2001 YEAR-END BALLOT
1. "Around the World," ATC: This stood in stark relief to everything else
on pop radio in 2001. Destiny's Child, Alicia Keyes, Jay-Z, all that inter-
changeably dismal Staind/Creed/Incubus piffle--everyone's a showstopper,
dramatizing and declaiming over every square inch of song, self-appointed
legends the moment they get a record on the air. (No less true of at least a
couple of the people below, but I found myself fleeing from a greater per-
centage of radio swagger this year than at any time in recent memory.)
"Around the World" was the only music to satisfy my new rule that the best
song in any given year must be touched by the hand of "You Showed Me" by the
Byrds: mysterious, luminous, melancholy, evanescent, serene. ATC's singer
spends much of the time explaining her inability to explain anything ("I
don't know what to say--oh not another word, just *la-la-la-la-la*..."), but
precipitating her speechlessness is one of the greatest subjects of all for
pop music, a disruptive but liberating encounter with "the radio playing
songs that I have never heard." In the first verse she hears them, in the
second she sits in an empty room waiting to hear them again. No matter how
cataclysmic the effect, there's never explicit verbalization of what is
better left to the *la-la-la-la-la*s and their matching Europop synthesizer
flourish. Even the big Martha Wash/Robin S voice that pops up at the end,
which 10 years ago would have been front and center, is mixed way into the
background. A deceptively complicated record that is as pure in its way as
the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" or the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner."
2. "Get Ur Freak On (Nelly Furtado Remix)," Missy Elliot: In another year,
in a different frame of mind, this would have topped my list. The regular
version is the most bizarre mainstream hip-hop I've heard since Busta Rhymes'
"Woo-Hah!", the remix (easily identifiable by the helpful line "Reeeeee-
mix!") weirder still. As freak artifacts go, this one conjures up Tod Brown-
ing and the Mothers of Invention as much as it does Chic.
3. "Round and Round," Hi-Tek: Good title for an R&B trance-out. The round-
and-round at first refers to voices in the singer's head, then settles into
a break-up-to-make-up kind of round-and-round. Towards the end there's a
dramatic announcement that "Today I made up my mind to get away," but noth-
ing's ever resolved and the song trails off still going round and round. Not
the Ninja Turtle group from the late '80s, which was Hi Tek 3, unless it's
one of those remnants-of-the-Drifters-type touring companies.
4. "Days of the Week," Stone Temple Pilots: It's pretty funny how this group
is so entrenched on both "hard" and "modern" rock stations, the two commer-
cial radio formats that are the most sanctimonious about their closed-off
worlds. If either listenership ever clues into the fact that they're harbor-
ing the new Monkees, I'm sure excommunication will follow immediately. For
what it's worth, I don't know anyone who operates on the calendar described
in "Days of the Week." "Back from the dead" on *Monday*? It's been a long
time since these people held real jobs.
5. "Since I Left You," Avalanches: A bookend for Hi-Tek above, insofar as
it's exactly the kind of half-remembered reverie I imagine as the inspiration
for "Around the World." Like Barbara Mason's "Yes, I'm Ready," which the
vocal reminds me of and which always makes me swoon when I hear it today. It
takes a lot of technological ingenuity to get such authentically faraway
ambience out of some spliced-together samples. I wish it were an actual song,
especially one I'd gotten to know off the radio, instead of from a mixed tape
made by a friend. I guess those things matter to me, which is partly why I
connect with "Around the World" more deeply.
6. "The Plumb Song," Snow: To introduce the concept of probability to grade-
school kids, you begin with familiar vocabulary applied to everyday examples:
it's unlikely, though far from impossible, that we'll see any snow in April,
but it's extremely likely, though not 100% certain, that we'll get some in
March. If you'd asked me three years ago about the probability of Snow in
2001, I would have placed the likelihood well towards the low end of the spec-
trum. More improbable still, he's added one of those airy, magisterial highway
songs to my country's national canon: Gordon Lightfoot's "Carefree Highway,"
Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Roll on Down the Highway," Tom Cochrane's "Life Is
a Highway"...well, maybe it's a two-song canon. "The Plumb Song"'s most bril-
liant line comes right at the start, where Snow pays homage to his Hendrix/
Allman/Clapton roots by asking someone to "hand me that guitar." And thus the
legend can finally be told: Deep down in Jane and Finch, across from Albion/
Way back up in the woods among the evergreen/There stood a few apartments
lined up in a row/Where lived a country boy, went by the name of Snow. Etc.,
etc.
