about their own complicity in the devaluation of art and entertainment any time soon (turns out you can’t haunt a corporation into having a conscience).

I’m going on two years since I cancelled all of my streaming subscriptions and started my own media server, and baby I’m thankful. I’m not claiming any position of moral authority, and I’m certainly not demanding that everyone follow suit (although I’m happy to explain how to do it to anyone who’s curious - all you need is a computer and a storage device and you, too, can run your own private Netflix/Spotify!). I try to purchase music digitally or on vinyl when I can, and this year I started renting movies from Scarecrow Video again, after years of lapsed membership, and only after repeated pleas from the local institution to help save their business. But I have primarily re-built my media library through, uh, let’s say unconventional means (🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️).

I will say, I think it is unequivocally healthier in the long term for artists and for us as consumers to go around the streamers whenever and in whatever ways we can, especially considering the trends laid out in the articles above. By actively acquiring and/or choosing a thing, whether purchased or hunted down on a Russian torrents forum, you are wrestling back some control from an infrastructure that would prefer you let your entertainment choices be made for you. It is a losing battle, but it feels good to fight it anyways; to claim some agency in what you consume, and the terms under which you consume it.

Put on an NTS radio show instead of a Spotify playlist. Pick a movie from the Criterion Channel’s immaculately curated collections. Better still: rent or buy a blu-ray and reacquaint yourself with menus and bonus features! Listen to an album in a physical format, read through the liner notes and notice when it ends, instead of bleeding into algorithmically-recommended infinity!

Modern existence is hard, its conditions often nigh-intolerable. These companies I’ve just spent this whole intro (and my whole Thursday afternoon) ripping into can’t even sniff the upper echelon of the world’s evils. But what they are nominally selling, art and culture, is supposed to be a tonic against those evils, to help broaden life’s horizons by giving it meaning, shape, and context. What they would prefer to offer you instead is an opiated, uncanny replica with no promise of perspective. It feels imperative that we remember how to notice the difference.

Astrid Sonne - Give My All

I’m ready to assume at this point that there’s just something in the water in Copenhagen. The Danish capital city has spawned a trove of great, left field art-pop in recent years: ML Buch (who featured on last year’s best of list), Fine (who featured on last week’s), Erika de Casier, and Molina, to name a few. Oh and Astrid Sonne, who with this year’s full-length Great Doubts made it known that she’s jockeying for big dog status within the burgeoning scene.

Album highlight “Give My All” is a great gateway into her sonic world, a vaguely Björk-esque synthetic symphony that is just a little off-kilter, a crooked painting, half-uneasy half-triumphant. “I’d give my all to have / just one more night with you” Sonne offers over a waterfall of gloriously canned strings. Staccato stabs of icy piano chords follow, and eventually drop out to make space for a beat drop, a slo-mo 80 bpm trap rhythm that announces itself with big bass kicks and open hi-hats. “You’re distant like a star / You’re so far away” she concludes as the strings re-enter the fray and the chorus circles back around. For a song with such basic ingredients, “Give My All” emerges as a jewel box, an uncanny concoction of feeling and sound.

1010benja - I Can

“I Can” wastes no time with intros; over big “Wonderwall” acoustic strums, this Kansas City based R&B chameleon gets right into it.

“It might be enough, yeah / the valley of my love, yeah” goes the first verse of this smoldering ballad, Benjamin Lyman’s elastic voice honey-sweet and reassuring, a cinematic smear of huge vocal hooks right from jump street. Then on the second verse suddenly it’s all doubts and darkness: “It might not be enough, yeah.” Ultimately “I Can” is a question not a statement, a song about romantic tension unresolved that rides an ever-cresting wave of churning, blistering beauty and melancholy melody. When a big orchestral outro arrives out of nowhere in the song’s final minute, Lyman breathily ad-libbing atop a march of stirring strings and regal horns, you just have to tip your hat. He absolutely had to do it to ‘em.

Mabe Fratti - Pantalla Azul

It’s getting hard to keep up with prolific Mexico City-based cellist and composer Mabe Fratti, who has put out so much quality music over the last few years under various aliases and collaborations that it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

There’s nothing overwhelming about “Pantalla Azul,” however - a beautifully sparse highlight from this year’s pop-leaning Sentir due no sabes. Teaming up with Héctor Tosta, with whom she formed the duo Titanic last year, the song’s title, which translates to “blue screen error,” hints at its concerns, an exploration and embrace of the mysterious and unknown. The song begins with just her instrument, Fratti using a whammy bar and a host of effects to make her cello bend and soar like a fretless bass.

“No hay lección más que entender / que todo se desordena” (there is no lesson left to understand / that everything is disordered) she sings in her ethereal soprano, and the song begins to blossom, delicately layering in 80’s soft-pop keys and triplets of treated piano alongside plucks of her cello like sheets of pastry in a tiramisu.

Iron & Wine - Cutting it Close

Whatever man, I still love this guy, and I think it’s remarkable that he’s carved out such a unique lane for himself doing yeoman’s work in the under appreciated realm of immaculate AOR folk-pop. If that makes me an NPR normie, so be it.

