Top Ten
The Year in Music
Uli Loskot
Top Ten 2006
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The Year in Quotes 1
"We dress up funny, run around in the woods, and hit each other with sticks. There's something ...
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The Year in Music A bad year for hip-hop? People kept saying that throughout the last 12 months, but you'd never know ...
The Year in Local Music This was hard. A shit-ton of Baltimore bands, singers, rappers, and bang-on-some-pots-and-pans'ers r...
The Year in Art The year's past first Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays have been ridiculously event-packed. How to ...
The Year in Stage There's no denying the pleasures of maximalist theater. A large-cast, elaborate-set production such ...
The Year in Books David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest first appeared 10 years ago. And, apparently, the 10th annivers...
The Year in News Republican rule was supposed to be good for Maryland, tightening up the fiscal scene and challenging... | By Van Smith
The Year in Quotes 1 "We dress up funny, run around in the woods, and hit each other with sticks. There's something ...
The Year in Movies Must 2006 be the year of Borat? Not trying to take anything away from director Larry Charles and act...
The Year in Television Three-quarters of a century into its existence, television may finally be becoming our mirror. Yes, ...
The Year in Music A bad year for hip-hop? People kept saying that throughout the last 12 months, but you'd never know ...
The Year in Local Music This was hard. A shit-ton of Baltimore bands, singers, rappers, and bang-on-some-pots-and-pans'ers r...
The Year in Art The year's past first Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays have been ridiculously event-packed. How to ...
The Year in Stage There's no denying the pleasures of maximalist theater. A large-cast, elaborate-set production such ...
The Year in Books David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest first appeared 10 years ago. And, apparently, the 10th annivers...
Posted 12/13/2006
A bad year for hip-hop? People kept saying that throughout the last 12 months, but you'd never know it to look at the results of our 2006 Top 10, with no less than six rap albums placing. Maybe hip-hop really is the last populist genre in town worth a damn. That certainly seems to be true among many critics; none of ours seemed too interested in stumping for Sugarland or Hinder or Rascal Flatts or any of 2006's chart-topping non-rap. (Whether that's evidence of a hip-hop bias or the fact that all that stuff, like, really sucks is up to you.) And even the populist part is up for debate, given that many of our hip-hop picks were, well, commercial flops. Commercial flops on major labels and by artists whose names your rap-hating uncle might even recognize, but nonetheless.
But then, at this point, what isn't a commercial flop? Hot artists with a huge online and/or press buzz can sell exactly squat. Better to just find the stuff that moves you, right? Ballots for this year's Top 10 were diffuse things whether coming from jazz cats, rock fans, or pop snobs, filled with obscurities and personal obsessions and stuff we've never even heard of. (My own No. 1, the bratty teenpunksploitation of Be Your Own Pet, didn't come close to placing. But I'm not that bitter.) The one thing everyone seemed to agree on was "you do your thing and I'll do mine." Which is not to say catty pop sniping and dead horses weren't everywhere this year. When you absolutely have to air your opinion on the same leaked Jay-Z track everyone else is talking about before lunch, only blogs will do.
So if you want to know who was moved and grooved by the psychedelically saturated noise of the Yellow Swans or who loved the best album in decades from a newly revitalized Ornette Coleman or who was the lone nut who voted for the Lindsay Lohan album--OK, he later recanted--you can check out the individual ballots on our web site. But for now, here's our democratically decided upon, totally official Top 10. And, of course, no one should read too much armchair sociology into numerical data gleaned from two dozen finicky music nerds, right?
Our 2006 National Music Top 10 was compiled from numerically weighted ballots from 24 regular City Paper contributors--J. Bowers, Jim Breihan, Tom Breihan, Michael Crumsho, Raymond Cummings, John Darnielle, Lee Gardner, Ian Grey, Jess Harvell, Geoffrey Himes, Joel Hunt, Marc Masters, Michaelangelo Matos, Bret McCabe, Anthony Miccio, Kevin O'Donnell, Ethan Padgett, Makkada B. Selah, Al Shipley, George Smith, Rod Smith, Jason Torres, Tony Ware, and Mikael Wood. Numerical ties were broken by determining how many individual voters nominated a particular record. (Jess Harvell)
1
T.I. King (Atlantic) Unlike other hip-hop poll toppers like OutKast or Kanye West, T.I. doesn't play to the cheap seats of critical respectability or pop crossover. He's never going to record with Jon Brion or write a novelty smash like "Hey Ya." What makes King such an understated triumph is, give or take a Jamie Foxx collaboration, T.I.'s unstinting commitment to the formalist purity of hardcore beats and rhymes. In an era when friggin' Fergie is the biggest selling rapper in the world, the King of the South goes hard for the long haul of a whole album, the true inheritor of turn-of-the-'90s New York's crown. Grumble and gripe all you want, but when it comes to the two things pop music has promised since rock 'n' roll--attitude and rhythm--the man born Clifford Harris is the best thing going. (JH)
2
Ghostface Killah Fishscale (Def Jam) "Do you think comparing Fishscale to Mama Said Knock You Out for Top 10 is misguided?" "How so?" "It's a tour de force. It sounds revitalized. It's like a comeback album from a guy who didn't actually need one." "Yeah. Except for the fact that Ghost has never had LL's commercial profile." "Well, yeah. To be honest, it was hearing Ghost rhyme `Wanna step to me' with `Rip your guts out like a hysterectomy' over background cheering that made the connection for me." "Well, Ghostface sounds like LL in `Mama Said' mode pretty much all the time." "Yeah, he does. But I hear this as what he did pretty well on The Pretty Toney Album--the tour-de-force factor--done perfectly." "Fine, go ahead." "Thanks." (Michaelangelo Matos)
3
