by Chris Alarie
That football is the most popular sport in America and that the NFL is the most popular professional sports league are indisputable facts. This is a frequent source of consternation for me because, while I am certainly a football fan, I find it to be a vastly inferior sport to both baseball and basketball and believe that the NFL is one of the most onerous institutions in all of sports. Of course, the reason for football's dominance are myriad—from the primal appeal of the sport's violence to the relatively short season and once weekly games to the sport's particularly good fit for gambling and fantasy leagues—but there is one key factor that seems to have been overlooked: football's comparatively lesser engagement with advanced statistics.
Both baseball and basketball have been embroiled for years—or decades, in the case of baseball—in debates about the merits and value of advanced statistical methods of quantifying and evaluating the performance of players and teams. These debates often divide along generational lines, with younger writers, fans, and executives generally tending to lend greater credence to these advanced statistics than their older peers. And rather than offer a defense of one approach or the other,1 I'd just point out that these debates are essential parts of the fabric of both MLB and the NBA. Football, however, has mostly managed to avoid this debate and, really, the encroachment of advanced statistics almost entirely.
Indeed, when ESPN tried four years ago to introduce an advanced football statistic titled QBR, it was roundly ignored and routinely mocked. It exists now primarily as a means for other sports media organizations to criticize the "Worldwide Leader". But beyond reflecting somewhat poorly on Disney's otherwise impenetrable sports behemoth, the failure of QBR further serves to demonstrate football's immunity to having advanced stats as a part of the general discourse surrounding the sport. QBR's flawed analysis and laughable conclusions is a larger part of the NFL media and fan landscape than far better and far more useful advanced statistics such as Football Outsiders' DVOA. Often times the debate surrounding advanced stats is reduced to "numbers" vs. "the eye test"; in football, "the eye test" reigns supreme.
The question implicit in this is: why doesn't the majority of football fans care about advanced statistics? While I wouldn't claim to fully explain it, I can hazard a few guesses. Partly it is because football is so much less about individual achievements than baseball and basketball and much of advanced statistics focuses on the performance of individual players. But even still, there are advanced stats (such as the aforementioned DVOA) that focus on team performance and have not gained much traction among the mass of football fans. Perhaps it is a result, in part, from football's militaristic symbolism2 and borderline fascistic obsession with the strength, unity, and secrecy of individual franchises and the league as a whole. The NFL is well known for its paranoid credo, "Protect the Shield". And, as Tim Kawakami frequently observes, NFL fans, more than fans of any other sport, have an extreme loyalty to their franchises and owners over players or even coaches. And the paranoia3 and gamesmanship of NFL coaches is legendary. So perhaps advanced stats, which ostensibly peel back the curtain of of the sport and offer a deeper understanding of why teams and players succeed or fail, are, to NFL fans, the proprietary realm of the overlords running the teams and not the business of us plebes in the general sporting public. Another possible explanation is that the dominance of fantasy football—which traffics almost entirely in traditional stats as opposed to advanced stats—has kept all but the most dedicated fans uninterested in these more complicated statistical analyses. Whatever the reasons, it is clear that advanced stats do not have the same place in football discourse as they do in the realms of baseball and basketball. And that lack of advanced stats is part and parcel of the NFL's perhaps confusing dominance in this country.
This is perhaps an oversimplification, but I suspect that the disparity between the NFL and MLB/NBA reflects, in some ways, differences within the culture as a whole. Advanced statistics, and the sports that more directly incorporate them, seem more likely to appeal to intellectual, coastal elites. By contrast, the NFL, with its rejection of advanced stats in favor of more primal, simplified, and traditional notions of sports, seems more likely to appeal to the mass of red state denizens who feel like the coastal elites and the media ignore their concerns and interests. As I said, this is probably not entirely accurate—among other problems, plenty of us coastal intellectuals still watch football. But it seems, at very least, to be of symbolic importance that probably the biggest football fan among American presidents was Richard "Silent Majority" Nixon while Barack Obama is famously obsessed with basketball. And it is worth noting that the same analytically inclined media that dominates baseball and basketball has been unable to predict or even understand the continued successes of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
In this somewhat convoluted metaphor, the baseball and basketball focused, pro-analytics crowd is the coastal, media-saturated segment of the population arguing in increasingly minute, esoteric detail about the various discrepancies between Hillary Clinton's complicated financial regulation plans and Bernie Sanders's promise to "break up the banks!"4 The more conservative, anti-advanced stats faction of the baseball and basketball world is analogous to the conservative intellectuals futilely decrying Donald Trump's conservative bona fides in the pages of The New Republic. In the meantime, the remaining hordes are actively defying both sides of these debates by watching football and pledging their intention to vote for Donald Trump. This is not to say that all football fans are Trump supporters or vice versa, but there is clearly a similar dynamic playing out in the realms of sports and politics.
