For my last article of the year, I’ve decided to compile a list of some of the songs from my yesteryear that really hit me hard and had an impact on my musical taste. If you haven’t heard some of them, give them a listen and you just might find your next favorite genre or band.
I have to level with you guys here. I am not a big fan of Christmas music. This is probably an side effect of working retail for the past three years, but somehow holiday music does not get me in the appropriate festive spirit. Unfortunately, as the 25th edges closer and closer, it becomes more and more difficult to avoid listening to it altogether. So for those of you who like me do not enjoy this particular subsection of music, I hereby present Laura Hillsman’s Christmas playlist for people who don’t like Christmas music.
Although WRVU takes pride in supporting local artists and showing love to less popular musicians, we aren’t living under a rock. 2014 had its fair share of compelling hits on mainstream radio, and we are going to highlight 9 of those songs here. Our criteria is simple: each song needed to spend at least one week on The Billboard Hot 100 to be eligible for this list. We present them to you in no particular order.
“Man of the Year” – ScHoolboy Q
Schoolboy Q’s flow and a sample of Chromatics’ “Cherry” makes “Man of the Year” an easy and enjoyable listen.
Before the out-of-nowhere snowstorm that caused Interpol to be stranded for 50 hours, I had the pleasure of seeing Interpol at Marathon Music Works on the unusually chilly night of November 11. I went over to the venue and was immediately greeted by a large, excited crowd. What came after definitely did not disappoint and made my Tuesday night go from ordinary to extraordinary.
Gracing his wrist, “The River Is Everywhere,” a quote from the piece “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse rests on Andrew McMahon’s lower arm as a reminder that wherever you go there is always going to be a piece of you. Since the release of his latest venture as Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, this daily reminder could not be any more relevant. The long awaited debut of a solo album came under the moniker Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness following a short solo EP, The Pop Underground, in 2013, nearly 8 years with Jack’s Mannequin and 3 full length albums recorded with high school band, Something Corporate.
It may be surprising to see a retrospective of a nine-year-old nu metal album on this blog, particularly from a writer who has vented at length about the overall lack of quality of mid-2000s popular music. Then again, everything about System of a Down’s music, from the band’s ability to mash together disparate and seemingly irreconcilable influences to their shocking success on the mainstream airwaves, is a bit surprising. System’s landmark 2005 album Mezmerize happened to be on my mind as I put together a discussion for my psychology class, and revisiting it as I worked resulted in three dominant trains of thought, none of which dealt with my homework: 1) nostalgia for the days when my biggest concern was whose backyard trampoline the neighborhood kids would be hitting up after school, 2) amazement at how irresistibly fun the eleven songs are, and 3) wonder at System’s ability to somehow maintain this fun amidst livid, highly caustic lyrics and guitar riffs. In conjunction, these concurrent streams of consciousness brought me to the crucial question: how the hell did a band like System of a Down hijack the popular music consciousness?
I think the answer boils down to two factors: perfect timing and the group’s ability to infuse its thrashing songs with elements that made them palatable to mainstream listeners.
When talking about weird, avant-garde musicians, Frank Zappa’s name is usually thrown around. I say “thrown around” because I feel like not many people who know his name really known much about his music. Too many times I’ve heard someone say something like, “Oh, Zappa? Yeah, his music is kind of weird, I’m not really a fan.” There’s some truth to this statement; his music is, generally speaking, weird, but I feel as though many people don’t understand the spread of genres that Zappa incorporated into his own music. Truthfully, I think that there’s at least one Zappa album for almost everyone.
2014 saw all kinds of hip hop floating around, from new stars and old. Countless tracks have already been forgotten, but this article is about the ones that really stuck. This is just one writer’s opinion, but here it is: the ten best hip hop tracks of the year.
10. Clipping – “Work Work”
While clppng is one of 2014’s more uneven releases in any genre, “Work Work” channels the group’s brand of bizarre industrial-hop into something almost party-appropriate. The sneering delivery of lyrics about pimps, gang signs, and dead homies comes caked in irony, but “Work Work” is charming and catchy enough to let us in on the joke.
9. Jeremih – “Don’t Tell Em”
DJ Mustard gets much of the credit for gracefully reconciling modern popular hip-hop with increasingly EDM-soaked pop charts, after previous attempts ranged from limp to mashup-tier. You can criticize Mustard for being formulaic, but when songs you didn’t even produce start following the formula you can’t deny its effectiveness. On representative track “Don’t Tell Em”, Mustard streamlines the hazy, stylish, “All the Time” Jeremih for mass consumption.
Before you crank up “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and start decking the halls with boughs of holly, take few minutes to heave up some enthusiasm for the holiday that cuts between “The Monster Mash” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” While largely ignored by convenience stores, TV specials, front yard decor, and the radio waves, Thanksgiving has just as much of a right to be celebrated as the other holidays do!
When you think “punk” it is likely that images of garage bands, spiked hair, and lyrics about anarchy and disestablishment come to mind. However, when you think “reggae” you may conjure up images of the beach, slow beats, and lyrics about peace and love. After taking a closer look, the two seemingly opposite genres are in fact not all that dissimilar. While the two originated in different times and in different ways, they have since been brought together to make some groundbreaking tunes that we now usually refer to as “ska.”
