2018 was a lean year. Arguably the weakest output of great new music from the past decade. Vampire Weekend pushed its anticipated release to 2019. Timberlake tumbled. Kanye fizzled. Big-ticket hip-hop releases felt bloated and overrated. For long stretches, I kept waiting for a record to truly capture my aesthetic imagination. It happened only a handful of times.
Weighing and considering is always relative. We work with what we are given. While I enjoyed records from Wild Nothing, Rhye, Snail Mail, Hater, Let's Eat Grandma and reliable veterans like Josh Rouse, Gorillaz, Arctic Monkeys, and Death Cab, none of them moved me enough to get over my recent writing slumber.
The records on this year's list, though undeniably excellent, would have had a difficult time cracking the top five from the past few years. There is no Deeper Understanding, A Moon Shaped Pool, or Carrie & Lowell, let alone recent brilliant efforts from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Slowdive, Chance the Rapper, Nick Cave, Bon Iver, Jamie xx, or Tame Impala.
Another note: the oft-peddled idea that hard-hitting or better music is made during GOP administrations is tired and lazy criticism. There was no truly exciting or polarizing album this year inspired by our soulless regime. As I've griped before, too much is made of the political landscape in which a certain song or album is created. Reviews filled with tag-lines such as the Reagan years are all too common and usually misleading or meaningless. With the usual suspects writing most of the criticism, there is rarely a hard look at the Establishment, and music's reaction to or interplay with it, when their guy is in office. So they reach and overstate. They exaggerate influences. They bend narratives to reach their own conclusions. They would have us believe that during certain four and eight-year stretches, music with a powerful political bent all but disappears. Then again, Jimmy Carter did bring us disco, so maybe that is exactly what happens.
The point is this: national politics rarely make for great music. The local and personal almost always trumps. And the best musicians flourish under any sitting president--independent, striking, and never driven by special interests.
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