1 Of course, like any good liberal, I almost neurotically try to split the difference between the two camps in my personal feelings toward the subject.↩
2 George Carlin's famous routine about the difference between baseball and football remains as true as ever.↩
3 There's that word again.↩
4 Clearly, I fall into these camps.↩
Chris Alarie is Spectacular Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Thursday, January 28, 2016
MARIO MAIL MAX / WARNING EXPO
by Daniel Alarie
Daniel Alarie lives in Santa Rosa, California and generally prefers to write with pencils.
Daniel Alarie lives in Santa Rosa, California and generally prefers to write with pencils.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Ten Favorite Music Releases of 2015
by Douglas Slayton
My taste in music is myopic and driven entirely by emotional reaction. This list is not objective and is mostly about listening to sad music while being sad. The list is ordered in a haphazard manner; don't attach any significance or meaning to the order.
My taste in music is myopic and driven entirely by emotional reaction. This list is not objective and is mostly about listening to sad music while being sad. The list is ordered in a haphazard manner; don't attach any significance or meaning to the order.
Time Spent Driving Passed & Presence
When I was in high school and developing a curated affectation that would solidify to the bullheaded personality that I now embody, seeing this group of older guys playing the sort of music that I was just discovering (I was five years younger than most of the band's fans, at the time) really made an impression on me.
Some number of years later, they made a record that feels like something that would have come out when I was still eighteen and still discovering this music.
I spent several cold winter weeks in 2015 sitting on curbs listening to this album and crying but feeling alright about it.
The Saddest Landscape Darkness Forgives
It is hard to talk about this record without feeling tears well up in my eyes.
The Saddest Landscape has perfected a certain sort of immediacy to their delivery. This record exhibits that and never feels well worn.
Foxing Dealer
This fucking record. Albatross was a seemingly insurmountable achievement that was annihilated when this was released.
I was able to see them on either side of the release of Dealer this year and post-release was easily one of my greatest experiences from the entirety of 2015. I remember walking home, having my headphones on and not listening to anything, just going over it again and again in my mind, trying to make sense of it all, then sitting on my porch just breathing in the entirety of the night.
Envy Atheist’s Cornea
This has a lot in common with the Saddest Landscape's record. But where the Saddest Landscape are immediate, Envy is pensive and contemplative. Though not as sprawling as their previous efforts, the brevity doesn’t go against their strengths.
Envy has always been a band the matters greatly to me but I can never really explain why to anyone unless they already know.
Spraynard Mable
Spraynard says all the things they think and feel and don’t hide it under much metaphor, which makes them very antithetical to my usual favorites.
They fit into a style of punk that I don't usually like. But the uncut honesty makes this album something that I spent a lot of time listening to last year, and will probably continue to listen to in the future also.
Football, Etc. Disappear
This has a fair amount in common with the Time Spent Driving record, except it taps a separate vein of the same scene that birthed TSD a decade or so ago. Plus Football, Etc. is younger than those bands, so it still brings in other touches that are new and exciting.
They have lots of other EPs and even a full length but this is easily my favorite release of theirs.
Warm Thoughts Intangible
This record is two songs, and they are both really good. Like really good.
Dikembe Ledge
Dikembe released a really good full length in 2014 called Mediumship, but this EP is better.
They talk a lot about not being good enough or living up to your own expectations, and that is something I can really get behind. Plus their song titles are usually inside jokes, so it feels like they could be your cool friends who smoke a lot of weed in order to deal with their anxieties and insecurities.
Make Do and Mend Don’t Be Long
Make Do and Mend sound like Hot Water Music, which is hard to top.
I am a sucker for someone who shouts their feelings in songs, and that is a feature of most of this record—in the best way.
Hop Along Painted Shut
This is angular pop, and so much more. They manage to transcend that and everything else that they touch.
Plus Frances has a singular voice, one from which it is hard to turn away.
Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Flower and Haiku For Bowie
by Alexis Faulkner
Strong Bowie Inside
Softest Center Trembling
The Damnedest Winter
Alexis Faulkner is Unicorn Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
At Least I Am Not Writing a Thesis
by Lauren Drayer
There are many things to complain about when it comes to your academic life. Your professor has questionable logic, he assigns one hundred pages of reading every week, and his class is based on the premise that you will fail; your lab partner spells the most surprising words incorrectly, she never remembers what time she was supposed to meet with you, and she keeps changing her mind about the font she uses in her emails. The smallest little things—and academia is nothing if not an aggregate of small things elegantly orchestrated into a master concept called a major—can get in the way of the big picture. They cloud your perspective: it is hard to project yourself a semester into the future when you are currently worried about whether you professor intends to fail you this semester because you deserve it or because he feels like it. The little things also prevent you from sleeping well: they nag and nag at you until all you can see when you close your eyes are all the little failures of the day. Most importantly, they prevent you from enjoying that burger you’ve been craving—who enjoys a burger when they have to rewrite their paper outline for the fifth time? That being said, at least you’re not writing a thesis.
