Coda 2011: So, A Year for Musical Sadomasochists.

Cover art from M83's 2011 album Hurry Up, We're Dreaming.

I am so tired. I haven't gotten a full night's sleep in over a week. Every time I lay my head down to rest, my mind is gripped by thoughts of writing this blog. I am kept awake by the pains of 2011. So, instead of sleeping, I'm going to write, because that's what my mind demands.

I'm going to be blunt about this: 2011 was not a good year for music. For the last month I have been listening to almost nothing but music from 2011. It has not been an easy month for my ears. Of the nearly forty albums I've listened to from the year, I kid you not when I say the easiest one to listen through was Minecraft - Volume Alpha. Yes, C418's soundtrack of Minecraft was by far the easiest listening experience of 2011. And I think that may be what's keeping me up at night. How could a year in which so much music was released be so rough?! How is it possible that Minecraft - Volume Alpha may be the most consistent album of 2011? What the hell happened? Let's find out.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha by C418.

2011 was an "indie" year in every sense of the word. The rock was indie. The electronica was indie. The hip-hop was indie. The R&B was indie. It tore up the classic map for making music and forged its own path. And no where was that more clear than in hip-hop.

I'm going to save my breath about Jay-Z and Kayne West's Watch the Throne, even though it is easily one of the better albums of 2011. Because while Watch the Throne dominated year-end lists and record sales, there's nothing extraordinarily special about it. In fact, the power duo didn't capture the year the way a group of young skaters from California did. By the end of 2011 these kids would carve out their own corner in hip-hop - a space for punk-filled rage, off kilter flows, and sons abandoned by fathers - and they would do it under the name Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. 

The members of Odd Future stayed incredibly busy in 2011, making names for themselves the world over. Mike G, Hodgy, Left Brain, and Domo Genesis all made significant contributions to 12 Odd Future Songs, a collection of random OF tracks released in 2011. Tyler, the Creator released his debut studio album Goblin, a fiery mix of layered beats, humorous lyricism, and homophobic slurs. Frank Ocean forced the R&B world to pay attention to him with his debut mixtape nostalgia, ULTRA. Syd actually broke off from Odd Future in 2011 and started her own neo soul/hip-hop group that would bring her and fellow OF producer Matt Martians fame under the name The Internet. 2011 was the blow up year for nearly every member of Odd Future, and it highlighted a sudden shift towards alternative rap in the mainstream hip-hop community. 

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.

And alternative rap can be described, at best, as inconsistent. Danny Brown's 2011 album XXX is an incredible entry in the hip-hop realm, but it's far from consistent or appealing to the general public. Like I really fuck with "Blunt After Blunt," "Adderall Admiral," and  "I Will," but I'm also not sure they're even good songs. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're not good. And I like them a lot. So, take that for what you will. The same can be said for Shabazz Palaces and Das Racist, two other alternative hip-hop groups with "best of 2011" albums. 

But hip-hop wasn't a one-note genre. 2011 was a huge, and I mean huge, debut year for the next generation of hip-hop artists. Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Big Sean, Pusha T, Childish Gambino, and A$AP Rocky all released debut projects in 2011. When you factor in the year's debuts of Frank Ocean and The Weeknd as well, you're looking at the future of music. All eight of those artists are heavy weights in their genres, and more than a few of them are in contention for the greatest of all time. Unfortunately, while their futures would be bright, none of them released their best work in 2011 (obviously). Section.80 by Kendrick is fantastic, and it's safe to say that he took the title as the best lyricist in the industry after "Rigamortus," but it's not the strongest album by his standards. The same can be said for The Weeknd, A$AP Rocky, and Frank Ocean. Their mixtapes were good. But that's about it. For Pusha, Sean, and Childish, I won't even go so far as to say their albums were good. They were worse than Drake's Take Care, which I refuse to acknowledge as one of the better albums of 2011. (Because it might be, but it really shouldn't be. It is propelled forward by the weakness of the year.) Also, before we move on from hip-hop, I really need to point out that the best line of 2011 was Lil Wayne's, "Bitch, real Gs move in silence like lasagna." Let that sink in.

Okay, that's all. Moving on.

Amy Winehouse.

"We're going to turn now to a major loss in the music world tonight. The gifted singer, Amy Winehouse, found dead in her London home. She was just 27." 

Amy Winehouse was more than a "gifted singer," as David Muir suggested above in ABC's evening newscast on July 23rd, 2011. She was, in and of herself, a gift. She was an icon. Amy changed the way we look at pop and soul, using brash lyricism and pitch perfect bravado to fill the souls of millions. Frank is one of the best debut albums of the century, and though much can be said about Back to Black, nothing more needs to be said than it is simply one of the greatest albums of all time. Period.

