Vince Staples, Ramona Park Broke My Heart Like the Stooges’ Fun House, but without fun or a house. The band’s motto: “Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation.” Their excellent debut album comes in handy for those days when you just wanna blast some cat-hair clogs out of your brain. The Austin collective Water Damage lay down a monster groove (two drummers? three?) with amps groaning in sweet feedback agony. Quite possibly my favorite 22-minute psych-freak noise-punk drone of the year. The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past-or as Tate used to say, “Hip-hop is ancestor worship.” Tate gives a (typically) mind-blowing talk about rap artistry the song ends with him saying, “I mean, one of the things we know about MCs is, man, they just have phenomenal memories.” His voice echoes into space-“phenomenal memories, phenomenal memories”-and resonates into the future. Mos Def) sums it up in “No Fear of Time” when he says, “We assemble an ark and just float on.” The album ends with a sample from the late Greg Tate, one of the realest minds ever to write about music, whose obit I had to write almost exactly a year ago. (Hell, what could be more authentically Nineties than disappointing everyone? How about refusing to release it on streaming services?) The Brooklyn underground rap duo made history with Rawkus classics like “Definition,” but 25 years later, they’re trying to bring their moment forward into the future. I totally get why you thought the Talib Kweli/Yasiin Bey reunion was a letdown, but as a Nineties bitch who has prayed for this album on more floors than I care to count, I do not share your dismay. Taylor Swift, Pink Receiving Special Honors at 2023 iHeartRadio Awards The only skip is the weepy ballad, but that’s just because Blackpink sound most themselves when they swagger like they know they’re the coolest girls in the room. But the killer is “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” a guitar banger full of freestyle synth-horns and crazed hormones. “Pink Venom” is a perfect blast of Sunset Strip hair-metal cosplay-even the title sounds like the name of a bar band playing Poison and Motley Crue covers at the sleaziest dive in town. The “Lovesick Girls” of K-pop are out for blood-when Rosé yells “I’m so rock & roll!” she isn’t kidding. ![]() Jisoo, Lisa, Jennie, and Rosé step out as glam queens on Born Pink-it’s the great album they’ve always had in them. Bring on Nobody Likes You When You’re ’23. Y2K wasn’t so hot, but at least it had a kick-ass Madonna album.) 2022 felt more like Neil Young’s 22 than Taylor Swift’s, but the sick sonic minds on this list kept opening up private dream spaces. ![]() The double-digit years are always pivotal for music-’66, ’77, ’88, ’99 were four of the coolest music years ever. All these albums keep giving up new surprises for me. But these are my faves, with pop idols, guitar bangers, rap poets, disco visionaries. What a year for music-any of my top half-dozen or so could have been Number One some other year.
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