The truth is that I did write a senior thesis. A very long one. On the biochemical characterization of antibodies. But that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about writing a thesis in a department purposefully geared toward emotional pain: the Humanities. Humanity means the human race, or human beings collectively. It also means humaneness and benevolence. Academically, the humanities are the study of literature, philosophy, art … all things that are at the core of human beauty and creativity. It should be intuitive, it should feel good, it should reflect our energy, our capacity for good. It should feel human—good-human. But there is nothing good-human about the humanities. At their core they are vague, violent, mean.
There is this thing in law that dismisses regulations entirely if they are too vague to be reliably obeyed and enforced. The actual term is “void for vagueness”. We should be able to dismiss the humanities as a whole on that premise, because there is no structure within this area of study that would allow any practitioner to reliably produce a good analysis of literature, art, and especially philosophy. Why especially philosophy? Because philosophy is not even properly rooted in words; it exists in our minds as an abstraction of ideas that few have intelligibly translated into documents such as the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Just kidding; that book is unintelligible. Which further proves my point that philosophy rarely yields a structured response from anyone. Not even the Great Thinkers. Thinkers should keep their thoughts there, in their heads, in the space directly surrounding their bodies—not on paper, for it is there that it infuriates me the most.
So, above I have addressed why the “vague” portion of humanities is a problem. My conclusion, more or less verbatim, is that “it infuriates me the most.” My next point has to do with violence. We all have preconceptions of violence. Homicide comes to mind, police violence, battery. But obviously this is not the sort of violence that we notice in the humanities. It is far more subtle, because the humanities have mastered the art of quiet warfare. It comes in the form of an essay you thought was about Monet, when it really is about income inequality of Latino lesbians with lupus. You always, always get tricked into a carefully convoluted web of knowledge that is neither here nor there, all disguised as an essay inconspicuously titled “The Straightforward Explanation of Monet’s Paintings”. See? It is violence of the most sophisticated kind: directed at the reader wholly and personally.
Lastly, I need to address why I think the humanities are mean. There isn’t a very well thought out opinion there, so I won’t discuss it in any detail whatsoever.
In conclusion, when developing a humanities thesis, the student has to surmount the vast vagueness of his topic, realize that his writing will cause physical pain to his readers, and he has to understand that as a result of his work people will view him as mean, and probably avoid him in the future, both in the short and long-term. We all have many complaints about our academic experience, but if we are lucky, we are not humanities students, and at least we aren’t writing a thesis.
Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.
There are many things to complain about when it comes to your academic life. Your professor has questionable logic, he assigns one hundred pages of reading every week, and his class is based on the premise that you will fail; your lab partner spells the most surprising words incorrectly, she never remembers what time she was supposed to meet with you, and she keeps changing her mind about the font she uses in her emails. The smallest little things—and academia is nothing if not an aggregate of small things elegantly orchestrated into a master concept called a major—can get in the way of the big picture. They cloud your perspective: it is hard to project yourself a semester into the future when you are currently worried about whether you professor intends to fail you this semester because you deserve it or because he feels like it. The little things also prevent you from sleeping well: they nag and nag at you until all you can see when you close your eyes are all the little failures of the day. Most importantly, they prevent you from enjoying that burger you’ve been craving—who enjoys a burger when they have to rewrite their paper outline for the fifth time? That being said, at least you’re not writing a thesis.
The truth is that I did write a senior thesis. A very long one. On the biochemical characterization of antibodies. But that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about writing a thesis in a department purposefully geared toward emotional pain: the Humanities. Humanity means the human race, or human beings collectively. It also means humaneness and benevolence. Academically, the humanities are the study of literature, philosophy, art … all things that are at the core of human beauty and creativity. It should be intuitive, it should feel good, it should reflect our energy, our capacity for good. It should feel human—good-human. But there is nothing good-human about the humanities. At their core they are vague, violent, mean.
There is this thing in law that dismisses regulations entirely if they are too vague to be reliably obeyed and enforced. The actual term is “void for vagueness”. We should be able to dismiss the humanities as a whole on that premise, because there is no structure within this area of study that would allow any practitioner to reliably produce a good analysis of literature, art, and especially philosophy. Why especially philosophy? Because philosophy is not even properly rooted in words; it exists in our minds as an abstraction of ideas that few have intelligibly translated into documents such as the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Just kidding; that book is unintelligible. Which further proves my point that philosophy rarely yields a structured response from anyone. Not even the Great Thinkers. Thinkers should keep their thoughts there, in their heads, in the space directly surrounding their bodies—not on paper, for it is there that it infuriates me the most.
