Best of 2008: These Miracles Work
I’ve long since given up any pretense come December of being able to think in any comprehensive way about the *best* music of the year. There’s just too much new music released every year to an audience too scattered for a marketplace too micro-targeted and boutiqued for me to claim I can tell anyone what’s best. I mean, I hear a lot of new music every year. More than most folks I think. But I’d still guess that any one of you could make a personal top ten list of music I haven’t even heard this year. We all love music, but less and less is it something we share–not the way they shared Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, or even the way we shared, say, The Clash, Bruce Springsteen and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five in 1981. Hell, we don’t even listen to music together anymore, instead listening ever increasingly in the auto-erotic isolation of personal playlists and crappy earbuds.
A list of the best albums of 2008? It almost seems quaint and nostalgic. I think we’ve finally reached the point of the atomization of the album. And, at 45 I’ve personally reached the point where individual years no longer seem like the discrete entities they once seemed. I can clearly remember 1975 as the year of Born to Run, Horses, and The Mothership Connection; the summer of 1978 as the summer of Animal House and the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. But 2005, 2006, 2007? I can’t remember anything unique about them at all.
But I know I’ll remember 2008 as the year that everything changed. The year that we elected a Black president. The year that a 30 -year political cycle which pushed the country so far right I hardly recognize it as the country I grew up in finally wheezed to an ignoble end. The year a borrowed boom exploded into a recession which, by the time it’s over, will almost certainly be the worst of my adult life leaving a smoking black crater where the cyberlibertarians’ and supply sider’s “long boom” once stood.
And I’ll remember 2008 as the year I fell hard for a rock band, falling in love with a band like I haven’t since I fell in love with the Clash as a teenager. That band is The Hold Steady whose 2008 album, Stay Positive, is the best rock album I’ve heard in 15 years and maybe longer.
Ok, maybe it’s not as good as Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Rubber Soul, Revolver, the White Album, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, or Kick Out the Jams…. But it might well be as good as, say, London Calling, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Never Mind the Bollocks…, Exile in Guyville.
Stay Positive is the fourth album in five years from The Hold Steady–the Brooklyn by way of Minneapolis quintet. It’s not so much a breakthrough for the band as a it a culmination. All the elements that made their first four albums critically acclaimed indie gems are here in spades–big hooks, classic Les Paul rock riffs, sing-along choruses; cinematic, character-driven lyrics. But everything’s better, most especially Craig Finn’s remarkable lyrics.
Finn packs more words per measure into a song than any one since Bruce Springsteen circa Blinded by the Light putting it over with a fervid, rapping delivery stuttering like a study hall nerd suddenly gone Pentecostal. On previous records the tongues of fire delivery has been wedded to deliberate tales of kids in search of some kind of ecstasy–religious, sexual, psychoactive. In earlier songs any ecstasy would do for Finn’s characters (several of whom reappear throughout the band’s oeuvre), though it was always pretty clear that at heart the search was mostly spiritual. (The band’s second album, Separation Sunday, loosely tells the tale of a three burnout teenage lowlifes stumbling their way towards a literal resurrection–the albums is kinda like the Hold Steady’s Zen Arcade and Finn is probably the most overtly Catholic American songwriter, again, since early Springsteen.)
Last year’s Hold Steady album, Boys and Girls in America, was a breakthough–miraculously dense with singalong hooks and loaded with acutely observed character studies (”you don’t have to know the inspiring people/let your boyfriend know the inspiring people/you can hang in the kitchen/talk about the stars in the upcoming sequel” goes one stanza of You Can Make them Like You). But if the music sounded like it was breaking out (guitarist Tad Kubler is a riff machine and a fine lead player, drummer Bobby Drake a secret weapon), Finn’s lyrics started to sound a little cramped. It was impossible not to adore the uplifting teen nostalgia of Massive Nights or be charmed by the gimlet eyed lyrics of Citrus but there’s only go so far you can go with drugs as a metaphor, and even the most Catholic of writers has to outgrow the easy references to Jesus and Judas or risk becoming a bore.
There’s not a boring second on Stay Positive.
The closely observed character studies have gone cinematic. One for the Cutters–which tells the story of a Indiana U sophomore coed who falls in with a bunch of burnout townies and becomes an accomplice in murder–could literally be made into a movie the way Sean Penn made Springsteen’s Highway Patrolman into The Indian Runner. And the FM hit, Sequestered in Memphis, was described by NPR host Terry Gross as the story of a guy who wakes up to find himself in the middle of an episode of Law and Order (the lyrics are sung by a character who is being interrogated by cops).
The hooks have gone nuclear. Try getting Sequestered in Memphis, Hey Sapphire, or Magazines out of your head.
And although the drugs (one hard copy bonus track is called Ask Her for Adderall) and religion are still here (”Hey Sapphire, If I cross myself when I cum would you receive me?”), they’ve turned into something more complex, adult, and sometimes dark. Lord, I’m Discouraged may be the greatest song ever written about watching someone you love slip away in the unreachable throes of drug addiction.
But mostly this is a surging, uplifting record. The title ain’t some piece of post-modern irony. Stay Positive means what it says and says what it means, “We gotta stay positive.”
Outside the band’s Nov. 6 set at Terminal 5 smoking cigarettes after the Hold Steady finished and before Drive-by Truckers were to go on, I overheard some doe eyed, pimple faced kid who had to be underage saying to a friend with, well, frankly, ecstasy, the ecstasy of a sort you don’t often feel at 45, “That was the best show I’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t the best show I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t the Clash at Bond’s in 1981, or Ray Charles & the Staple Singers at Carnegie Hall in 1978, or the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. But it was freaking great and being there felt fantastic. In the words of Craig Finn, “I was a skeptic at first, but these miracles work.”
Next, the best of the rest of 2008.
- Hitting Things in Class - Students Need Drum/Mallet Sticks
- Instruments in Children's Hands!
- Lend Me a Tenor.....Sax!
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December 24, 2008 at 8:05 pm
[...] this month I wrote about my favorite album of the year, Stay Positive by The Hold Steady. Today a ...
January 3, 2009 at 6:52 pm
[...] Gnarls Barkley album. And I loved The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive for reasons pretty much already covered by Jason ...