Twenty-five is not particularly old. It may feel that way to some of my fellow millennials, but it’s not lost on me how much there is to learn, how much room there is to grow and how many horizons have yet to be explored. I have no doubt that over the next several decades, I’ll acquire new tastes, develop new quirks, even adopt new ideas and positions. As Chris Rock once said, life is long. Yet every December for the past decade or so, I’ve been completing the same top 10 list-making exercise, under the consult of several authoritative sources—respected music critics, the Grammy nominating committee, my Spotify year-end playlist, President Barrack Obama’s list of contemporary songs that he’s never actually listened to. And every year, I come to the same realization: I have no idea what’s happening in music anymore. Every year my ignorance grows, and every year my fear of becoming a rigid old man becomes less irrational. I vaguely remember hearing about a bad bunny, a female stallion and two babies (one little and one da). My most notable engagement with pop music in 2020 was discovering that WAP wasn’t a racial slur. The music scene has become a dark and scary place for me, so apologies if my selections are painfully obvious and unthorough. But these are the five new records I found worth listening to in between comedy podcasts, Beatles re-releases and late 2000s indie rock. I’ll be stuck here forever, but I suppose there are worse places to be.
5. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band — Letter to You
“Slow moving wagon drawing through a dry town
Painted rainbow, crescent moon, and dark clouds
Brother patriot, come forth and lay it down
Your blood brother for king and crown
For your rainmaker.”
The cool thing about being an adult is that you have money. Not a lot of money, but enough money where you can buy your own ticket to a concert you want to go to and then ask your friends to do the same without worrying about whether or not they have enough money to go with you. There are not many other cool things about adulthood. Bills? Awful. Doing laundry? Gross. Freedom? Overrated. The concert thing is really it. Which makes it especially horrible that a hundred-years plague came around and gutted the entire live music industry. There it was, and there it went. Damn, adulthood was going so well. Letter to You is a great studio album, chock full of voluminous instrumentals and nostalgic cries that only the Boss could credibly deliver. But while listening to this thing for the first time, I couldn’t help but wish I was hearing these songs in person—with the fullness of Jake Clemons’s saxophone, with Bruce’s voice cracking in the higher registers. You know what? It doesn’t even have to be the E Street Band. Give me a local Soundcloud rapper, a wedding singer, a shitty metal band. Just give it to me in person. Maybe someday. For now, music must exist on the playlist.
4. Fiona Apple — Fetch the Bolt Cutters
“Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long
Fetch the bolt cutters, whatever happens, whatever happens
Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long
Fetch the bolt cutters, whatever happens, whatever happens
Fetch the bolt cutters.”
How many rock stars do we have left? Not just famous people who play rock music. I’m talking about musical artists who are defined by “bad” behavior or their general indifference towards convention and decorum. Shredding on a Fender or screaming through a chorus can help, but are not prerequisites. I mean “rock star” as a personality trait, not a job description. Can you name more than five under the age of 70? Jack White? Kind of. Dave Grohl? Not after Wasting Light. Bono? Never even close. Gwen Stefani? Rock stars aren’t judges on the Voice. Kanye? Probably the best answer, but there’s a fine line between punk rock and bipolar disorder. On Fetch the Bolt Cutters (only her FIFTH studio album), Fiona Apple makes her case, and it’s a convincing one. The album was recorded over several years in the singer’s Venice Beach home, utilizing the facile editing software Garage Band and whatever items she could find in her kitchen drawers or bedroom closet. And while the banging together of pots and pans and the ambient noise of restless cats may come across as amateurish dreck, Apple managed to create a highly percussive, avant-garde record unlike anything you’ll hear this year. You know, like rock stars used to do.
3. Bob Dylan — Rough and Rowdy Ways
“I’ve grown so tired of chasing lies
Mother of Muses, wherever you are
I’ve already outlived my life by far.”
