Perhaps more than any year in music before, 2013 got me all turned around. It wasn’t really the music. I had heard and appreciated artists like Haim, Vampire Weekend and Lorde before. What had me brooding was a strained narrative found throughout an arena you could now only politely refer to as music criticism. It was a celebration of the end of taste and the conflation of all genres into one super-genre that satiates everyone, what Grantland’s Steven Hyden called “the ‘whatever sounds awesome’ style.” We are nearer, the narrative follows, to music-as-democracy that banishes priggish notions of “good” music for the sake of peaceful accord, all thanks to light-speed communication.
I get the sexiness of the democracy effigy, but I find it difficult to subscribe to the rhetoric when three of the top five musical moments in 2013 are brought to us courtesy of Universal Music Group and the other two are thanks to Sony Music Entertainment. The products speak for themselves. There is nothing wrong with Haim’s “The Wire,” or the delightful “Royals,” and even One Direction’s “Little Black Dress,” which oddly sounded like a King’s X deep cut. But I find the utopian vision of one kind of “awesome” dissatisfying, bland and a little creepy. As Elvis Presley once chided his band, “that don’t move me.”
This is a year that saw critics scrambling to validate several calculated attempts by Kanye West to push runway fashion, footnoted with occasional moments of music. It was the year of the wrecking ball that was Miley Cyrus. And in case you wanted a window into just how gruesome thoughtless genre-meshing can look, force yourself to recall Luke Bryan’s “That’s My Kind of Night.” I realize that 2013 was supposed to be a really exciting year in music, but I can’t help but feel a camaraderie with Future of the Left’s Andy Falkous when he sing-says “you have confused excitement with the fear of missing out.”
Maybe that’s why one of my favorite albums of the year was Daniel Markham’s Ruined Your Life. It is a self-conscious, pensive record by an erstwhile rock and roller struggling to remember what it meant to like a song, let alone write a good one. “I came here to rock and roll” Markham sings mockingly at a tempered pace while a despondent lap-steel whines in the background. Ruined Your Life is an embarrassed record and I mean that in the best way. It finds Markham kicking a can down the road, reciting couplets like “the news is such a bummer, just like the end of summer,” and laughing to himself. Markham knows that there has always been a too-subtle joke at the core of popular music. It is in articulating this disillusionment that Markham ended up writing and playing one of North Texas’s most lucid albums of the year.
Each year I find more communion with local music than the widely released, well-branded albums and singles tumbling down the public relations chute. When I think of 2013, I am less moved by a Kendrick Lamar verse than I am by the continued battening of local hip hop that gave us the emergence of Sam Lao and -topic, and the continued rule of A.Dd+. I don’t feel an ounce of conviction about the new Arcade Fire material, but I saw God when 66-year-old Tommie West, of immortal Dallas funk/soul group The Relatives, got an entire crowd to pogo. And my ham-handed analysis can’t even begin to tackle the Unconscious Collective, a trio so visually alien and devastating with their virtuosity they upend many notions I held about music.
It is tough to call any of those artists “important,” since we so often define that term by the numbers and those acts currently impact such a finite quantity of people. But for about 30 to 60 minutes on a diminutive stage, any act on any night can become preeminent. And isn’t that why any of us digs music in the first place?
At the end of 2013, I am thinking more about the next decade of music than about the year itself. Critics like Hyden and I can agree on one point: the asymptotic trajectory of popular music is a good thing. If it ever actually does level off, music will be dead, but it won’t level off. Some unlicensed antagonists, some testy miscreants will eventually come along and upset the whole damnable thing. They will lash out with something we couldn’t possibly have expected and we will thank them for it. They will be the artists and we will be the benefactors, again. For now, I am glad for all the upsetters we have in Dallas, and I’m looking forward to another year of being knocked off balance by what they do.
Image: Sam Lao in live performance at Index Fest, October 2013. Credit: Andi Harman.