7. "You," Lucy Pearl: "Nephew Snoop," as he's referred to here (by somebody
clearly much younger than he is--confusing), is about thirty times scarier in
John Singleton's otherwise clumsy BABY BOY than Ben Kingsley's affected Frank
Booth imitation in SEXY BEAST. Kingsley has a big 20-minute buildup and a
shaved head, and he more or less nags people into submission (he's more annoy-
ing than frightening); Snoop's got the look. On "You" he takes on a much more
difficult supporting role as a marriage-minded romantic who advises "time
brings change."
8. "Purple Hills," D12: I'm not sure if Eminem's supposed to be an actual
walking timebomb, liable to say or do something indefensible at any given
moment, or whether he just plays around with that idea in order to ridicule
anyone gullible enough to believe it. I'm a year behind, that was 2000's big
question--lots of close analysis that tried to figure him out, just like
everyone used to try to figure out Axl Rose--and to that end, "Purple Hills"
was probably insufficiently self-involved for critics fascinated by all the
Slim Shady legerdemain. But I'm convinced that "Purple Hills" has it all over
"My Name Is," "The Real Slim Shady," and "Stan" in one department: it's full-
bodied and instantaneously catchy, musically alive in a way that Eminem's
usual plinking around isn't. Eminem's isn't even the most interesting voice
here, which belongs to the Humpty Hump soundalike who turns "sumpin', sumpin',
sumpin'" into a perfect vocal ellipsis. As far as Eminem's neuroses go, one
of my favourite lines in GHOST WORLD was Thora Birch's explanation of why she
chose to do a portrait of Don Knotts for her summer art class: "Because I like
Don Knotts." I do too. Now *there* was a guy with "issues."
9. "My Way," Limp Bizkit: The first Fred to make my year-end list since Right
Said Fred in 1991. This Fred's a few evolutionary steps backwards in terms of
cartoonishness, a leap back to Freds Grandy, Flintstone, and Mertz, but "My
Way" always caught my attention, and sometimes even nailed my mood, in what-
ever setting I heard it this year. It has an odd minor-key coloration that's
almost beautiful in spots, making the standard soft-part-now-here-comes-the-
loud-part gimmick seem not so hokey as a result. Another highway song, only
here the highway is where you're banished to if you don't accommodate Fred
Durst's every last wish. And I'm sure that at this point in his life, Durst is
a guy who faces no end of resistance from the people he surrounds himself with
on a day-to-day basis.
10. "Family Affair," Mary J. Blige: I have a daily thing in my class where we
spend five minutes commemorating the birthday or death day of somebody famous,
or the anniversary of a famous event. On Chuck Berry's birthday I always play
"Come On," with some or all of the lyrics written on the board, and I talk
about how in his other songs he'd sometimes make up funny words like "bothera-
tion." This year, that prompted Shauna to point out that Mary J. Blige sang
about "hateration" in her new song. Well, she probably had Chuck Berry in the
back of her mind when she wrote that, I said, a bit of blufferation on my
part--"Family Affair" mentions 8-Tracks, too, so for all I know its rhymes owe
more to Chuck Barris. Perhaps we'll revisit Mary J. Blige's influences on
March 15, Sly Stone's birthday, and I'll tell the class all about the mud and
the blood and the importance of punctuality.
I'm casting a bonus vote for my Dad, who recently asked if I was "still
writing for the Village People." It was his greatest malapropism since my
parents were apartment-hunting a few years ago and he mentioned a place as
being "$850, including utensils." I was enjoying the moment too much to really
answer him, so yes, Dad, I am, now and again, but I try to save all my best
stuff for the Silver Convention.