Artist(s) of the Year 2020
This was a bad year in almost every way. But it was a good year for music. I could probably wax poetic about that connection for awhile but I’m not sure it’s really the most fecund territory. I think I’d rather spend whatever poeticism I have in reserve on the music itself.
Originally I wrote this as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place; but in the process of writing, I went back and listened to all of this stuff and honestly I can’t pick favorites. Taylor feels like the champ right now, but that’s just because she’s the freshest.
There’s a certain rush to liking music that just came out… You feel like you’re tapped into an energy. Like you’re really inhabiting the time, not just floating through it. I only have the energy to dabble in this, but I think it’s a feeling that’s missing for a lot of people (musicians and engineers especially) who only listen to older music. Admittedly, it’s often great older music, but there’s some disgruntled crustiness in them — a certain “get off my lawn kids!” — that I think comes from missing that fresh vibrant feeling of loving a record that is young on the shelves and has its whole future ahead of it.
Anyway, the point I was making is that originally I gave Taylor Swift the Artist of the Year honors and then moved on the the runner up and the bronze medalist. But I think this was only the recency effect. At the risk of feeling puny and indecisive, I’ve decided to let my top three artists share the crown.
I’m presenting them in reverse chronological order, which happens to be the order I originally intended to honor them. It was one of those years that proves the Nietzsche quote about us “hav[ing] art in order to not die from the truth.” A huge and heartfelt thank you to all of these artists, and to countless others I didn’t mention. You’ll never get what you truly deserve. But thank you for doing it anyway.
Spoiler Alert: The full playlist, with the featured winners as well as the honorable mentions, is here for your listening pleasure.
Autumn Winner: Taylor Swift
Taylor came in a bit late in the game, to be honest. She dropped folklore in July with close to no warning and, while I liked it on first listen, it took me a couple months to really get into it. It’s a great story, about how the record was made, and she gets into it some on the Disney+ special I mention below. Essentially she caught a wind of inspiration in early quarantine and started trading tapes with Aaron Dressner of The National, and also with previous collaborator Jack Antonoff.
This is the opening track and it really sets the mood. Even the first line, “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit / been saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’” puts you on the path. She says as much in the long pond sessions, her aforementioned Disney+ special.
In the film, the three collaborators sit around talking about the songs and the writing process and, in between conversations, playing through the entire album as a trio. The biggest takeaway for me was that Taylor Swift has become a serious singer. And writer too, although I was more aware of that already. Some of the melodies she lays over these moody basic grooves are so next level. And she really stretches her voice in interesting and subtle ways while never sounding like she’s trying very hard at all.
This Bon Iver duet is one of the standouts from the album and they both kill it here. Though honestly, it’s not even the most impressive Taylor performance in the film. The whole thing is really a very enjoyable watch.
And then, like 3 weeks after the long pond film comes out, she drops another record with these same two dudes! This is when I really felt like she took the crown for the year. I don’t like this second album quite as much as the first, but it still has some amazing songs on it.
“happiness” is the champ for me (although Sarah’s favorites are currently “tolerate it” and “ivy” which are also awesome). The first time I heard this song I listened to it three times straight, as mentioned last week in this little missive. The lyrics are flawless and beautiful and the way she builds the emotion as the track builds is Gold Medal shit. Just masterful.
Sarah and I were talking about Taylor the other night and musing about how incredible it would be to see her perform this stuff in a 700-seat theatre like The Jefferson. Like, imagine if she wasn’t already one of the biggest pop stars on the planet and folklore just came out as her first record and you were seeing her live and hungry and giving it everything in front of a crowd that could all see the sweat on her face without needing a jumbo-tron.
It would’ve been amazing, but the real thing it got me thinking about is that Taylor never had that stage of her career that most artists go through; where they’re building their name and no one knows them and they can really feel out who they are and start to tell you their secrets without ever thinking they’ll be sprayed all over Twitter later. Maybe she did, but it lasted about 6 months and probably happened when she was like 11. And so now Taylor is having that moment. And it really feels like she’s letting down her guard and telling us some raw and delicate shit.
