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The Best Songs of 2018, in One Playlist
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The Boundaries Between Fame and Music Have Never Been More Porous
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Music Is Moving in Both Directions at Once
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The Women of Country Are Done With Playing by Nashville\u2019s Rules
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Hey there, everyone,<\/p>\n
Thanks so much for having me back once more for what\u2019s invariably a highlight of my musical calendar, and as always it\u2019s a real privilege to be here taking stock of another year with you all. (Jason, your great post<\/a> has me absolutely kicking myself for leaving Piano and a Microphone 1983<\/a> off my Top 10, which now goes to 11.) Since I\u2019m the last guest entrant and I\u2019m pretty sure everyone\u2019s probably already packing up their blankets and lawn chairs, I thought I\u2019d get a little weird and maybe a little cranky (what better way to head home for the holidays?) and ramble for a bit about a quartet of folks who\u2019ve made unusually impressive marks on our musical landscape in 2018. I speak, of course, of Cardi B, Tekashi 6ix9ine, Donald Glover, and Bradley Cooper, four drastically different cultural figures who speak to the far-flung and often downright weird ways that pop music is made, consumed, and processed (in a number of senses) in our current moment.<\/p>\n Forgive me if I don my academic cap for a moment\u2014blame the final exam that I\u2019m proctoring while writing this\u2014but a number of years back the media theorist Henry Jenkins coined the term \u201cconvergence culture<\/a>\u201d to describe the ever-increasing flow of cultural content between platforms, industries, and audiences in our current moment. In Jenkins\u2019 telling, much of this has to do with massive corporations and media conglomerates imposing themselves onto popular culture, but it also brings more grassroots possibilities for audiences to influence and interact with the culture they consume in newly immediate and powerful ways. Jenkins mostly wrote about this in terms of entertainment franchises\u2014Harry Potter, Star Wars, Survivor\u2014but Cardi, 6ix9ine, Glover, and Cooper all strike me as musical exemplars of a moment in which the boundaries between entertainment media, old and new, have never seemed more porous, for better or worse.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the best. Cardi B\u2019s origin story has been recounted many times by now (here\u2019s a link to Lindsay\u2019s terrific piece<\/a> from last year): how the regular(-degular-shmegular) girl from the Bronx rose to fame via social media and reality TV before breaking through with 2017\u2019s monster hit \u201cBodak Yellow<\/a>,\u201d the best song of last year. She followed it up by making one of the best albums of 2018, Invasion of Privacy<\/a>, establishing herself as (arguably) rap\u2019s most vital mix of talent and blockbuster star power to emerge since Kendrick Lamar. In a year that saw other stars releasing works that were either imposingly sprawling (Migos, Drake) or blindingly concise (Pusha T, Earl Sweatshirt), Invasion of Privacy almost felt like a throwback to everything we used to think an album ought to be: mature, substantive, well-crafted, fun, big in all of the good ways. It was an event album that delivered on its promise and then some, and there\u2019s no better musical torch-bearer for the bottom-up potential of our cross-platform musical world than Cardi, an artist who grew her career in unconventional ways and then had the talent and smarts to maximize what she\u2019d cultivated once the world was finally ready.<\/p>\n On the flip side of Cardi\u2019s axis is Tekashi 6ix9ine, who also used the cachet of social media to break into hip-hop and has lately suffered one of the more spectacular falls<\/a> in recent memory. From his earliest days of Instagram fame, the rainbow-haired, copiously tatted 6ix9ine presented himself as a sort of Sid Vicious for Generation Z, a deliberately repellent anti-fashion plate whose blunt and bludgeoning musical stylings seemed like a direct extension of the online persona he\u2019d crafted. His fans were rabidly devoted, at times troublingly so: News that he\u2019d pleaded guilty to a felony charge of use of a child in a sexual performance back in 2015 did little to slow his rapid ascent, and the hits kept on coming, including \u201cFefe<\/a>,\u201d his collaboration with Nicki Minaj that reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 this summer. Then, last month, it all came crashing down when 6ix9ine and several associates were arrested on federal racketeering charges. His lawyer claims it was all an act, a kid who got in over his head with the wrong people after setting in motion a fantasy life that he didn\u2019t know how to stop, and no matter your opinion of 6ix9ine as a person or performer\u2014mine is pretty low on both counts\u2014it\u2019s hard not to find his defense somewhat credible. After all, in 2018 what sounds more believable to you: a 22-year-old who rises from Instagram posts to become a criminal mastermind, or a 22-year-old who\u2019s so Extremely Online that the endorphin rush of followers and viral fame leads him to make a series of spectacularly ill-advised and self-destructive decisions?<\/p>\n Speaking of virality, one of the most talked-about and frequently watched songs of 2018 was Childish Gambino\u2019s \u201cThis Is America<\/a>.\u201d While I\u2019m an admirer of Donald Glover the actor and screenwriter, I\u2019ve never much warmed to Childish Gambino\u2019s music. Early works like Camp<\/a> and Because the Internet<\/a> felt like topiary with nothing behind it, elaborate hedges of winks and smirks for people who like rap to be good for a laugh. With \u201cAwaken, My Love!\u201d<\/a> in 2016, Gambino seemed to put away childish things and declare that the joke was over, but just because you\u2019ve decided to take music seriously doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that you\u2019ve gotten better at it, and I found \u201cAwaken, My Love!\u201d to be a lavishly produced exercise in paint-by-numbers re-creationism by a guy who still couldn\u2019t sing or write songs.<\/p>\n \n Congratulations to professional-grade musician Bradley Cooper for joining the elite ranks of American men who\u2019ve taken the \u201cextreme measures\u201d of six months of guitar\u00a0<\/span>lessons.<\/b>\n<\/p>\n And then this year came \u201cThis Is America,\u201d which used a stunning music video to pull a characteristically underwhelming song to the top of the Billboard charts this past spring. (Pace Chris<\/a>, with whom I rarely disagree, but in this case the best explanation for the song\u2019s underperformance on radio may be the most obvious: To my ears, it\u2019s just not very good.) \u201cThis Is America\u201d was widely touted as a career pinnacle for Childish Gambino but almost always with the insistence that song and video were inherently inseparable, which felt like a bunch of people besotted with Glover\u2019s work on Atlanta<\/a> moving the goal posts on his musical alter ego\u2019s behalf. Making a great television show doesn\u2019t make you a great musician, and hiring Hiro Murai to direct your music video\u2014a terrific filmmaker long before he started working with Glover\u2014doesn\u2019t necessarily prove you\u2019re a poly-artistic visionary, it just proves you\u2019re well-connected and, it must be said, rich. (For a sharper and far more eloquent rebuttal to the \u201cThis Is America\u201d hype than mine here, see this great essay<\/a> by Israel Daramola in Spin that Chris mentioned as well, one of the finest pieces of cultural criticism I read this year.)<\/p>\n Well-connected and rich brings me to my final subject, and brings us all back to the beginning of Ann\u2019s entry<\/a> at the start of this year\u2019s club: Bradley Cooper, who at the time of this writing has spent the past 11 weeks as 2018\u2019s most seemingly unlikely mainstay of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Watching A Star Is Born<\/a>, I found myself totally enraptured by Lady Gaga\u2019s magnificent performance as Ally but frustrated by the movie\u2019s steadfast refusal to actually be about its most interesting character: you know, the one in its goddamn title. Cooper\u2019s Jackson Maine, on the other hand, felt maddeningly empty to me, a mumbling jumble of mannerisms and stereotypes. What\u2019s more, the movie\u2019s complete disinterest in establishing what discernible skills made him famous in the first place, apart from a voice that sounds like Grampa Simpson doing Eddie Vedder and songs that sound like someone who\u2019s into the wrong Black Crowes albums, struck me as pretty insulting. (Although not as insulting as its cringe-inducing insinuations that there\u2019s just no place in this modern world for good-looking, guitar-slinging, fortysomething white guys, when in fact, as Jessica Hopper<\/a> and Hazel Cills<\/a> have both covered brilliantly as of late and Jewly\u2019s own post<\/a> alludes to, there\u2019s a whole genre-industrial complex out there with its thumb firmly on the scale for said population.)<\/p>\n But what bothered me the most, and will continue to as this movie sweeps its way to an armful of Oscars, was the breathtakingly credulous coverage of how much work Cooper put into becoming a Real Musician. \u201cHe learned how to play the guitar. He learned how to play the piano. Not just enough to be convincing onstage\u2014enough to be a professional musician,\u201d declared the New York Times Magazine in a story titled \u201cBradley Cooper Is Not Really Into This Profile<\/a>.\u201d \u201cBradley Cooper took extreme measures to become Jackson Maine for his directorial debut, \u2018A Star Is Born,\u2019 setting up a musical bootcamp in his home for six whole months,\u201d wrote the Wrap<\/a>. Six whole months! Congratulations to professional-grade musician Bradley Cooper for joining the elite ranks of American men who\u2019ve taken the \u201cextreme measures\u201d of six months of guitar lessons. Reading this stuff feels like being swallowed by some authenticity Ouroboros spawned from the most self-satisfied corner of our convergence culture, the Hollywood A-lister whose performance as a Real Musician in a movie about Real Music is praised online and in print on the grounds that he has in fact become a Real Musician in Real Life, which you\u2019ll know by reading the fawning coverage that he\u2019s \u201cnot really into,\u201d being a Real Director and all. It\u2019s enough to make me want to wrap myself in barbed wire to the strains of \u201cLeaning on the Everlasting Arms.\u201d<\/p>\n Sorry, I\u2019m verging into Silky Johnson territory<\/a> here. But give me music made by people who are actually good at it, dammit! Not just people who are good at being famous. Luckily 2018 offered no shortage of the former; to my ears, here are 10 albums\u2019 worth, in alphabetical order:<\/p>\n Armand Hammer, Paraffin<\/a> Excelsior<\/a>,<\/p>\n Jack<\/span><\/p>\n Read the previous entry.<\/a> Read the next entry.<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\ufeffCardi B, Invasion of Privacy<\/a>
\ufeffEarl Sweatshirt, Some Rap Songs<\/a>
\ufeffJanelle Mon\u00e1e, Dirty Computer<\/a>
\ufeffJ.I.D, DiCaprio 2<\/a>
\ufeffLucy Dacus, Historian<\/a>
\ufeffMitski, Be the Cowboy<\/a>
\ufeffNoname, Room 25<\/a>
\ufeffPusha T, Daytona<\/a>
\ufeffRico Nasty, Nasty<\/a>
\ufeffSpecial deluxe edition bonus cut: Prince, Piano and a Microphone 1983<\/a><\/p>\n