So, above I have addressed why the “vague” portion of humanities is a problem. My conclusion, more or less verbatim, is that “it infuriates me the most.” My next point has to do with violence. We all have preconceptions of violence. Homicide comes to mind, police violence, battery. But obviously this is not the sort of violence that we notice in the humanities. It is far more subtle, because the humanities have mastered the art of quiet warfare. It comes in the form of an essay you thought was about Monet, when it really is about income inequality of Latino lesbians with lupus. You always, always get tricked into a carefully convoluted web of knowledge that is neither here nor there, all disguised as an essay inconspicuously titled “The Straightforward Explanation of Monet’s Paintings”. See? It is violence of the most sophisticated kind: directed at the reader wholly and personally.
Lastly, I need to address why I think the humanities are mean. There isn’t a very well thought out opinion there, so I won’t discuss it in any detail whatsoever.
In conclusion, when developing a humanities thesis, the student has to surmount the vast vagueness of his topic, realize that his writing will cause physical pain to his readers, and he has to understand that as a result of his work people will view him as mean, and probably avoid him in the future, both in the short and long-term. We all have many complaints about our academic experience, but if we are lucky, we are not humanities students, and at least we aren’t writing a thesis.
Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.
Friday, January 8, 2016
Best Music of 2015
by Chris Alarie
What follows is my personal, highly subjective list of the best music of 2015, including songs, albums, and live performances, organized in ascending order from 20 to one. If you disagree, that is your prerogative. But I will personally judge you very, very harshly. Alright, with the preliminaries out of the way, on y va!1
20. Gary Pryor - "Grizzly Bears"
Normally (Uncanny Valley Magazine contributor) Gary isn't deserving of "best of" accolades, neither as a person nor as a musician. But with "Grizzly Bears", he has improbably managed to create an excellent synth-pop song that represents his varied, eccentric tastes. He put three different versions of this song up on his SoundCloud profile this year. All three are good but my personal favorite is this fuzzy take. In addition to the fucked up Sega Genesis style production, the song features such inspired lyrics as "Feel the power in your hand / You know it's time to be a man / Like a grizzly bear" which come across as a mutated version of some inspirational song from a 1980s sports movie. Honestly, Gary has no fucking right to make music this good. Oh well.
19. Kamasi Washington - The Epic
Saxophonist Washington's appropriately titled album2 evokes both the large-band hard bop of Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth and the sort of post-Coltrane, earthy music that artists like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp released on Impulse! in the late 1960s.
Of course, that explicitly retro quality does undermine the importance of the album quite a bit. Everything that Emily Lordi told Eric Ducker about Leon Bridges is more or less equally applicable to Washington's album. It is good but non-essential music. Of course, this leads me to wonder why I would include The Epic on my list of the best music of 2015 but wouldn't even begin to consider Leon Bridges's pleasant-but-limp album, Coming Home. Is it because Washington is reviving a style of music that was even underappreciated in its own time while Bridges is just engaging in limp, displaced nostalgia that exists purely to provide an empty but affirming answer the meaningless question "Why don't they make music like they did in the old days?" Is it because my personal tastes align more with Washington's music than Bridges's? Or is it just that The Epic is simply a better album in every way than Coming Home? I'd suspect that the answer lies in a combination of the three.
18. BAUS - DEMO 2015
I saw these Oakland post-punk weirdos open for Violence Creeps a couple of years ago and they only seem to have gotten better since then. Their demo from this year is a straight shot of groovy, nervy, distorted goodness.
17. Ghostface Killah & BADBADNOTGOOD - Sour Soul
The only reason this album isn't higher on my list is because I included one of its singles on my list for 2014. But this excellent album that he made with the otherwise horribly dull, Canadian trio of jazz dweebs, BADBADNOTGOOD, continues the late career resurgence of 2013's Twelve Reasons to Die and 2014's 36 Seasons. 3 With all the other bummers associated with the Wu-Tang Clan this year, it's nice to know that we can count on Tony Starks to provide us his usual high-quality, idiosyncratic blend of drug dealing tales, oddball slang, and dark humor.
16. Death Grips - Jenny Death
Welcome back, Death Grips. Stay weird.
15. David Bowie - "Blackstar"
I think the Classical—whose album Diptych was on my best of 2014 list—summed it up best:
God bless David Bowie.4
14. Vince Staples - Summertime '06
My dislike of Drake and Kendrick Lamar and general indifference toward Future kept me mostly out of the hip hop zeitgeist this year. But Summertime '06 is a really good album and the music video for "Señorita" is awesome.
13. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
Most of Courtney Barnett's songs blend together in my mind, but that's not necessarily a problem because they are generally very good. She reminds me a bit of Pavement in that she makes clever, unassuming songs that are memorable despite the fact that they are mostly unremarkable. Her music is much better than my description makes it seem.
12. Shannon and the Clams - Gone by the Dawn
Our friends, the Clams have long since established their signature blend of 60s pop melancholy, punk energy, and outsider music weirdness. Gone by the Dawn is their most fully realized album, featuring their most sophisticated songwriting, production, and vocal harmonies. "Corvette" and "Telling Myself" are particular standouts.