“Long lost friend of mine / I know we only fucked a couple of times,” go the opening lines of “Cutting it Close,” in what sounds like a good-natured extension of the olive branch; to whom, it’s hard to tell. But real heads know that any track where Sam Beam drops an ‘f bomb’ is gonna go hard, and this one is no exception. Over a loose weave of guitar, zither, and twinkly piano, Beam unfurls a patient song about time, the acceptance of its gifts and its thefts. “Time likes pulling my teeth / I never knew how many teeth I would need,” he admits, all but giving himself over to its whims like a modern day Rip Van Winkle.

I keep coming back to the song’s refrain, a deceptively simple turn of phrase that gets stuck in your craw the more you think about it: “It doesn’t matter ‘til it totally does.” Life is long / life is short, two sides of the same coin after all. Beam turns 50 next year, but I have no reason to doubt that he’s got another half-century of songs in him.

ScHoolboy Q - Cooties

While all eyes were on Kendrick this year, another TDE alumni quietly dropped an album that goes toe-to-toe with GNX for bars and production bonafides. On “Cooties,” over a “ka-chunk” beat of jazzy piano licks and elegantly gliding bass courtesy of LA crew Digi+Phonics, ScHoolboy celebrates personal victories (getting sober, losing weight, a new baby) and laments global tragedies in the same breath, the same stop-start flow, all the while sounding like a man revitalized and blessed with new perspective.

“I can't believe that mountain is real / accountant is thrilled” he intones, not so much a brag as a statement of fact. “Follow my purpose / they put the blinds down / I open the curtains / shine on me perfect.” It’s a meditative slapper that feels like basking in a hard-earned W while still carrying the weight of the past.

SML - Three Over Steel

SML is an LA-based quintet that emerged from the experimental jazz scene that spawned out of a tiny (and sadly, now defunct) bar in east LA’s Highland Park neighborhood called ETA. Their debut album Small Medium Large was recorded live at ETA over a series of performances, these live recordings then taken back to the studio, edited down and embellished with software polish. This cut and paste technique suits the group well, as evidenced on the kinetic “Three Over Steel,” which rides a continuous groove that recalls the weirdo-funk of On the Corner-era Miles Davis. Horn player Josh Johnson provides massive blasts of saxophone, a never-ending solo that rumbles and rattles atop crisp synths and vibrantly skronk-y guitar. You can feel the raw energy of improvisation and live performance at work, and if the song has seams where editing took place behind the scenes, it certainly doesn’t show them.

The Cure - And Nothing Is Forever

What an unexpected miracle, to get a no-skips album from the Cure of all bands in the year 2024. Not a “re-invented sound” album, not a legacy album, but a slate of premium goth greatness that, but for its aged perspective and focus on fleeting mortality, could have been beamed in from 1989.

The grandiose and elegiac “And Nothing Is Forever” takes almost three minutes building up a sunset-hued cloud castle of symphonic strings and crunchy, punch the sky arena guitar. When Robert Smith finally arrives, his distinctly wavering voice sounding fully intact, delivering the opening lyric “promise you’ll be with me in the end” as if from a mountaintop, it's enough to send shivers down your spine.

Vijay Iyer - Overjoyed

“Overjoyed” begins with a Guaraldi-an shuffle of bouncy piano and light hi hats, welcoming you in to a warm and well-lit space. Performing as a trio of piano, bass, and drums, Vijay Iyer and his accompanists set off from there, taxiing on the runway a bit before fully taking to the air over the song’s seven-plus minute runtime.

Compassion was my favorite jazz record of the year, and I love “Overjoyed” in particular for its radiant energy, even as it winds through quieter passages of searching bass lines and restless percussive interludes. It always - especially in its soaring final minutes - finds its way back into sunny skies.

Naemi (ft. Perila) - Day Drifter

On an electronic album brimming with experimental energy, one that is constantly zigging and zagging through genre expectations, one of Dust Devil’s most lovely surprises ends up being “Day Drifter” - a gorgeously straightforward guitar and voice duet that arrives amidst tracks of noisy electro-clash and crackling ambient textures; a quiet, eye of the storm barn-burner.

Here the Kansas-born, Berlin-based experimentalist Naemi goes full alt-rock mode, to magnificent results. The full-bodied electric guitar sound, wistfully emboldened with chorus and reverb, sounding like it just woke up and floated off of side B of Siamese Dream, the haunting vocals (provided by Russian experimental artist Perila) reminiscent of a specific strand of deconstructed, nocturnal shoegaze (it’s giving Lost in Translation OST, to me). I would have loved to hear more of this sound on Dust Devil, but maybe its fleeting appearance is part of the point; a real “I can also do this” flex on an album full of them.

Itasca - El Dorado

“I knew the road to my El Dorado,” begins Kayla Cohen (the songwriter/guitarist behind Itasca) over a smoky soft backdrop of synth-y flutes and a bass line that climbs like a vine, “but I was caught looking at the weeds.” Relatable! On her fifth album, and first in four years, Cohen is in perma-searcher mode, the title of this track and its opening lyric an acknowledgement that what she’s after may be a kind of false flag.

Over the course of the song, her voice shifts from a sighing, speak-sing softness to a full-bodied coo that recalls Joni Mitchell at her duskiest. In its final minute, her guitar finds its way into the center of the proceedings, an expressive swirl of a solo that crests a hill and rides down its hidden backside, its destination and destiny unknown.

Happy holidays, everyone. I may or may not have one more of these in me next week; if not, see you in 2025.