a year in the rear view
how I found the quote-unquote "best" music of 2024 & some other bits of culture to briefly escape the world's cascading WTF energies
I feel dumb sharing music recommendations at this moment of acute climate disaster in Los Angeles, a city where much of my community resides. So I have collected a few suggestions on how to assist in the recovery, or contemplate our shared vulnerability. That list appears right after this month’s playlist. Please do NOT become a paid subscriber to my mixtape delivery service this month. Instead consider giving to those in need.
# of Tracks: about 50 — one for each week of the year, maybe?
Length: 4 hours & a little bit
Themes: recordings I found myself playing on repeat in 2024 ~ mostly restricted to music released last year ~ a few exceptional exceptions from 2022 & 2023 that were new discoveries (for me), including Chappell Roan’s incredible “Pink Pony Club” ~ a small handful of artists I was involved with in a professional capacity (Carriers; 3 BPM) ~ an inexplicable preoccupation with Charlie Rich’s 1977 cover version of T.G. Sheppard’s song “Rollin’ With The Flow”
Links: Spotify — Apple Music — YouTube
Yeah, sure, you could say I’m late.
But this playlist is intended as an alternative to “best of” culture not a late entry into the fray. I don’t believe in rating or ranking art. Nor will I allow my listening to fall victim to a hierarchical list maker’s mindset. Music is not a competition and good music is timeless. No one can win music like you might a sporting contest. If there is an art of listening, that art is about pleasure, and you need to take pleasure as it comes.1 I’d even go so far as to advocate that your own journey as a listener should feel less like a sprint or a marathon and more like a random walk in a public park. This playlist is an effort to share a pleasant stroll with you, my fellow listeners.
So, how did I find the recordings on my Year End Stuff I Liked In 2024 list? I find myself consulting institutional authorities less often. Increasingly, I discover music through intuition, via recommendations from trusted friends/peers,2 and by pure accident. The song I listened to more than any other in 2024 was a number one country hit from 1977 by Charlie Rich.3 I first overheard it during an Idaho road trip, playing on the in-store stereo at the Smiley Creek Lodge, during a gas stop halfway between the towns of Ketchum and Stanley.
The only defining feature of every selection on this playlist is that, at some point, I played it on repeat, again and again and over again. Maybe I took inspiration from this lyric in Chappel Roan’s loosie single “Good Luck, Babe!”: “It's fine, it's cool / You can say that we are nothing, but you know the truth… / Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling”
p.s. I also created a more concise list of 15 musical things I enjoyed this year which you can find in the footnotes.4
Spotify version
Apple version
YouTube version
a few ways to help Los Angeles right now
CHARITY: A politically informed friend in LA recommends Wildfire Resource & Recovery Funds run by California Community Foundation and United Way, as well as this extensive Mutual Aid Document for the Malan fire. Finally, if you’re concerned about animal welfare he suggests the Pasadena Humane Society.
COMMUNITY: Many of my associates from the music world live in Los Angeles. Here is an editable/addable spreadsheet of music folks who have lost their homes to the fires, along with GoFundMe links and immediate requests where applicable. [UPDATE: I was informed that this list was created by my acquaintance Judy Miller and for that she clearly deserves the honorific mensch—even more than she already did.] If are a fellow music industry person, I’d suggest taking a look, to see if your friends and acquaintances have been affected.
PRAGMATISM: A Canadian friend who lost his home to fire a few years ago told me this IG post5 contains practical advice about dealing with insurance companies which he wishes he knew when disaster struck his family and all their possessions.
ART: Coincidentally another LA friend David Longstreth announced an LP yesterday which is about environmental hazard and observing our world’s simple beauty.6 Art can’t fix things but it can feel and describe, and this record’s tragic love for planet Earth resonates deeply right now.
The playlist includes songs such as…
^ Kendrick Lamar: “Not Like Us”
^ Kim Gordon: “BYE BYE” — I’m sharing this live clip because it’s awesome to see a woman I’ve admired for decades still rocking out at age 70. If you prefer traditional music videos, the song also has a retro-cool one featuring Gordon’s daughter.