11. Joanna Newsom - Divers
I am unable to explain why I love Joanna Newsom's music without delving into my feelings and personal life. So let's just say this album is really good and leave it at that.
10. Violence Creeps - On My Turf
Crushing, funny, angry, weird—the best of Oakland in microcosm. All hail Violence Creeps!
9. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell
I didn't actually listen to this album much but I want to include it because of the concert I saw him perform on Halloween. While his (admittedly amusing) cover of "Hotling Bling" got most of the attention, the entire concert was an intense, immersive, borderline religious5 experience. Sufjan and his band of multi-instrumentalists created a sound that veered from spare, fragile, achingly pretty acoustic numbers to loud, electronic, almost violently cacophonous sounds. And the lights and projections were fantastic.
As a side note, my friends and I met a friendly, middle aged, Chinese tourist on the train to Jersey City. My friend who had bought the tickets struck up a conversation with this man and offered him a spare ticket. So this man, who had never heard of Sufjan Stevens and had not begun his night with any intention of attending a concert, joined us. His look of awe and amazement at the end of the concert spoke to the power of Sufjan's music.
8. Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness
Her music reminds me of several artists from across the spectrum of catchy pop weirdos, particularly Karl Blau and Kate Bush. This album is full of strange earworms. Highly recommended.
7. Titus Andronicus - "Fatal Flaw"
The Most Lamentable Tragedy, Titus Andronicus's rock opera about manic depression is, in its entirety, borderline unlistenable. But "Fatal Flaw" succeeds where much of the rest of the album fails, with its sugar rush, in-the-red6 pop punk giving way to an energy deflating crash.7
6. Built to Spill - Untethered Moon & There's Nothing Wrong with Love
Built to Spill's new album, Untethered Moon, is not markedly different from the rest of their oeuvre, both in terms of style8 and quality.9 Additionally, the music videos for "Living Zoo" and "Never Be the Same", when viewed in succession, make for two of the most genuinely funny music videos I've ever seen. Doug Martsch is a strange man.
Also, this year, Sub Pop reissued Built to Spill's classic 1994 album There's Nothing Wrong with Love. I don't know if there are any funny music videos to go with that reissue, but it is an excellent album.
5. Kurt Vile - "Pretty Pimpin"
I read a description of "Pretty Pimpin" as the best song that Neil Young never wrote. I find that description apt, as this song has the same hazy, addictively catchy stomp as some of Young's stonier 70s hits such as "Walk On" and "Are You Ready for the Country?". The rest of Vile's album is unmemorable but this is one of the best songs of the year.
4. Ben Goldberg - Orphic Machine
I wrote a review of this album for Elmore Magazine. This is an album of incredible depth and weight. It rewards repeated listening.
3. Dave Rawlings Machine - Nashville Obsolete
Nashville Obsolete is an excellent album that seems both consistent with the music Rawlings and Gillian Welch have released under her name and something different in and of itself. Letting Rawlings's excellent guitar playing and warm, reedy voice take centers stage complements the relatively long, shaggy songs on this album. Like with Vile's song, there are strong shades of 70s Neil Young, particularly on "The Trip"—which also evokes Bob Dylan's long, addled mid 60s songs like "Desolation Row" and "Queen Jane Approximately" (which the Machine has covered in concert). "Pilgrim (You Can't Go Home)" is more like the songs on the Gillian Welch albums: a beautiful, humanist tune that fits snugly within the tradition of American folk and country music.
2. Unoperator - Something Something Something: Part 1
Returning to my list for the third time, Dak has crafted another unique, bizarre album. As is his wont, he released a bunch of music this year, including multiple versions of some songs. And, as is also his wont, he subsequently made much of that music unavailable. But this particular album was his best of the year and one of his best ever. It is the fullest realization of the dichotomies he so often explores with his music: catchy and noisy, funny and terrifying, fragile and heavy. If he makes it available again, I will update this entry.
UPDATE: He made it available. Here it is.
1. Rihanna - "Bitch Better Have My Money"
When this song first came out back in March, I declared it the best song of the year. Eight and a half months later, this remains true.
