Wow, it's weird to go over all the music that came out in 2015, & even weirder to think of the amount I managed to listen to. It was somewhat to the detriment of the stuff I really loved, but I am hungry for good music, which means you have to listen to a whole lot of not-good music to find it. A whole fucking lot. Because there are more people making music now than ever before, & the nature of commercial radio/media makes it very hard for the cream to rise to the top. Indeed, the top has never been more curdled (to beat a metaphor to death); the whole industry is about making money as fast as possible with whatever fad or dinosaur act it can. It's depressing. But probably more depressing for artists.
& that's the problem with year-end lists. They can no more determine what was "best" (as if they ever could) than they can claim to be comprehensive. I've tried to stopped looking at them, but I admit it's hard to stifle my curiosity - what do the people who think they know better than everyone else think is great?
That's not something I'm going to talk about here. I think you care about that as much as I do.
If that's so, what do people who care enough to vote for their favorites think? To answer that is to discover, for me, how out of touch I am with most everyone rating their music. & to do that, I go to a site called Rate Your Music Dot Com. I like this site a lot. Regular folks from all over vote on what they like. It has a couple of flaws - I think it skews young, & I also think the fans of metal are way over-represented on the site - but I find myself in agreement with a lot of their lists (more or less), especially as you travel back in time.
But these days? Well, here are the top ten releases of 2015 as voted by their users, minus the metal stuff, which, as I've said, is nowhere near actual listener levels:
1. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp A Butterfly
2. Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell
3. Joanna Newsom: Divers
4. Kamasi Washington: The Epic
5. Toby "Radiation" Fox: Undertale Soundtrack
6. Lil Ugly Mane: Third Side Of Tape
7. Julia Holter: Have You In My Wilderness
8. Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden Of Delete
9. Chelsea Wolfe: Abyss
10. Elza: A Mulher Do Fim Do Mundo
Two of these (#s 1 & 6) are hip hop, which I enjoy but which I don't actively seek out to listen to. One of these (#4) is called "spiritual jazz" on the site, & I am not keyed into new jazz at all. One of them (#5) is video game music, which bores me, & another (#8) is electronica, something I used to spend more time with but don't anymore. I can't say I heard that record. One of them (#10) is samba (!) & is probably an outlier, as it has 302 votes while the Lamar album has over 7,000.
That leaves 2, 3, 4, & 9. They are "indie" & therefore in my wheelhouse. & can I say, none of those I found too exciting. The one I guess I liked most is the Joanna Newsom, which I like mainly because it reminds me of Kate Bush, but it doesn't have the hooks that the best Kate Bush had. (I much more preferred this year's Joanna Gruesome record, which didn't even make the top thousand on Rate Your Music.)
Just like last year, & I probably talked about this then, there's not a record in the top one hundred that makes my favorite music list. You have to go to # 169 to get an artist I'll play on my show.
So how does an artist make the cut? I guess I'll talk about it tomorrow.
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