While I would be a horribly unqualified film critic, I would be a disgrace as a music critic. I have neither the vocabulary, technical knowledge, nor historical perspective to be able to offer more than "I liked that" in regards to most music, despite the obscene amount of music I seek out and listen to.

Here's my best shot. I am still making my way through a LOT of music from 2008, and I suspect I will be for some time. So let's just say this is the stuff that made the strongest first impressions from what I was able to hear. No real order here--how can you order moods?

Kasai Allstars -- In the 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into a Swimming Fish and Ate the Head of His Enemy By Magic

This is gorgeous, shimmering--the kind of music where you just sorta stop what you're doing and think try to take it all in. People tend to condescend to "World music" as somehow more authentic or heartfelt or, the reverse, as bland NPR background music. Which is one reason we should do away with such terms of musical colonialism. This is the third entry in the brilliant "Congotronics" series (I recommend them all) and easily the best for me. It's also the least chaotic (part of the wild charm of these albums) with a sly, silky complexity, especially on the first track, which could simply be the best thing I've heard all year.

The Goslings -- Occasion

Ferocious guitar noise, and like everything in this genre and to the surprise of those who don't listen to it, it's really about the pursuit of the most elusive and subtle beauty.

Beach House -- Devotion
I really didn't care much for this at all the first time I listened. But for some reason I kept putting it on when in one of those "I'm not in the mood for anything" kinda moods. These songs are almost all very strong. The melodies will pop up in your head at the strangest times.

Grouper -- Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Kind of part of the whole ghostly lo-fi folk thing going on lately, but this is truly spooky at times.

No Age -- Nouns
LA rock band...noisy and abrasive, like I like em.

Nomo -- Ghost Rock
As I said in an email to a friend, Nomo are like if someone said to themselves "let's make music with all the stuff Ryan likes thrown together." Therefore, this is not to every taste. Afro-pop, jazz, and rock all collide (really the best word) in this sunny set of instrumentals.

Other stuff worth mentioning:
Sian Alive Group -- 59:59
Suarasama -- Fajar Di Atas Awan
Torche -- Meanderthal
Ruby Suns -- Sea Lion
El Guincho - Alegranza (though anyone who says this is better than Panda Bear's Person Pitch is an insufferable obscurantist hipster!)

Reissues: The GAS boxset is simply astounding, some of the best electronic music I've ever heard. It's like being serenaded by benevolent all-knowing machines. The "Nigeria Special" compilations from the Soundways label are mind-boggling because what I purchased as a novelty (Nigerian Disco in the 70s? Cool!) turned out to be some freaking great music. All three comps (Blues and Afropop, Disco and Funk, and Rock) are solid from top to bottom. Special indeed.

Zodiac

There is an essential and perhaps constitutive gap between what we normally feel to be a conviction of truth and the evidence in support of it. To some extent, all evidence is somewhat circumstantial. How do we close that gap? How much certainty is enough to be "certain"?

One of the more provocative and interesting interpretations of Zodiac see the movie as dramatizing the arrival of the digital age as it encroaches upon and overwhelms the solid certainty, the contact, of analog. The solid certainties of hierarchies of truth and meaning give way to a digital flatness of equivalent 1's and 0's. The search for the killer, an ethical imperative and need for truth, marks this film as a tragedy, if only an epistemological one.

I did not write a "Best Movies of 2007" post, but this was the best movie of 2007.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling

The Rolling Stones



Why did it take me, a music lover and even more a classic rock lover, nearly 29 years to finally appreciate the Stones? Perhaps the inevitable (and unfair) comparisons to the Beatles, a band whom they share almost nothing in common. If the Beatles represent the 60s, free love, and LSD, the Stones are the 70s, sleazy sex, and cocaine. Perhaps it might be said they are the darker, more mature side of the immaturity of the rock ethos: self-destruction.

All of this is pretty much the standard line, and I don't have much else to offer at this point. But as far as the music itself is concerned, maybe the difficulty for this listener is due to the odd spaciousness of the arrangements, Jagger's heavily mannered and almost unmelodic singing style, and most of all the lack of truly insistent melodicism in the songwriting...The Rolling Stones, as odd as this might seem to say, don't insist on themselves very much. It's great background music...and given time and patience it blooms and burrows its way into your memory.

Give All to Love

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the muse;
Nothing refuse.

'Tis a brave master,
Let it have scope,
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope;
High and more high,
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But 'tis a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
'Tis not for the mean,
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such 'twill reward,
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;—
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, for ever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho' her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson