But how sustainable this adaptability is we simply don’t know. It’s tempting and not inaccurate to kvell about how staunchly musicians bore up under the most extenuating historical circumstances since World War II-the livestreamed concerts with their merch sales and tip jars, the scattered live albums these events generated (full disclosure: I proposed Hamell on Trial’s scabrous Pandemic Songs myself), robust support for the George Floyd-sparked Black Lives Matter marches, enthusiastic turns at the Biden convention and inauguration, Taylor Swift converting her imposed isolation and untold wealth into 34-count-’em-34 good-to-superb songs in a single year, her helper Matt laying down 10 lesser ones, others great and small venturing back into the studio as well. But as music fans we’d best remember that we’ll be lucky if anything like live music is up and running by autumn in all likelihood, the drought that began last March has yet to reach its midpoint. We all hope that with him gone 2021 will be shinier. We all know 2020 was a megashitty year that our deposed president did everything he could to render shittier. And I was also struck by how few of the entities we used to call bands appeared on the Pitchfork list as Rolling Stone did what it could to hold the fort. But as I examined the year-ends of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Paste (which while far less acute than the bigger guys’ is where I encountered Backxwash), and the so-called Village Voice Pazz & Jop Rip-Off Poll-about which I know essentially nothing because I’m a Facebook denier, but whose results I found more to my taste, perhaps because it wasn’t calibrated with a target market in mind-I was struck by how different Stone and P4K were down below Fiona Apple, Run the Jewels, Bob Dylan, Waxahatchee, and Haim, all Xgau A’s, and Phoebe Bridgers, Sault, Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, Bad Bunny, and Lil Uzi Vert, all honorable near-misses by me. Obscurantism is never my goal-as I’ve always carped about critics who pride themselves on “discovering” hot items and next cool things, novelty should never be an end in itself. And this year EP-powering Yonic South, Phoebe Bridgers tip McCarthy Trenching, my second Chicago Farmer pick, and the not yet reviewed Justin Farren and Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow don’t exhaust the candidates.
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In recent years there've been, to name a varied few, Dawn Oberg, Jinx Lennon, Carsie Blanton, Jealous of the Birds, and Derek Senn, plus African stuff. So OK, it’s not like I’ve never pumped music few readers have heard of before. His 2016 art show was noticed here, his CD only in Britain. And then there’s another blind pull, Martin Creed’s Thoughts Lined Up: the whimsical outcries, musings, tributes, jokes, protests, and word games of a 47-year-old Scottish punk-pacifist-dadaist conceptual artist who's modestly famous in the so-called United Kingdom. review I could find, a superb one by Jennifer Kelly in Dusted. This led me to Group Doueh & Cheveu’s extraordinary 2017 Paris-meets-Sahel Dakhla Sahara Session, which generated but a single U.S. 1 but reminded me that I hadn’t dug around in the Sahara myself for a while.
Then there was Amanda Petrusich’s stunned New Yorker Etran de l'Air rave in December, which not only alerted me to that band’s 2018 desert-guitar No.
Rough-hewn DIY singer-songwriter Kirby Heard I pulled out of my unplayed shelves blind and Zambia-born Canadian transgender rapper Backxwash’s hip-hop Deviancy I sought out on the strength of the title-not-music of her Polaris Prize-winning horrorcore 2020 God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It. At 71 selections it was the third shortest of the century, and 10 of my picks weren’t even 2020 records, including three from 2018 that encompass two slept-on EPs by the Roots’ Black Thought and one each from 20 indeed, only three of the five inevitable 2019 misses-the late-released Lil Wayne plus Young M.A and Mannequin Pussy-were records anybody else much knew about. As I pondered my choices for the finest albums of 2020, however, several statistical anomalies bothered me. The Pazz & Jop essays I wrote for The Village Voice from 1975 until 2005 were magnum opuses that wore me out, but post- Voice my year-enders turned easy peasy-chatty and informational while saving room to toss out a few generalizations. As I pondered my Dean’s List 2020, I was struck by how hard it was to write about.
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