A Mood That Turns

Joy Denalane “Soweto ’76-’06” – How’s this for a “huh, really?”: This Afro-funk/neo-soul hybrid is by a German artist. Okay, so, an Afro-German artist, but still, it’s hard to imagine anything sounding less Germanic than Delanane and her most recent album Born & Raised. “Soweto ’76-’06,” a clear highlight from that record, is a dense and moody track that sounds a bit like Mary J. Blige fronting Fela Kuti’s band. The lyrics are relentlessly grim, but the tone of the piece errs on the side of celebration, which makes a lot of sense, actually, given that it’s essentially a song about finding a way to survive against all odds. (Click here to buy it from Amazon Germany, or here to buy it from eMusic.)

Meanwhile, on Fair Game: Ted Leo stopped by for a solo session, and it was very awesome.

Elsewhere: The Pazz & Jop and Idolator polls are both up now, and if you are for some reason interested in seeing what I voted for you can see my Idolator ballot here and my Pazz & Jop ballot here. I really need to emphasize that these should NOT be taken as my personal “year-end list.” This is a matter of voting, and my selections are totally arbitrary. (The only real constant is that the Of Montreal is my favorite record from 2007. It just is.) If you read this site regularly, you may have picked up on the fact that I like a lot more than ten albums per year. To be very blunt, I feel like any critic who either finds it a little too easy to fill those things out or struggles to come up with enough records to fill the positions really ought to find another line of work.

Anyway, I find it really, really hard to care about any of this stuff right now. I think both of the lists skew heavily in favor of records I either enjoy or respect, and so there’s really nothing much to bitch about other than the fact that I felt like I needed to pry my eyes open in order to read through the Voice’s essays, even the ones written by friends of mine whose work I usually admire. (The most disappointing by far is certainly Todd Burns’ cringe-inducing, disturbingly elitist essay about dance music.) I don’t think it’s really their fault, though. It’s just a lot of tired bullshitting, and smart people working hard to find some kind of narrative in their given topic. The thing is, though — who the fuck needs a narrative at this point? Aren’t we already overflowing with narrative, whether it’s from magazines, blogs, publicists, and the artists themselves? If anything, we should all be running screaming from any attempt to force 12 months of music into some tidy storyline. It all just seems like a huge waste of time (and talent) at best, and an exercise in lame-ass witless punditry at worst.