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
1 In the interest of blatant self promotion (hidden in a footnote as a nod toward modesty), I'd like to point out that Doug and I released three new albums this year. Check them out here.↩
2 It is a triple album.↩
3 In retrospect, I should have put this album on my 2014 list↩
4 During a recent Uncanny Valley Magazine editorial discussion, Professor Editor-in-Chief Douglas Slayton actually said that he didn't think that David Bowie was cool. Despite the extremely evident stupidity of this statement, we ultimately decided against asking him to resign from his post. We support the freedom to express indefensibly dumb opinions here at UVM.↩
5 Not necessarily (for me) due to the overt religiousness of Sufjan's lyrics while still acknowledging that the religiousness is probably inseparable from the meaning of the music.↩
6 Or, to use a term from another song on the album, dimed out.↩
7 I asked a friend of mine who is diagnosed as schizo affective to offer her analysis of the song with regards to the experience of a manic episode. She said that the song was far too slow to accurately reflect her experience of manic episodes but that the wooziness at the end did evoke some of the sensations of the crash that comes at the end of the episode.↩
8 Melodic, knotty, guitar-driven.↩
9 Really fucking good.↩
What follows is my personal, highly subjective list of the best music of 2015, including songs, albums, and live performances, organized in ascending order from 20 to one. If you disagree, that is your prerogative. But I will personally judge you very, very harshly. Alright, with the preliminaries out of the way, on y va!1
20. Gary Pryor - "Grizzly Bears"
Normally (Uncanny Valley Magazine contributor) Gary isn't deserving of "best of" accolades, neither as a person nor as a musician. But with "Grizzly Bears", he has improbably managed to create an excellent synth-pop song that represents his varied, eccentric tastes. He put three different versions of this song up on his SoundCloud profile this year. All three are good but my personal favorite is this fuzzy take. In addition to the fucked up Sega Genesis style production, the song features such inspired lyrics as "Feel the power in your hand / You know it's time to be a man / Like a grizzly bear" which come across as a mutated version of some inspirational song from a 1980s sports movie. Honestly, Gary has no fucking right to make music this good. Oh well.
19. Kamasi Washington - The Epic
Saxophonist Washington's appropriately titled album2 evokes both the large-band hard bop of Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth and the sort of post-Coltrane, earthy music that artists like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp released on Impulse! in the late 1960s.
Of course, that explicitly retro quality does undermine the importance of the album quite a bit. Everything that Emily Lordi told Eric Ducker about Leon Bridges is more or less equally applicable to Washington's album. It is good but non-essential music. Of course, this leads me to wonder why I would include The Epic on my list of the best music of 2015 but wouldn't even begin to consider Leon Bridges's pleasant-but-limp album, Coming Home. Is it because Washington is reviving a style of music that was even underappreciated in its own time while Bridges is just engaging in limp, displaced nostalgia that exists purely to provide an empty but affirming answer the meaningless question "Why don't they make music like they did in the old days?" Is it because my personal tastes align more with Washington's music than Bridges's? Or is it just that The Epic is simply a better album in every way than Coming Home? I'd suspect that the answer lies in a combination of the three.
18. BAUS - DEMO 2015
I saw these Oakland post-punk weirdos open for Violence Creeps a couple of years ago and they only seem to have gotten better since then. Their demo from this year is a straight shot of groovy, nervy, distorted goodness.
17. Ghostface Killah & BADBADNOTGOOD - Sour Soul
The only reason this album isn't higher on my list is because I included one of its singles on my list for 2014. But this excellent album that he made with the otherwise horribly dull, Canadian trio of jazz dweebs, BADBADNOTGOOD, continues the late career resurgence of 2013's Twelve Reasons to Die and 2014's 36 Seasons. 3 With all the other bummers associated with the Wu-Tang Clan this year, it's nice to know that we can count on Tony Starks to provide us his usual high-quality, idiosyncratic blend of drug dealing tales, oddball slang, and dark humor.
16. Death Grips - Jenny Death
Welcome back, Death Grips. Stay weird.
15. David Bowie - "Blackstar"
I think the Classical—whose album Diptych was on my best of 2014 list—summed it up best:
You might think David Bowie is ripping us off but actually we're just both ripping off the same Scott Walker era https://t.co/Gr1gkQ4rLN
— The Classical (@the0classical) November 24, 2015
God bless David Bowie.4
14. Vince Staples - Summertime '06
My dislike of Drake and Kendrick Lamar and general indifference toward Future kept me mostly out of the hip hop zeitgeist this year. But Summertime '06 is a really good album and the music video for "Señorita" is awesome.
13. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
Most of Courtney Barnett's songs blend together in my mind, but that's not necessarily a problem because they are generally very good. She reminds me a bit of Pavement in that she makes clever, unassuming songs that are memorable despite the fact that they are mostly unremarkable. Her music is much better than my description makes it seem.
12. Shannon and the Clams - Gone by the Dawn
Our friends, the Clams have long since established their signature blend of 60s pop melancholy, punk energy, and outsider music weirdness. Gone by the Dawn is their most fully realized album, featuring their most sophisticated songwriting, production, and vocal harmonies. "Corvette" and "Telling Myself" are particular standouts.
11. Joanna Newsom - Divers
I am unable to explain why I love Joanna Newsom's music without delving into my feelings and personal life. So let's just say this album is really good and leave it at that.
10. Violence Creeps - On My Turf
Crushing, funny, angry, weird—the best of Oakland in microcosm. All hail Violence Creeps!
9. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell
I didn't actually listen to this album much but I want to include it because of the concert I saw him perform on Halloween. While his (admittedly amusing) cover of "Hotling Bling" got most of the attention, the entire concert was an intense, immersive, borderline religious5 experience. Sufjan and his band of multi-instrumentalists created a sound that veered from spare, fragile, achingly pretty acoustic numbers to loud, electronic, almost violently cacophonous sounds. And the lights and projections were fantastic.
As a side note, my friends and I met a friendly, middle aged, Chinese tourist on the train to Jersey City. My friend who had bought the tickets struck up a conversation with this man and offered him a spare ticket. So this man, who had never heard of Sufjan Stevens and had not begun his night with any intention of attending a concert, joined us. His look of awe and amazement at the end of the concert spoke to the power of Sufjan's music.
8. Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness
Her music reminds me of several artists from across the spectrum of catchy pop weirdos, particularly Karl Blau and Kate Bush. This album is full of strange earworms. Highly recommended.
7. Titus Andronicus - "Fatal Flaw"
The Most Lamentable Tragedy, Titus Andronicus's rock opera about manic depression is, in its entirety, borderline unlistenable. But "Fatal Flaw" succeeds where much of the rest of the album fails, with its sugar rush, in-the-red6 pop punk giving way to an energy deflating crash.7
6. Built to Spill - Untethered Moon & There's Nothing Wrong with Love
Built to Spill's new album, Untethered Moon, is not markedly different from the rest of their oeuvre, both in terms of style8 and quality.9 Additionally, the music videos for "Living Zoo" and "Never Be the Same", when viewed in succession, make for two of the most genuinely funny music videos I've ever seen. Doug Martsch is a strange man.
Also, this year, Sub Pop reissued Built to Spill's classic 1994 album There's Nothing Wrong with Love. I don't know if there are any funny music videos to go with that reissue, but it is an excellent album.
5. Kurt Vile - "Pretty Pimpin"
I read a description of "Pretty Pimpin" as the best song that Neil Young never wrote. I find that description apt, as this song has the same hazy, addictively catchy stomp as some of Young's stonier 70s hits such as "Walk On" and "Are You Ready for the Country?". The rest of Vile's album is unmemorable but this is one of the best songs of the year.
4. Ben Goldberg - Orphic Machine
I wrote a review of this album for Elmore Magazine. This is an album of incredible depth and weight. It rewards repeated listening.
3. Dave Rawlings Machine - Nashville Obsolete
Nashville Obsolete is an excellent album that seems both consistent with the music Rawlings and Gillian Welch have released under her name and something different in and of itself. Letting Rawlings's excellent guitar playing and warm, reedy voice take centers stage complements the relatively long, shaggy songs on this album. Like with Vile's song, there are strong shades of 70s Neil Young, particularly on "The Trip"—which also evokes Bob Dylan's long, addled mid 60s songs like "Desolation Row" and "Queen Jane Approximately" (which the Machine has covered in concert). "Pilgrim (You Can't Go Home)" is more like the songs on the Gillian Welch albums: a beautiful, humanist tune that fits snugly within the tradition of American folk and country music.
2. Unoperator - Something Something Something: Part 1
Returning to my list for the third time, Dak has crafted another unique, bizarre album. As is his wont, he released a bunch of music this year, including multiple versions of some songs. And, as is also his wont, he subsequently made much of that music unavailable. But this particular album was his best of the year and one of his best ever. It is the fullest realization of the dichotomies he so often explores with his music: catchy and noisy, funny and terrifying, fragile and heavy. If he makes it available again, I will update this entry.
UPDATE: He made it available. Here it is.
1. Rihanna - "Bitch Better Have My Money"
When this song first came out back in March, I declared it the best song of the year. Eight and a half months later, this remains true.
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
1 In the interest of blatant self promotion (hidden in a footnote as a nod toward modesty), I'd like to point out that Doug and I released three new albums this year. Check them out here.↩
2 It is a triple album.↩
3 In retrospect, I should have put this album on my 2014 list↩
4 During a recent Uncanny Valley Magazine editorial discussion, Professor Editor-in-Chief Douglas Slayton actually said that he didn't think that David Bowie was cool. Despite the extremely evident stupidity of this statement, we ultimately decided against asking him to resign from his post. We support the freedom to express indefensibly dumb opinions here at UVM.↩
5 Not necessarily (for me) due to the overt religiousness of Sufjan's lyrics while still acknowledging that the religiousness is probably inseparable from the meaning of the music.↩
6 Or, to use a term from another song on the album, dimed out.↩
7 I asked a friend of mine who is diagnosed as schizo affective to offer her analysis of the song with regards to the experience of a manic episode. She said that the song was far too slow to accurately reflect her experience of manic episodes but that the wooziness at the end did evoke some of the sensations of the crash that comes at the end of the episode.↩
8 Melodic, knotty, guitar-driven.↩
9 Really fucking good.↩
Monday, January 4, 2016
Diatribes of an Aging Computer Nerd
by Ben Stark
When I was your age I had to walk FIFTEEN MILES to laugh at computer stuff—and on a Saturday afternoon when my minutes ran out on NetZero, and I couldn’t think of any new, original Juno email addresses, but I absolutely had to download the latest Limp Bizkit single from Napster, the library was my only solace. Sure, they watched me like a hawk, I only got an hour, and their poorly maintained installation of Windows ME made Netscape lock up every 4 minutes, but dammit, I had to get that song somehow.