^ Meshell Ndegeocello: “Baldwin Manifesto II”
^ Samora Pinderhughes: “Forgive Yourself”
Extra credit:
• Three More Stories Behind My Selections: Some anecdotes to prove that I discover my favorite music through random walks. Follow the footnotes for YouTube clips of each selection.
Xavi’s “La Diabla” was practically ubiquitous street music when I visited Mexico City in early 2024 and though you may not be familiar with it, the track is far from obscure. (It has almost one billion streams on Spotify.) Xavi is part of a wave of “regional Mexican” musicians blowing up on global streaming platforms with a sound that unites Mexican country music (think Mariachi) with production techniques drawn from contemporary R&B, urban, and pop genres.
“Sylvia” is by Dida Pelled,7 an artist I first listened to in December, after meeting her at a holiday party at a friend’s recording studio in midtown Manhattan. She is a shredding guitarist with jazz training who happens to make extremely charming indie pop. Recommended if you like contemporary girl indie artists Japanese Breakfast, Mitski, or Phoebe Bridgers, but with a virtuosic edge reminiscent of St. Vincent.
The oddly titled track “Lmchi w Rjou3” by Taxi Kebab8 caught my attention when I heard it blaring over the sound system of a restaurant two blocks from my home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I imagined it was an artistic response to the massacre, tension, and incoherence of the Middle East right now. It is not. The recording is from 2019 and the French-Arabic duo who made it disbanded in 2023. But if Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid retroactively tried to claim Charli XCX’s Brat Summer,9 I’m going to continue to free associate this track as something encapsulating my peace dreams. May unjustifiable wars give way to shape, resolution, restoration, and justice.
• Brian Eno on Artificial Intelligence for the Boston Review: Eno is a rather eloquent fellow so, rather than summarizing, I’ll quote the element I found most interesting, about the feeble sources that may be informing the quote-unquote “intelligence” of our, ahem, newest robot overlords.
AIs is not by any means the whole of the world’s knowledge, but just the part that happened to have been published in printed books by the small sliver of the English-speaking world that happened to publish them—and made them available to AI bots? What kind of sausage is that? Surely Weisswurst, made of available scraps on the butcher’s floor.
I hope Eno goes deeper on this topic, and perhaps even engages and amplifies some younger creators more deeply engaged with making higher quality AI sausage such as the power couple of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. (Mat’s Twitter feed is one of a few reasons I still login to that hellsite.)
• Red Hot’s TRAИƧA compilation: A bunch of friends and collaborators worked on this rangy compilation devoted to “spotlighting the gifts of…the most daring, imaginative trans and non-binary artists working today.” It also sports contributions from famous musicians whose names you’ll recognize like Andre 3000, Sharon Van Etten, Sade, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, etc. Trans rights are sometimes called the new frontier in human rights, even though there's still much work to be done on the old frontiers. (No one lives unconstrained by race, sexuality, or nationality.) I like this compilation’s lens on the issue. It conveys that both music and gender are fluid and expansive and that those qualities are a virtue they hold in common. TRAИƧA contains almost 50 tracks and has a run time of almost four hours so it’s hard to summarize or even listen to in a single sitting. A suggestion on how to tackle it: Start with “Ever New” a duet between the song’s author Beverly Glenn-Copeland and famous pop star Sam Smith, then move on to selections from some artists already familiar to you, then dive deeper in.
• A supercut of Bob Dylan appearing in television advertisements: So there’s the matter of A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about that most protean of American artists. I saw it the day after Christmas, and it inspired me to revisit his discography over the holiday break. I’ll have more to say about his music in a future edition of my mixtape delivery service, but for now, here’s something else that brought me perverse joy: a supercut of his appearances in ads for Pepsi, Victoria’s Secret, IBM, Cadillac, Apple, Google, and other mega-brands over the past two decades. Let’s be honest, dude did not need the money. I suspect it was just another weird flex, a way for Dylan to reaffirm his status as our greatest American icon, and make clear his version of the trickster archetype is alive and well in the 21st century.
