2015 Week 50: Top 100 Tracks Streamed

Spotify's year in music is one of the great things about streaming. You can get a wrap up of at least some of your music habits in a way that would take way more obsessive nerdetry to do offline than I think even the most insane among us would never do. So, even though I do listen to vinyl and this year started using Google Play to stream my own collection, this number is pretty damn close to reality. 62 thousand minutes. Take that! But what was I listening to? Was it all the same band? Not quite. I don't think I can name 4, 526 artists, but that's what I listened to, at least once. I give everything a chance. How else would you find anything? Spotify also tells me I listened to 12,000 different tracks, mostly in the following genres.

But who gives a shit about genre? Not me, apparently. My top artists where:

1. Tom Waits - 247 Streams
2. Elvis Costello - 189 Streams
3. Arctic Monkeys - 156 Streams
4. Elvis Costello & The Attractions - 144 Streams
5. Ana Tijoux - 121 Streams

So I guess, technically, Elvis Costello should be number 1, but that's how Spotify breaks it down. I'm not sure what they consider a stream though since I get the sense the individual numbers might be too small.  Anyway, next measure was albums and no surprises there either:

1. Tom Waits - Rain Dogs - 117 Streams
2. Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones - 77 Streams
3. Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie, etc. - 58 Streams
4. Royal Thunder - Crooked Doors - 54 Streams
5. Thunderbitch - Thunderbitch - 52 Streams

Which brings me to my top tracks. I won't get into the top 5 tracks and instead just direct you to this week's playlist, which is just my Top 100 for 2015, according to Spotify. I've been listening to it the past couple of days and while there really aren't any complete surprises, there are a few songs I hadn't actually heard in a while, but I guess I played them a lot at the beginning of the year. There are a lot of newer songs but mixed in with some of my old standbys. Shuffle this playlist and it's pretty much what riding around with me is like.

Best Albums of 2015: Number Seven

I won't beat around the bush here, because my number 7 album is not about bush beating. It's Thunderbitch, which I wrote a little bit about not too long ago, and is about as straightforward as it gets. This is the type of album you can play and wind up losing complete track what happened during the 32 minutes that Brittany Howard and company trashed your head like some hotel room afterparty.

And yet. . .

There are moments of angst and vulnerability that peak through from behind the debauchery. From the opening track, "Leather Jacket" I get the sense of a kid dreaming of being this rebel street tough and hanging all her hopes on the idea of putting on this jacket. But there's also some flashes of the price of that choice, which get hinted at several times through out the album, no matter how "totally fucking awesome" she looks in the leather jacket that's disintegrating off her bones.

It's in that context that the druggy, Stonesesque "Very Best Friend" goes beyond just being about this girl tracking down her very best friend with all the pills she wants to take. Because once you think you've figured out she's just talking about her pusher, there's a bit about how "Momma called me and told me not to hang out with that boy no more, he ain't no good to talk to. But momma he was there for me, where were you? And now it's kinda all your fault." And then there's an apparent overdose or something as she laments the future she could have had. Somehow, all this comes across without putting any kind of damper on the party at all. It's this complete sense of self abandonment that we tend to romanticize in Rock n Roll that gives it the sense of danger and, really, its basic appeal. It's that line between sex and death that the leather jacket bikers walk and it's in full display on this album. How could it not be in my top 10?

2015 Week 42: Hoodlums at the End of the World

They don't seem that dangerous.

I find more darkness and danger in less obvious musical places than you'd expect. At some point, if we make a big generalization, we can say rock splits into two different paths of darkness with one path going theatrical - metal, goth - and the other going more gritty - punk, bluesy Stones type shit. (Just go with it for a second, I know it's a huge oversimplification.) Historically, I think we tend to associate things getting really dark in the more theatrical genres with bands like Black Sabbath, Slayer, Sisters of Mercy, etc. Sure, we associate punk with nihilism, but especially with the more pop balanced punk going back to The Ramones, it's rooted in the feel good, early rock n roll vibe. But the thing is, that early rock n roll vibe does have a certain darkness to it that I think gets glossed over a bit in hindsight. It was always rebellious, but the nihilism in punk was always there in a way that it's hard to express. The only thing I can think of to illustrate the point is (wait for it) Eddie and The Cruisers. Yeah, the movie. Bare with me.

Eddie (Michael Pare) in the movie was basically Jim Morrison, and while Jim was way more theatrical and The Doors were working far from the early rock sound that The Cruisers were playing, I think it still rings true. Rock n Roll was born after World War II. Sure, we won, but when the death toll of the Holocaust and the implications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sunk in, was there ever a more ripe breeding ground for nihilism? Much has been written about this by the beat poets and beyond. But my suggestion is that Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and all the other founding fathers of rock were also addressing these realities whether they knew it or not and it comes through in the music. But at the risk of getting into a long academic thing about this, let's just use this as a setting for what this is really about: Thunderbitch.

Crazy fucking shit going on at this show, I bet.

Thunderbitch is the side project of Alabama Shakes' Brittany Howard along with members of Fly Golden Eagle and Clear Plastic Masks. It is, quite simply, unadulterated rock n roll. It's fast, nasty, greasy, a little obnoxious at times and while it's tons of fun, there's ultimately a certain danger and darkness in the heavy reverb and distortion that makes it come across as somewhat apocalyptic. It's grand without trying to be theatrical. It's that second path I talked about taken to it's furthest extreme while remaining rooted in the heart of the music. The album opens with a song about leather jacket and ends with one about a motorcycle and even though those are very simple things, what they symbolize is not giving a fuck. About anything. It's like this band is playing at a dive bar to celebrate the day the sun explodes, but without calling attention to the cosmic shit, because fuck that, just light another joint and let it rip.

So I liked the album so much that it inspired a Spotify playlist where I just built around it with some songs I thought of as I was listening to it that might better explain what I'm talking about. In addition to the full Thunderbitch album, there's some punk, some rockabilly and some bluesy Stones type shit (yes, that's a genre!). Remember to play this in the order it's presented for best results but if you say "fuck you" and shuffle it, you might be getting the point even better than I intended. It's teenage delinquent music for hoodlums at the end of the world.