I should think this whole affair pretty self-explanatory. One new release (the first) rekindled my audiophilia. This year has made me music-obsessive, and to celebrate I give you a top 30 list. 2011 has been among the all-time best years for independent hip hop. We’ve had late-career resurgences (Shabazz Palaces, Beastie Boys, Pharoahe Monch), young crews/mobs/gangs/associations/etc (Black Hippy, Green Ova Undergrounds, Bruiser Brigade), youngins that materialized from bedrooms full of chronic smoke (Main Attrakionz, A$AP Rocky and all their producers) and active veterans just putting out some of their best work (CunninLynguists, Doomtree, Curren$y). These artists took up the majority of my listening this past year. That and some exceptional concept albums spanning all genres. Without further adieu, here is my list (which is WAY too close to the Gorilla vs. Bear and Coke Machine Glow lists). Please leave any questions or recommendations in the comment section. Please refrain from mentioning Odd Future.
01 Black Up by Shabazz Palaces – The best album since 2007. Maybe best hip hop album I’ve ever heard. In time, I might declare it the best album I’ve ever heard. Sonically, it incorporates avant-jazz, african traditional, ambient and dubstep/techno styles into a hip hop album. Thematically, it touches on loss of identity, freedom, truth and just about everything worth thinking about. Live it. Love it. Own it.
02 936 by Peaking Lights – Dub music, but weirder. Indra Dunis chants lyrics that sound like a joyous Lou Reed (as if she was listening to Sunday Morning on a loop). Aaron Coyes’ droning basslines provide the meat of the music
03 Oneirology by CunninLynguists – Dreams and everything they entail.
04 No Kings by Doomtree – Doomtree is now what Def Jux’s and Anticon’s rosters used to be in their Golden Ages. Their take on the genre is made up of allegory and theses, vivid yet impressionistic images that conflate space and time. They are Robin Hood. They are Spartacus. More generally, they are outsiders who never fit in, refuse to fit in and will make sure the world gives in to them whether the like it or not.
05 808s and Dark Grapes II by Main Attrakionz – The stream-of-consciousness ramblings and deliberate contradictions of a pair of social misfit twenty-somethings. Unlike Doomtree, Mondre and Squadda would sooner make a mockery out of the norm than wage war.
06 D by White Denim – My favourite rock band since XTC was young.
07 The Tape Hiss Hooligan by .L.W.H. – It’s a single producer’s show and the best since J Dilla’s Donuts. Of all people to show up on a hip hop mixtape, Max von Sydow (greatest actor ever) via samples from Lars Von Trier’s Europa acts as a guide to lead us by hand through the unhinged cinephilia-induced stupor of L.W. Hodge’s consciousness. On this Total Recall-like journey/hallucination, we come across Western Tink’s Bogartian anti-hero cool, Shady Blaze’s pill-addled promptness and the goonish weirdness of Main Attrakionz members MondreM.A.N. and Squadda B. Like the Von Trier film, Hooligan‘s characters and general DMT-meets-X-box-haze contradicticts it’s noirish tendencies. It’s The Big Sleep as done by Dario Argento.
08 Tomboy by Panda Bear – Person Pitch is one of my top ten favourite albums of all time. This one’s much more a collection of songs than Person Pitch, but Noah Lennox still makes sounds without precedent that underscore vocal harmonies (with himself?) that Gorilla vs. Bear insightfully called hymn-like.
09 Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleurs Libres by Matana Roberts – Robert’s saxophone and spoken word based saga of a young girl enslaved, raped and freed who suffers to make home for herself and her family makes music novelistic the way Raekwon made it cinematic. With it’s narrative of anguish, survival and the never-ending stride toward justice, it’s one of the year’s best hip hop records disguised as a jazz/poetry concept album.
10 W.A.R. (We Are Renegades) by Pharoahe Monch – My favourite rapper of all time. He’s back. W.A.R. is his weakest lyrical work, but his most sonically diverse. One this release, he zeros in on what could reductively be called “everything that’s wrong with the world today” i.e. oppression, racism, lies, authority, and radical-chic posers discrediting the serious polemicists. By no mistake was it released in the midst of the Arab Spring whether or not Monch intended it to. The soundtrack to the revolution.
11 LiveLoveA$AP by A$AP Rocky – On a lighter note comes A$AP Rocky. His lyrics are indefensibly shallow, but the way he charismatically bounces syllables and words around are mesmerizing when matched to the equally mesmerizing production. His best asset is his taste, calling in producers like Clams Casino, Beautiful Lou and SpaceGhostPurrp and features like Main Attrakionz and Schoolboy Q. LiveLoveA$AP does help to establish a national idea (check artwork) of hip hop, not post-regional, but syn-regional, a conglomeration of elements from around the states. It’s an accidental masterpiece, if anything, but it’s also the year most compulsively listenable full-length.
12 In Love With Oblivion by Crystal Stilts – A terrifying abstract horror record in shades of ’60s psych. Feels not unlike the fourth or fifth hour into a Twilight Zone marathon.
13 Setbacks by ScHoolboy Q – If you read my top MCs list, You probably know how I feel about this. It’s a little front-heavy and it devolves into shallow weed rap toward the middle section, but Q’s raw talent, aesthetic understanding and impeccable taste in beats makes it what it is.
14 Native Speaker by Braids
15 New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges by Colin Stetson
16 Mina Tindle by Mina Tindle – The year’s most promising debut. Very few can pull the whole solo-singer-songwriter thing whilst maintaining aural complexity (PJ Harvey), but somehow this young française did it. Anticipate a full-length.
17 I Am Very Far by Okkervil River
18 Weekend at Burnie’s by Curren$y – Curren$y turns weed rap into outsider art. He feels about the plant the way Ingmar Bergman felt about faith; it won’t heal all wounds, but it’s a way to get by.
19 XXX by Danny Brown – I’ll always take Brown’s self-loathing over Childish Gambino’s self-pity. While Glover whines about pre-Kanye problems, Brown finds everything a human being can possibly dislike about itself and turned it all into a coal-black-comic hip hop confessional. XXX glues him to his top-tier MC pedestal for his pure unrestrained ability to fucking spit. And with that, I deem XXX the most mature album ever made about an artist’s own immaturity.
20 Days by Real Estate
21 Mrs. Jones Cookies by The Sandwitches
22 Hot Sauce Committee Part Two by Beastie Boys
23 Deerhoof vs. Evil by Deerhoof
24 Street Halo EP by Burial
25 Freaking Out by Toro y Moi
26 Kaputt by Destroyer
27 Badlands by Dirty Beaches – I haven’t listened to the new album by The Caretaker yet, and until I do, I have this as a grimy Lynchian take on ’50 noir and rock ‘n roll.
28 Exmilitary by Death Grips – Will it be the hip hop gateway drug for a legion of metal kids? Will it be to them what Kid A was to introducing young rockers to electronic styles? Probably not, but it’s an interesting anomaly that fuses the two genres scorned most by suburban white parents.
29 House of Balloons by The Weeknd – Portrait of the artist as a pathetic dude at a party.
30 Too Young to Be in Love by Hunx and His Punx – It’s not perfect, but I can’t resist the ‘fuck you’ to heteronormativism and sarcastic queer-inflected sensationalism applied to Leslie Gore-esque tunes.
My Baby Shot Me Down 