Clipse Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up) Just brutal. Virginia Beach brothers Malice and Pusha T pop their 'plosives with concussive force, and when they talk about bad things, they do it with such vivid, economical clarity and sneering hauteur that morality melts away. The stuff they talk about is appalling: craxploitation, needless death, meaningless sex. And they don't even seem to be enjoying their ill-gotten gains: "Talk about your day, I pretend to listen / And you don't gotta love me, just be convincing." The Neptunes' bleak, spacey tracks inflate all that nihilism into something apocalyptic, an unrelenting masterpiece of bad faith. (Tom Breihan)
4
Sonic Youth Rather Ripped (Geffen) Exeunt ubiquitous indie louse Jim O'Rourke, whose brief Sonic tenure mysteriously revitalized these AARP-bound avant-scenesters. Kim, Steve, Lee, and Thurston were able to once again pull off the now-perennial trick of laundering their patented sound fountain-of-Youth fresh; Ripped marks the conclusion of Sonic Youth's major-label contract, captured at midsummer twilight. But for every quiet, coral-tinted "Turquoise Boy" or ever-so-chamomile "Do You Believe in Rapture?" SY turn to something more corporeal--the asphalt vortex of guitars on "What a Waste" or "Incinerate," with its showy invocation of mid-'90s Dinosaur Jr. (Raymond Cummings)
5
The Hold Steady Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant) More upbeat than 2005's Separation Sunday, the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America expands upon the band's "sex/drugs/rock 'n' roll = spiritual salvation" motif without losing the sarcasm, humor, and bar-band crunch that made it popular in the first place. Though Craig Finn's hyperliterate spoken-word delivery is still a love/hate proposition, his tales of hipster triumph and woe continue to ring hilariously true. "Chillout Tent" features an oddly appropriate guest vocal by Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum fame, playing a kid who ODs at a rock festival and ends up banging some girl in the medics' tent. Badass. (J. Bowers)
6
Lil Wayne and DJ Drama Dedication 2 (Gangsta Grillz) Compared to his last actual album, late 2005's Tha Carter II, Lil Wayne's typically oblique and bizarre metaphors actually feel a bit lazy at times on this relentlessly long 78-minute mixtape hodgepodge of bootleg beats. Even so, this New Orleans rapper taking it easy is still better than 90 percent of the rest of the hip-hop that's out there at the moment. And when he starts attacking the government's response to Katrina and spitting conspiracy theories on "Georgia . . . Bush," his eccentric swagger hits a direct and visceral new plateau. (Jim Breihan)
7
Joanna Newsom Ys (Drag City) Please, quit quibbling over such pedestrian matters as lyrics' literal sense, inflated song lengths, and that warbling voice. Joanna Newsom's bewitching Ys is, quite simply, the prettiest five songs in 55-ish minutes to caress the ears in ages, ripe with gossamer string sections, tremulous melodies, and a gorgeously winsome sprit. (Hey, some of us have a girl who made her own clothing in our dating past.) And if imagining Newsom as the vocal love child of Dolly Parton and Björk doesn't do it for you, just move along to Robyn already. (Bret McCabe)
8
The Roots Game Theory (Def Jam) Despite their rep as the best--well, only--live band in hip-hop, the Roots' records always sounded a little flat, ?uestlove's drums too crisp and thin to knock like the 808s and sampled breakbeats of traditional rap production. On Game Theory, though, he finally starts to fuck with the levels, pushing the snares into the red and scaling back on the lite-jazz production values. They may be forever destined for modest backpacker success, but it's a shame that Def Jam fucked up the opportunity to effectively promote the first Roots album that sounds amazing coming out of car speakers. (Al Shipley)
9
Scritti Politti White Bread Black Beer (Nonesuch/Rough Trade) Green Gartside's last return to record-making, 1999's meandering Anomie and Bonhomie, suggested that the Scritti Politti frontman's love of hip-hop had begun to short out his hard-wired melodic gift. Not so on this terrific--and typically overdue--follow-up, which the Welsh pop whiz opens by calling rap's boom boom bap "the beat of my heart." With its Brand Nubian quotes and chewy home-studio grooves, White Bread Black Beer bears out his claim, but not at the expense of gorgeous twee-funk tone poems like "Snow in Sun," whose "Kokomo" echoes couldn't frighten the kids in Kris Kross. (Mikael Wood)
10
Lupe Fiasco Food and Liquor (Atlantic) We don't know what happened to Lupe Fiasco. The 25-year-old Chicago native seemed like a marketing and promotions rep's wet dream. From endorsement deals with Reebok to being co-signed by Jay-Z to being blessed by the King Midas touch of Skateboard P on production, the critically acclaimed Food and Liquor was still a commercial brick, despite Fiasco showing emotional depth on joints like "Hurt Me Soul," lyrical acrobatics on "I Gotcha," and wrangling guest appearances from Jill Scott, Mike Shinoda, and Kanye West. Maybe it was the glasses. (Jason Torres)
The Unabridged List
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Tom Breihan
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Jim Breihan
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Michael Crumsho
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Raymond Cummings
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John Darnielle
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Lee Gardner
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Ian Grey
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Jess Harvell
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Geoffrey Himes
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Joel Hunt
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Marc Masters
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Michaelangelo Matos
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Bret McCabe
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Anthony Miccio
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Kevin O’Donnell
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Ethan Padgett
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Makkada B. Selah
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Al Shipley
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George Smith
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Rod Smith
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Jason Torres
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Tony Ware
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Mikael Wood
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Top Ten archives
More Stories
The Year In Tracks (12/15/2009)
. . . just in the case the album really is dead.
The Year in News (12/9/2009)
The Year in Movies (12/9/2009)
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