When I was your age I had to walk FIFTEEN MILES to laugh at computer stuff—and on a Saturday afternoon when my minutes ran out on NetZero, and I couldn’t think of any new, original Juno email addresses, but I absolutely had to download the latest Limp Bizkit single from Napster, the library was my only solace. Sure, they watched me like a hawk, I only got an hour, and their poorly maintained installation of Windows ME made Netscape lock up every 4 minutes, but dammit, I had to get that song somehow.
“What are you doing?!” the Librarian barks, looking over my shoulder.
I attempt to quickly close the LimeWire installation program but it is too late. She has seen me. The fire in her eyes burning, all the while she’s thinking, “Why don’t you shoplift music from a record store like a normal person?”
“You can’t install programs on this computer!” she snaps. “That’s against library policy!”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’ll just put it back how it was…” I wiggle the mouse, waiting for the computer to unfreeze, “As soon as it stops freezing, I’ll fix it.”
She frowns and walks away. Later I can hear her chatting with another librarian, “I don’t even know how to turn the damn thing on and these kids come in here and they know everything about it and the world wide net. Back in my day, if you wanted to learn something you read a book!”
_______
I come from a generation who grew up in a time when computers suddenly became affordable and this newfangled thing called “the net” appeared and no one really knew what it was, but we all knew we wanted it. Computers couldn’t fit in your pocket back then. There weren’t laptops as thin as a pencil. There was no Wi-Fi. There was no cellular data. No, our computers came in gigantic metal boxes, everything connected with cords, and getting on the Internet involved a phone line and an esoteric box with blinking lights that made horrible screeching sounds as it attempted to make a digital handshake with your ISP.
This is a generation whose dads finally buckled down and spent $800 bucks on their first 300Mhz Pentium computer and 15 inch CRT monitor so the family could have the Internet, but really so they could look at pixelated GIFs of porn when everyone else was asleep. We had dot-matrix printers that took paper on a “roll” with holes on the side to feed it through. Our first semblances of a tablet were the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton—two shitty handheld devices that used a stylus for input and that no one really liked.
When I was a kid, our mail boxes would fill up with AOL floppy disks and CDs. We got them glued to the inside of magazines along with cologne samples. Stacks of them were available for free just about anywhere you went. We got so many disks people started coming up with different ways to use them. Need a coaster? AOL disk. Need to tile your pool? AOL disks.
8-year-olds didn’t have cellphones back then. When us kids left the house, our parents just trusted that we would stay out of trouble and come home for dinner on time. And we usually did. Because the Internet was so boring and shitty, we actually spent most of our time outside the house. I used to go to the coffee shop and get free refills all day while I wrote in my notebook and listened to burned CDs of stolen music I had spent several days trying to download.
It was a simpler time. A time when technology was awkward and bulky and no one was sure how to use it so we just left it at home and let it collect dust. There weren’t flatscreen TVs at the grocery store bigger than the one in your living room yet. The NSA wasn’t tracking our Google searches and Facebook posts. We didn’t have supercomputers in our jacket pockets or on our wrists. Plus, you know, 3D Doritos. Am I right?
We didn’t… Oh fuck, my Apple Watch says I have an appointment in an hour. #brb #toodles #lol #TotallyFuckingOnFleekRightNow
Ben Stark is a creme egg who does computery things, amateur photography things, YouTube things, and sometimes donates bad writing to underprivileged online magazines.
Saturday, January 2, 2016
A Song for the New Year
by the Uncanny Valley Magazine 100% Good Time Family Band Solution
To celebrate the brand new year, we wrote and recorded a song special for you. Enjoy!
The Uncanny Valley Magazine 100% Good Time Family Band Solution is rotating cast of miscreants and musical reprobates.
To celebrate the brand new year, we wrote and recorded a song special for you. Enjoy!
The Uncanny Valley Magazine 100% Good Time Family Band Solution is rotating cast of miscreants and musical reprobates.
A New Years Poem
by Douglas Slayton
last year
i wrote you songs
because i didn't think
i would make it through another
and you still haven't called
but i am not mad
but i am sad
i still wait somedays
i want to ride my bike past your house sometimes
but i know it's wrong
and i know i will die someday
and if i was meant for anyone
it was for you
the moon was new
and there was no rain
when we were together
but when it rains and
the moon is full
i think of walking through
the yard together
Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine
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