But the great part is that, since she’s having this intimate moment 15 years into a very successful career, she has some fucking skills! You just listen to the way she sings, especially unadorned on the long pond sessions, and you can hear those years. She knows her way around that voice, and she’s not scared to take risks because she’s comfortable finding her footing no matter where it goes. The same is true for her writing too.
And so I initially decided to give the crown to Taylor for the year, and there’s no doubt in my mind that she earned it. But like I said before, this was a late game surprise entry. The field was crowded.
Summer Winner: Run The Jewels
Until roughly December 12th, RTJ had the title locked up. It’s insane to me that most, potentially all, of RTJ4 was written and recorded before this year even started. There was simply no album that captured the feel of being deep in the throes of 2020 like this one did.
But I’m almost certain the whole album was in the can before Covid made it out of Wuhan, and I’m 100% sure it was done before George Floyd was murdered. In fact, the first two singles dropped in late March, almost exactly two months before Floyd’s death.
“yankee and the brave” is both the first single and the first track on the album. And it couldn’t have been anything else. Talk about coming out of the gates strong! this shit just blazes non-stop for two and half razor sharp minutes. The first couple bars are fire, but when El-P comes with “matter of fact, kiss the ass and even the cra-a-ack / Automatic facts, it’s like tha-a-at” 48 seconds in, everything was all over for me.
And, of course, it mentions police killing a black child, which brings us to June 3rd— barely over a week after police choked Mr Floyd to death—when they drop the full album and we all hear “walking in the snow” for the first time.
I’m including the live version they did on October 17th for Adult Swim because it makes you sit with the relevant line for longer than anyone would freely choose to. But you won’t regret they did it to you either because it’s just that powerful.
The entire Holy Calama-VOTE concert is amazing and it’s (almost?) all on YouTube. Definitely the best quarantine concert I’ve seen. I liked the Taylor long pond one a lot, but this thing steamrolls it. And I can’t let go of “walking in the snow” without mentioning that a) Gansta Boo never disappoints and b) every lyric in this song is devastating. The way that El ends the first verse with
Pseudo-Christians, y’all indifferent, kids in prisons ain’t a sin? Shit
If even one scrap of what Jesus taught connected, you’d feel different
What a disingenuous way to piss away existence, I don’t get it
I’d say you lost your goddamn minds if y’all possessed one to begin with
and then Mike finishes the second verse with
never forget the story of Jesus: the hero was killed by the state
… so so hard.
A few other notes to buttress my previously held sentiment that Jaime Meline and Michael Render were the undisputed champs of 2020: first I’ll mention the Song Exploder episode where El-P dissects “JU$T” with help from Pharrell, Zach de la Rocha, and Mike himself. But RTJ was more than just music this year. Mike was a force in the world.
I remember sitting at my breakfast table on Friday Nov 6th, in the hours after Georgia switched from red to blue on all the news maps, watching Mike hold court on Twitter while everyone shouted him out (along with Stacey Abrams and many others) for all the work on the ground that helped make it happen.
And while Mike does do the behind-the-scenes work in the community, the man was born to be in front of a microphone.
I got into a run this summer where I almost exclusively spent my daily listening time on random Killer Mike interviews. Mike has, as this great Pitchfork profile from 2017 puts it, “a photographic memory, an easy smile, and the ability to effortlessly unspool complete paragraphs of well-reasoned, fact-based conclusions.” There are plentiful examples of this, like the one above, all over YouTube. This Bad Faith interview is a great more recent (post-election) example too. His Netflix special Trigger Warning is also full of pure genius moments, but it came out in 2019 so it doesn’t technically count in the RTJ column for this year.
Mike and El have been on fire for the past half decade or so, but I do think they hit a new stride in 2020. In contrast, my other fave from this year has been out of the limelight for close to two decades now. But she came back fierce.
Spring Winner: Fiona Apple
I was reflecting to Sarah earlier this evening that the new Fiona album reminds me of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah insofar as, while I can totally see how some music lovers can listen to it and not really be moved, for me it is unrivaled perfection. Those two albums are both so singular and so unique and something about them just hits all of the right spots for me.
But where D’Angelo is murky and mysterious, Fiona is fearless and fiery and messy and more honest than anyone I’ve heard speak publicly in quite some time.
