Summing up a year’s worth of music with a short list of albums and singles is like trying to summarize foreign-policy white papers in haiku. A lot of the things that made 2006 worth getting through are hard to communicate in the usual “I like this record” format: hip-hop taking over the Internet, for instance, or music fandom and music making becoming massively parallel, mutually reinforcing phenomena. Here’s some of what I consider to be the best and coolest shit to have happened in the past 12 months.
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Gerard vs. Bear. Just when it looked like indie-rock MP3 bloggers had finally seized the upper hand, usurping the power and influence of the glossy music mags, an anonymous critic launched gerardvsbear.blogspot.com and took a big shit all over their party. Some of the posts are credited to Gerard–a manic spouter of fractured Tarzan syntax whose catchphrase is “What up the fuck?”–and some are credited to Bear, a more sedate and precise writer, but they’re all hilariously brutal attacks on bloggers’ taste and professionalism. If Gerard is feeling charitable, he might just accuse you of taking industry payola; if he’s not, he’ll accuse you of wanting to touch Colin Meloy’s balls.
Chicago’s fest-filled summer. Between Intonation, Pitchfork, Lollapalooza, and the Touch and Go anniversary bash at the Hideout Block Party, this year’s festival season was a really fun endurance test. How long can you stand in the blazing sun drinking Sparks? How long can you survive on cheese curds alone? How long can you stand there getting elbowed in the ribs while trying to watch a band before you start hating the whole idea of watching bands? When it means getting to see Dead Prez, Os Mutantes, and Negative Approach in the span of a few weeks, the answer is “as long as it takes.”
The Walkmen go nuts. The prickly pop of the Walkmen’s 2004 disc Bows and Arrows seemed to foretell a popular breakthrough, but instead the band changed course with this year’s breezily loopy A Hundred Miles Off, which includes honky-tonk piano, ghostly organ, and mariachi horns, among other embellishments. They followed Hundred Miles with the news that the band members are collaborating on a group novel, then dropped a loving song-by-song cover version of Harry Nilsson and John Lennon’s already confounding album Pussy Cats. It’s like they collectively decided to fold up the It Band map and head for the wilderness of Dylan-style Crazy Ideas.
