20 Favorite Albums of 2012
Hello and thanks for sticking around for another year! Skatterbrain is seven years old now—how the time flies! It’s certainly been a decidedly pop-heavy affair around here for a majority of those years, but it wasn’t perhaps until this year that I realized a terribly important thing: POP is POP. Period. With that in mind, these are my favorite records of the year! I loved them proudly and loudly and I’ll continue to do so. Questions/concerns/short-sighted arguments about anything on this list? Ask me about it!
Bonkers ‘100 Favorite Songs of 2012’ extrava-mix coming later this week!
Will reblog for compelling eclecticity and SHRAG (the band name, not the album, which I learned of and heard for the first time last night).
Taylor Swift - Till Brad Pitt Comes Along
So this is a pretty essential Tumblr to follow.
Just heard early song “Never Mind” for the first time — her M.O. has been remarkably consistent:
Every time you look at me / I could go crazy but I don’t / say it but I won’t / ‘cause I’d rather be alone than lose you / All I want to do is be next to you / But I’m too tired to fight / And I could tell you now / But baby, never mind
Songs within a Song
Listened to Taylor Swift’s Red today. So the takeaway is that we’re still on a last-name basis, but this is a pretty strong collection of songs. Probably prefer it to Speak Now, even though Speak Now is probably better. (Does that make sense? I think that makes sense.) She’s experimenting (still say that “Trouble When You Walked In” isn’t dubstep, though would like to hear her collab with Ratatat since they’ve always needed a singer anyway, and “22” has a Ratatat chorus too); she’s self-plagiarizing (“All Too Well” swipes a common Swift melody, since c. “Teardrops on My Guitar”); she’s getting a few left hooks in (“Holy Ground,” “State of Grace”) but she’s not really surprising me, not asking me to return and pay closer attention. There’s more of that male harmony voice I loved on the first album and hadn’t really noticed on subsequent albums though it might be there. (Not to be confused with the soggy duets.)
Not sure if anyone has brought up Lily Allen’s (far superior x1000) “22.” But one thing that Lily Allen does get right that Taylor has been getting wrong lately, for better and for worse (better for the hooks, maybe, worse for the lyrics), is putting the listener into a really specific situation — so specific at times that interpretation tells you more about the listener than the song (c.f. absurd interpretations of “Not Fair” that Lily is being “unreasonable,” which can only be chalked up to sexist assumption and lazy listening, guilty as charged). “Dress up like hipsters” and “breakfast at midnight” are vague stand-ins for misery and magic (where the hell is the misery in this song, anyway? SHOW DON’T TELL). When Lily does stand-ins, it’s relatable as the kind of stand-in a 22 year old might use to express her own misgivings (“she’s got an alright job but it’s not a career”); when Taylor does it it feels lazy, like a marketer’s broad attempt to get the 18-24 demo (“this place is too crowded — too many cool kids” amirite young people let’s be unique and interesting!).
But the other reason Lily’s “22” is (much much much) better is that it actually has a point of view on 22; it’s not a series of on-the-nose Instagrams. 22 is when you judge the fuck out of being thirty; the turning point where you feel like, shit, maybe I’m not “young” anymore but I don’t wanna get old. Or something like that — Erika wrote about this well at the time:
The video underlines what this song – and the whole album, really – is all about, and what Lily’s critics are missing when they accuse her of ham-fisted political commentary or blaming society for her flaws: we talk about “society” and how it’s a “bad influence” on “young women” as if society and girls are faceless behemoths, collectives moving together like giant silvery schools of fish, cast into shadow as nonspecific negativity rolls across the sky and blots out the sun. But the truth is that society, if it fucks you up, fucks you up in a deeply personal way. The others don’t look any better or worse in their reflections than they do in real life; Lily’s character is either especially tormented, especially insecure, especially disappointed – or just imagines that she is.
You’re making a mistake if you think Lily casting herself as an Everywoman means Lily is casting herself as every woman.
And maybe that’s the difference between Taylor with her cabal (on TS and Fearless) and Swift post-cabal — maybe ironically, the songwriting team gave me a character, “Taylor Swift,” whereas on Speak Now and no less on Red, now I feel TAYLOR SWIFT behind the scenes but don’t hear her — the character — in the songs. Maybe that’s interesting in some abstract way, that there’s now this monolithic entity that’s putting out (consistent, interesting, catchy) songs as though a character from a former work were now the author. I pretty much said that last time around, too, actually.
And maybe that’s why Taylor feels like Weezer. It’s not like Weezer’s songwriting chops changed, or that their ability to do an off-kilter chartable pop-rock tune changed, even as they started pursuing more obviously poppy sounds and dumber (though much less creepy!) ideas. It’s that it was hard to analyze the character in the newer songs, to make shitty excuses for weirdness and weakness based on a complicated understanding of that character. Like, it took me until 2012 to finally just give up on Pinkerton! That’s a LOT of energy expended to defending the indefensible, and it’s because I believed in the idea of the Rivers character, wanted it to be a thing I could use. Like a Dostoevsky character, it lets me try things out in my own mind without the real-world repercussions of being so horrible or impulsive or whatever. Whereas later Weezer is that character making pop albums with varying but relatively consistent/unremarkable success, albums within albums.
Post-Pinkerton Weezer albums suffer from the same suspension of disbelief problem of so much pop music produced within movies and TV shows, where we not only have to believe that these songs are good as songs in our world, but that there’s also a universe in which these songs are unquestionably good as songs. Like, no way is Connie Britton or Hayden Planeteer’s music in Nashville seriously at the stature their world depicts it, right? And now I get that with Taylor Swift, just like with Katy Perry — no way is someone pulling this off outside of this fictional pop universe, right?
That’s what seems to be bugging me most — not that these aren’t passable to excellent songs as songs (and final analysis will probably land there first and foremost, so whatever, maybe Red will OBJECTIVELY be the 11th best album of the year!), but the universe that must exist for me to think that I would actually take this seriously, that there’s no difference between the pop from this world and the world I’m actually from.