To say that lyrics are “emotionally honest” is kind of a cliche, but it’s also usually a little false. Fiona is honest is a way that feels… actually honest. It’s not over-sharing for the sake of getting attention. It feels like she’s just very committed to writing and singing what she is actually feeling. If it doesn’t feel real, so won’t abide it. She touches on it in this (amazing, but somewhat infamous) New Yorker piece that came out in March, but is mostly from interviews done in late 2019.
You have to go to the myelin sheath — you know, to the central nervous system — for it to be good, I feel like. And if that’s not true? Then fuck me, I wasted my fucking life and ruined everything.
That’s a little melodramatic, but it comes at the end of a section where her ex-boyfriend (her ex-boyfriend, and from not that long ago) has come over for a visit and joined the interview. Let’s just say he has her a bit on edge.
But she doesn’t shy away from it, even in front of a journalist and a former lover. And I said that interview was a little infamous because she gave another interview (this one post-Covid, shortly after the album came out in April) in which she talks about how she was in a really fucked up place during the New Yorker interviews, in withdrawal from quitting both antidepressants and a decade of fairly heavy alcoholism in 2019.
That second piece, published in Vulture, is the real winner for me. I read it two or three times through. You just don’t hear artists talk like that very often. For example, this quote, when asked about how the recordings happened:
We started first trying to be a band and to have me build my confidence up as a musician, because it was really low a few years ago. It’s funny I’ve never been able to jam with people. I wish there was a better word for jamming. I’ve always been too shy to try, which is not a good way to be. If you grow up and you’re praised a lot for being special, rather than for making an effort, you end up later on in life being afraid.
First off, what a wonderful and real answer to a simple boring question. But more importantly, that last sentence shook me. I still think about it, 8 months later. I’m a little ashamed to admit, at 36, that I was praised a bit as a young person and that I carry some shrapnel from it. That fear she describes is real. But somehow naming it, even just listening to her name it, makes it bite less. This is her genius.
But her genius is also musical. I just love almost every note and every beat on this whole record. Her singing is amazing. And the percussion is so good! The way she built up a lot of these tracks from banging on household shit just felt so perfect as the soundtrack to the first few months of quarantine; when everyone was just bouncing around their own house and their own brain and wondering what the fuck was happening. And her lyrics are amazing too. Sarah and I were talking earlier about the way she approaches her relationships with other women (in songs like “Newspaper” and “Ladies”, as well as in the Vulture interview) and how it’s so deep and nuanced and also angry and hurt but also so empathetic. And we were specifically talking about how much more powerful and meaningful it is than the way Taylor approaches the women attached to her ex’s throughout her records.
In Conclusion
And so those are my winners. In a year where we all went deep, those three went the deepest; or at least the deepest into my psyche and my heart. I should maybe reiterate the obvious here, that I don’t believe in objective journalism. There was a ton of other great music released this year. But these were the ones the really spoke to me.
Still, perhaps in a misguided effort to lay claim to just a pocketful of objectivity, I feel I should mention a few others jams that hit me right from this year. Good bye and good riddance 2020. But thanks for the tunes.
Honorable Mentions
Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion — “WAP”
Haim — Women In Music, Part III (If there were a few months left in the year, this might take a top honor too. It came out in late June, but it’s been steadily growing on me, just reaching the point of obsession earlier this week. Sorry Haim. On the bright side, they’re the only artist mentioned here who’s nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy. Ps/ Fuck the Grammy’s.)
Terrace Martin & Denzel Curry — “Pig Feet”
DJ iMarkkeyz and DJ Suede featuring Johnniqua Charles — “You about to lose yo job!” (and this. and this. and also this.)
Jason Isbell — Reunions
Gorillaz — Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez
Beyonce — Black Is King
Brandi Carlile — for her concerts from home (streamed for fans on Veeps), specifically the campfire one, which was far and away the best actual live performance I’ve seen during Covid. (Technically this is her announcing the concert, also around a campfire. I can’t find the real thing on the open internet.)
The Mint — for that show we did at Holly’s like a month before everything shut down. And for the block party in Lindsey’s alley that we were booked for in April but got canceled. That would’ve been a good one.
The full playlist, with the featured winners as well as the honorable mentions, is here for your listening pleasure.