The great metal band Mastodon finally return to Nashville after recording and releasing their sixth studio album, Once More ‘Round the Sun, in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, and this time around they’ve brought some friends, Norwegian metal band Kvelertak and, a band that I’ve really been getting into in the past several months, the French band Gojira. When I was looking at going to the concert, I actually hadn’t heard of Kvelertak, but a friend of mine described them to me as “blackened hard rock” before the show started. However, I was excited just to see Mastodon and Gojira on the same bill, and I was not disappointed in the least.
If you’ve been in Urban Outfitters recently, odds are you’ve seen some vinyl records. These dinosaurs of the music world have been making a comeback in slightly more hipster circles for a while, hence their appearance in one of the most hipster clothing stores of them all. These records aren’t just the oldies that your parents listened to either. In fact, new albums are still being released as vinyl records as well as in more contemporary formats. So in honor of this resurgence, I hereby present to you a history of music formats, from vinyl to MP3.
You are probably already familiar with the famed “feud” between Sun Kil Moon frontman Mark Kozelek and the rock band War On Drugs, which started when Mark Kozelek became frustrated with the sound from the War on Drugs’ set bleeding onto his own stage at the Ottawa Folk Fest. The conflict only escalated with Internet exchanges, a couple of unflattering songs by Mark Kozelek, and fuel for the fire provided by the abundance of music websites and blogs commenting on this issue. Some people do not find any kind of humor in Kozelek’s attack and see him as an immature jerk, while others believe that this is simply another case of the media sensationalizing things out of context for the sake of a story. Whatever side you may take, there’s no denying that this beef was unexpected and the relationship between the two parties does not have the rich history that is more typical of these kinds of conflicts. So, we’ll take a look at 10 diss tracks with more personal back-stories than the songs we got from Mark Kozelek. We could easily put in 10 solid hip-hop songs on the list, but instead, we will try to go for some variety and see how wide-spread this phenomenon truly is.
It’s that time in the semester. Things are starting to get crazy. Those projects are piling up. Finals are just over the horizon. Right now you’re probably halfway through an intense study session, your study playlist is exhausted, and you find yourself checking WRVU for your emerging music needs.
Luckily for you, I have some great artists to bolster the ranks of your depleted library as you take on the end of the semester. As a general rule, these artists don’t feature many lyrics in their songs as I generally find lyrics to be distracting from my work. If you can get into the studying zone while listening to music with prominent lyrics, then I envy you.
This week was a whirlwind of school loads getting way too much to handle, the CMA Awards taking over Nashville and to top it off my friend had ACL surgery. With all of the busy-ness this week, I wanted to put a few songs together, new and old, that bring me peace and comfort in the hard, negative and stressful times.
I’m sure by now you’ve all heard the news: Taylor Swift has removed all of her music from Spotify. As in, everything. Not just 1989. The only track you can find that even features Swift is “Safe and Sound,” her collaboration with The Civil Wars. Go now and listen while you still can, before we have all been forsaken by the great blond goddess of our musical age.
The most elaborate musical prank of this week is no doubt the Aphex Twin/Taylor Swift mashup album. The cartoonist who put Aphex Swift together put forth an astonishing amount of effort to link two totally different artists. The most shocking thing isn’t the choice of artists, however, since there are already endless examples of absurd mashups floating around the web. No, the shocking thing is that this WTF pairing is so well done.
My initial reaction is that there’s no way Aphex Swift works at all, but on several subsequent spins I have to admit that there’s something going on here. “Starlightlicker” is the song that gets the closest to working in any traditional sense, no doubt because “Windowlicker” is the closest Aphex Twin has come to any sort of pop crossover. It’s surrounded by “T4ouble” and “We Are Never Getting Girl/Boygether”, both of which pace hectic breakbeat productions from Richard D. James Album with two of Swift’s most massive pop smashes. Initially I’m convinced that these two tracks speed up the tempo on “4” and “Girl/Boy Song” because they sound impossibly complex underneath Swift’s one-line-at-a-time delivery, but on further review the tempo is unchanged. The juxtaposition serves as a vivid reminder of just how unique and unhinged each of Aphex Twin’s pseudorandom productions is.
Earlier this week, another one of WRVU’s staff writers talked about Concert Do’s and Don’t’s. One of the suggest modes of concert etiquette was “Don’t experience the concert through the lens of your camera.” I feel like this has become a hot topic among my friends and me throughout the past few years; increasingly so as apps like Snapchat and Instagram have become more and more popular. So I’m here to talk about what I think, what the good people of the Internet think, and what artists think about smartphones at concerts.
California natives Foxygen recently released their third full-length album, “…And Star Power”, and I couldn’t have been more hyped for the release date. Knowing Foxygen, I expected to get a blissful mix of neo-psychedelia and 60’s revival, and what I got was so much more. Their third album marks the first double album from the duo, and with their first double album comes some new elements to their sound. Even before listening to the album, I noticed a bunch of small tracks in between the longer ones, eventually turning out to be mainly segues between the songs. Segues are new to Foxygen’s music, and they manage to pull them off incredibly well.
Now we can’t all be as great as good guy Greg. But there are still a couple things that you can do to be more like him at your next concert.
This week was a good one for Run the Jewels fans in Nashville. This morning, two days after their sold-out show at Exit/In, Run The Jewels 2, the duo’s long awaited follow-up to their self-titled debut, appeared on my news feed. I ate up this fresh musical morsel as soon I could. What I found when I dove into this album was one of the best collection of dope beats, club bangers, and vicious verses I have heard out of the rap scene this year and a continuation of the trademark style that El-P and Killer Mike have developed.