• “Dinosaurs Eating CEO” (2013) by American painter John Brosio, born 1967: Unless we’re talking about which character I’d prefer to play in a game of Mario Bros, I’m not a pro-Luigi type. I’d describe myself as a borderline pacifist who still admires the gutsy rhetoric of Malcolm X. But let’s have no illusions: violence takes many forms, and violence breeds violence, even when that violence is corporate, administrative, and structural.
People Who Died: Eikoh Hosoe • Jimmy Carter • Peter Yarrow • Phil Lesh • Quincy Jones • Vojtech Havel
I’ll leave you with two bits of culture from folks memorialized on this list—a link to Little Blue Nothing, my favorite album by the enigmatic Czech duo, Irena & Vojtech Havlovi10 which you can also find on Bandcamp, and an image by Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe.
As always, thanks Taja.
Perhaps an exception should be made for musicians-in-training, younger listeners, or older people taking a more studious interest in music after a lifetime of doing other stuff? They’re allowed to turn listening into work and pursue a musical education like it was a job. Not sure what music critics are thinking, though, because culture writing is not really a job anymore due to the collapse of mainstream media’s business model. (Something I’m sad about!)
Here is a brief list of some associates and peers who made year end playlists which I found useful. Also one from the peerless PJ Harvey, my gawd what an icon.
Philip Sherburne’s “Best Albums of 2024” for his Futurism Restated newsletter — Substack post
PJ Harvey’s “most fascinating and beautiful pieces of music I came across this year” — Spotify link
Fluxblog’s completely unhinged and comprehensive (in a good way!) “Best Music Across Genres” — Substack post
music supervisor Tiffany Anders “new to my ears 2024” — Spotify link
artist manager Josh Berman’s 50 Favorite Songs of 2024 — Spotify link
radio station program director Bruce Warren’s Best of 2024 — Spotify link
The Futurism Restated’s post introduced me to three ambient, spacey, experimental LPs by Kali Malone, Raphael Rogiński and upsammy. I appreciated Fluxblog’s sprawling 700+ track, 45-hour playlist for its almost unhinged level of comprehensiveness.
According to Wikipedia, it also hit number 32 on the easy listening charts.
15 musical things I had a profound connection to in 2024 (mostly new stuff & excluding music I work with in a professional capacity)
the death of Steve Albini
Chappell Roan "Pink Pony Club"
Xavi "La Diabla"
Kendrick Lamar "Not Like Us" + "tv off" (feat lefty gunplay)
Kim Gordon "BYE BYE"
Escape-ism "The Rebel Outlaw"
The Cure "Warsong"
Taylor Deupree "Snow/Sand (for Clarinets, Vibraphone, Cello & Percussion)
Bonny Light Horsemen "When I Was Younger"
Waxahatchee & MJ Lenderman "Right Back To It"
Taylor Ashton "Strong Hands" (feat. Rachael Price)
Oisin Leech Cold Sea (whole album)
Arooj Aftab "Whiskey"
Charlie Rich "Rollin' With The Flow" (1977)
Mermaid Chunky + Oren Ambarchi not a particular record by either artist, just intrigued by what they have going on generally speaking
Songs from all these artists are included on this month’s main playlist. This short list was created for Tiger Bomb, a radio promotions company I did a project with in 2024. The solicited dozens of indie music business people for their year-end favorites. Find the full list here. It’s…a lot (!) but if you want a deeply eclectic perspective on the year in music it’s a pretty intriguing list to scroll through.
The track released to announce Song of the Earth is a musical setting of the first paragraph from David Wallace-Wells book The Uninhabitable Earth. It is a bracing mission statement for the LP and an encapsulation of what we might face as a culture over the next few decades.
Dida Pelled “Sylvia (lost her sense of being a woman)”
TAXI KEBAB “Lmchi w Rjou3”
To be fair Charli herself invited Kamala to her table, but oh the think piece journalism we’ve had to endure.
If you’re more narratively-inclined, you might prefer this hour-long documentary portrait of the Havlovi by French filmmaker Vincent Moon. Either way, their music’s transportive power is up there with Mark Rothko and the Cocteau Twins, and equally deserving of the description “ethereal.”