It's been a rough one..

Sorry folks for the inactivity. This holiday season's steam has fogged my windows and my musical insight has been impaired. Of course at the end of the year we have the 'best of' lists coming out...but is there any good music from the past 12 months......

I'll let ya know soon enough, but here's some stuff that came out 42 years ago...



Too bad the Stones didn't put anything out this year....

ATTN: Hipsters. It's Over For You (The 2010 Year in Review)

Contrary to what you might've read everywhere else on the internet, almost NO GOOD MUSIC WAS RELEASED in 2010. Actually, quite a bit of good came out of the "avante-garde" scene (to make a huge genre generalization), which was sort of the 'story' of music criticism this year. Will we be hearing Columbus Discount artists in Jamba Juice in 2012? No, because I truly believe this widespread 'appreciation' of 'difficult' music is a fad brought on by the utter lack of good pop music being made anymore. Seriously, the health of pop music in general can be monitored with every new Weezer release. Some twisted irony that is - they're still relevant!

It turns out all of my predictions for this year were wrong, too. The Beach Fossils album came and went without a peep due to a glut of sound-alike bands (that I previously did not know about) who also released records. I guess they're gonna break up and get marketing jobs now. Neither Chairlift or the Magic Wands released anything, although I'm still waiting with a half chub for that Chairlift record in '11.

So what was good on the pop side of life this year? Not Hip Hop. The Disney trifecta of Roscoe, Drake, and Rick Ross teamed up to make this the worst year for radio rap since... I don't know when. Ever? Kanye, of course, kept tricking white kids into think he's an artist and black kids into thinking he's the next Puffy. Wrong! Puffy developed artists much better than he, e.g. B.I.G, Ma$e, The LOX, Lil' Kim. Real shit. Kanye: we here at TNRR think you're a gauche, middle-class imposter. The Man Who Would Be King, my nizzle. Step off. You made some good beats for Jay, that's it. I know Drew downloads your albums stat when they come out, but I took one look at your 30 minute video and said "Fuck Outta Here". Quincy Jones has my back, natch.

Anyway, as far as rock goes, only 2 things made in the last 365 held my attention. First, Wild Nothing's Chinatown gets my vote as Single Of The Year:

The 'if-New-Order-were-a-shoegaze-band' (or is it the Furs?) sound is instantly fresh, and it perfectly distills the Chillwave trend into a memorable three minutes. We'll still be listening to this song in 2020. The album it comes from, Gemini, is pretty strong, too.

My other favorite thing is a little band called Seapony. This quiet gem drifted into my ears a couple months back and I find myself returning to it whenever I get too bummed out reading Year End Best Of lists (none of which mentioned them)

Honorable mention goes to Best Coast, I guess. I saw them at Hopscotch and it was really the only moment during the whole thing I enjoyed. Here's their cover of the famous Lesley Gore hit, and although it came out last year, I'm including it because it's fuckin' timeless:

Local Heroes award goes to Raleigh OG's Future Islands. I heard this song In The Fall back in March and it was one those rare moments of being blown away. A lot had to do with the smoke & light show, but still. It marked (for me at least) their coming of age. They're a national band now. So hats off to them. I still remember what you told me about porn and RPGs at my house, though, William!

So that's pretty much it for pop (I'm not going to focus on the surfeit of good 'difficult' music this year, put out most prolifically by labels like Olde English Spelling Bee, because it's not really for everyone, and there's simply too much of it). The rest was an army of me-too hipsters treading the same old territory (Beach House, Deerhunter, Girls, Liars, Wavves, bands with names like the aforementioned). Who cares about that shit? Pitchfork, obviously. If you want to be bored out of your mind, check out their year end list. Unlike years past, I actually tried listening to everything on their list, and it only made me more depressed. Most of that shit everyone will have completely forgotten about in 5 years, even Pitchfork themselves! See that's what so funny about these felchers... they just endorse popular opinion, and a lot of what they tell you to like, they don't even like! Listen to your heart folks and USE YOUR HEAD.

Finally, this is a farewell for The Truth, for now. I'm gonna be way too busy this semester trying to graduate and transition into the "real world" to publish incisive and hard-hitting posts (ha-ha) on here. I expect I'll return in approx. 6 months. Until then, our other contributers are gonna have to pick up the slack (I'm looking at you, Scotty!). So, to say sayonara, here's "Never Ending" sung by Connie Francis. If anyone can find me an mp3 of the original version used in the rad movie Flight of the Phoenix, hook it up!

Are your parents more hip than you?

Here's an alternative look at the 1960's, the decade you thought you loved. It's just a bunch of conservative propaganda-type bullshit (I can't believe something like this could be made by government-sponsored TV), but if you can get past that, there's actually a lot of good footage here. The takeaway line probably comes in Part 5: "the '60s replaced pleasure with happiness". Hmm... And of course the biggest buzzkill is that the most popular musical act of the decade is not the Beatles, no, but someone by the name of Engelbert Humperdinck. Figures.



Oh, but that's not all you little weirdos. If you really wanna see how cool our parents were, check this clip of Pink Floyd when they were killing it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr0hdXPH92M

Watch Macca at the end do some PR, translating what just happened for all the squares. The Floyd also played around the same time at the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream event - look at that fucking setlist - a 'happening' in the classic sense of the word. John Lennon was there. Were you? See him do some wandering around in the clip farther down the page. But first, here's more early Floyd...

What the fuck is this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTfDUyUkVYE

Intelligent, candid, point-counterpoint analysis of pop music? When you compare that clip with this (remember that nightmare?) you begin to make the case for the devolution of man.

Back to Lennon. It's cool to see both of them in their Sgt. Pepper era looks. They must have just shot the cover of that record at the time these were filmed. Both clips are collected in the documentary Tonite Lets All Make Love in London which, you can already guess, is ESSENTIAL. Something Drew (I'm sorry, 'The Myth' - is that some kind of 24 Hour Party People reference?) should have on DVD but doesn't. The opening sequence:



Here's another look at the 14 Hour Dream. This is some kind of promo video, better quality, but notable for the smooth psych jam "Revolution" by Tomorrow, which could pass for a Ride or Telescopes song circa 1991 easily.



Finally, here's the song about the event (or was the event's title taken from the song?) by the Syn, accompanied by a hot video:



Yes, the '60s fucking Ruled. Case closed. Enjoy your weekend.