The lack of rap on this list is not lost on me. Which is why I made sure to include the best rap record of the year, courtesy of old Robert Zimmerman. Rough and Rowdy Ways finds Dylan out of his Sinatra/American standards phase and back to writing sprawling epics and tender odes with his signature brand of specificity and wit. The record is packed to the brim with boastful rhymes, lovely tangents and enough cultural references to fill a hundred Wikipedia pages—often set to very simple musical tracks, conjuring the sound of beat poetry and early hip-hop. So many delicious lines here. “Transparent woman in a transparent dress/Suits you well, I must confess/I’ll break open your grapes, I’ll suck out the juice/I need you like my head needs a noose.” Supremely haunting. “I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones/And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones.” C’mon! Is there a poet on Earth capable of putting Anne Frank and Indiana Jones in the same sentence? And then there’s “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute saga about the Kennedy assassination and, somehow, the first number one single of Dylan’s career. Pop music does many things, but it doesn’t often inspire further reading into American history. Dylan somehow does. The whole world has copied him, but he still remains an original. To call Rough and Rowdy Ways a return to form or an artistic swan song would be trite and, frankly, dishonest. The truth is Bob Dylan has been pushing the limits of his artistry for the better part of six decades. Some records (Time Out of Mind, Tempest) are better than others (Shot of Love, Christmas in the Heart), but the steady flow of great music will go uninterrupted until one tragic day when it’s no longer possible. If Rough and Rowdy Ways signals anything, it’s that the voice of his generation has plenty left to say.
2. Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher
“I’ve been running around in circles
Pretending to be myself
Why would somebody do this on purpose
When they could do something else?”
Although she’d been a favorite among indie fans since her debut album Stranger in the Alps in 2017, Punisher was my first exposure to the ethereal vocals and simple emo pleasures of Phoebe Bridgers. And perhaps it was for the best that I arrived at this party fashionably late. College Nico would have rolled his eyes at the folksy goth chick in the skeleton onesie. I knew more than a few Phoebe Bridgers types in my college years, and if those girls wrote a song about burying a skinhead in their garden, I would have believed them. But time has a way of softening you up, and this year I was perfectly primed for some angsty tunes about vampire lovers, UFOs and bumming around Kyoto. I suspect Bridgers is going to do quite well at whatever we’re calling the Grammys this year. And that wispy voice of hers is bound to carry her to pop superstardom. But I hope she waits a few years before doing a Bond song or popping up on a Kendrick Lamar single. Because records like Punisher are special. And I’d like to hear another one someday.
1. Taylor Swift — folklore
“And they called off the circus, burned the disco down
When they sent home the horses and the rodeo clowns
I’m still on that tightrope
I’m still trying everything to get you laughing at me.”
Taylor Swift has been one of our great lyricists for over a decade. But people, myself especially, are stupid. And we only pay attention to lyrics if the song is slow. What? She’s singing it with an acoustic guitar? Maybe we should hear her out. If you (or I) weren’t brainwashed by Pitchfork and Rolling Stone into thinking breathiness was more important than ideas, we would have realized the sublimity of Swift’s poetry long ago. “Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes.” So slick. “Heartbreak is the national anthem, we sing it proudly.” Shockingly self-aware. “She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts. She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers.” Martin Scorsese is jealous of that character work. “You call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest.” Dear god. I’m not sure Leonard Cohen could have written that line.
Yet still, Folklore represents a giant leap forward for the 31-year-old superstar—a collection of short stories that she describes as “imaginary/not imaginary tales.” Taylor is not usually one to stray away from the first-person point-of-view. But here she manages to deftly navigate several characters and perspectives, sometimes across multiple songs (the Teenage Love Triangle Trilogy comprised of “cardigan” “august” and “betty” is one of the record’s most clever inventions). Is there an album this year with such a clear sense of place? The green grass of Centennial Park in “invisible string,” the Pennsylvanian lake in “seven”, the Rhode Island gated community in “the last great american dynasty.” Hell, when Taylor sings “meet me behind the mall,” you feel like you know exactly which parking space. Immersive yet objective. Specific yet timeless. It’s my favorite piece of culture this year. Let’s just forget evermore ever happened.
Smartest guy in the room, dumbest guy outside of it.