And while 2011 saw the premature death of the global icon, it also saw Amy's influence live on in someone like her, a budding English pop/soul star who would come to be known by a single name: Adele.

No one owned 2011 quite the way Adele did. There are few people who can say they lived through 2011 without having been exposed to "Rolling in the Deep," "Someone Like You," "Rumour Has It," or "Set Fire to the Rain." Those songs were everywhere. She had multiple songs in Billboard's Top 25 year-end singles. Adele was a global sensation, smashing even Amy's records. The fact that all of those songs came off a single album (21) makes it all the more impressive. The album, now a classic of the 21st century, stands as a beacon of light in an everlastingly dark year. And the songs it produced outshone a painfully repetitive year on the radio.

Adele performing at the Royal Alpert Hall in 2011.

So, let's turn that radio on and see what's up, because I simultaneously love and despise the hits of 2011. Lemme preface this by saying that most of the time radio hits sound the same. It can be extremely difficult to tell artists apart when they're all making the same song over and over again. However, 2011 stands at a unique crossroads, where radio was excellent and every song sounded like it was made for the fucking club.

Seriously, it feels like every song from 2011 was bit by a dubstep bug, instantly remixing them into club songs. "Titanium," "On the Floor," "Lights," "We Found Love," "Super Bass," "Give Me Everything." Literally every single song became an electronic dance hit. Pitbull and David Guetta's phones must have been ringing off the hook in 2011. Ridiculous.

The thing is though, all of those songs kind of slap. Those singles weren't just catchy - they were good. Radio was still really fucking good. Or maybe, like alternative hip-hop songs, they weren't good, and we've just convinced ourselves they are. Maybe we find pleasure in just how bad they are. Let's take LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," for example. I, for one, really hate how catchy this song is. If I even hear the hook it'll be stuck in my head for like the next week. It's derivative and its verses are simply awful. There's nothing unique about it. And yet, I think it might just be a good song. It's certainly a successful song. It can be played on repeat. It's memorable. It was, after all, the second most played song of 2011, after Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." Could it be that "Party Rock Anthem" is actually a great bad song? I think so.

My ten picks of radio hits released in 2011.

Okay, that's enough radio. Let's go back to albums. In fact, let's go to indie rock, who I crowned as the dominant force of 2010. Indie rockers came back bigger, brasher, and more "indie" than the year before, looking once again to dominate. And, well, they didn't quite succeed the same way in 2011.

No offense to any indie artists or to their cultish fans, but I'm pretty sure I listened to the same 2011 indie rock album seven or eight times. Real Estate, Wild Flag, The Decemberists, Wilco, Destroyer, Radiohead, Girls. The list goes on. Now, not all of these indie rock albums were awful. I actually particularly enjoyed Father, Son, Holy Ghost by Girls, for example. However, none of these artists hit the level of consistency or innovation that the indie rockers of 2010 did. None, save for one group: Cults.

Cults' self-titled debut album is a banging, indie tour de force. It'll make you jump and dance and throw your hair around. It is, easily, the best indie album of 2011, and one of the better ones of the last decade. As I listened through indie album after indie album, it began to feel a little like trench warfare. You just put your head down and hope for a brief moment of rest, a moment where you can look up and breathe. That's Cults. Cults actually made me stop what I was doing and smile. It grabbed my attention, put a smile on my face, and stayed with me. And that's pretty powerful. 

My ten picks of album "deep cuts" from 2011.

I'd like to take a moment to actually stop bashing on 2011, and let all of the love I have for music pour out to the projects that are so often forgotten about. To this day I see lots of love for 2011 albums like Let England Shake by PJ Harvey, Take Care by Drake, and 4 by Beyoncé. But lest we forget that while these albums were... umm... fine, there are some absolutely amazing albums that have become lost in the tide of history. Bon Iver's 2011 self-titled album may be the worst album in their discography, but it's a melancholic tribute to homes and loves lost. Its tracks are beautifully soft spoken in a way that "Skinny Love" isn't, and because of that I think it's gotten swept away with time.

Another nearly perfect project lost in the annals of time is M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming. Now I'm not one to prop up French achievements. It actually irks me to do so. But if you give Hurry Up, We're Dreaming the amount of time and respect it's due, it's difficult to deny the brilliance of the French electronic group on this album. It may be, dare I say, the best double album of the last decade. Will it be remembered as such? Almost certainly not. But it should be. 

I pride myself on having a pretty thorough understanding of music and its history. But in doing this project, I have (of course) discovered so many new albums, songs, and artists that I've fallen in love with. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of Tune-Yards. On her 2011 album, w h o k i l l, Tune-Yards combined all of my favorite parts of funk, art pop, and noise music and made one of the best albums of all time. Yeah, I'm saying it. w h o k i l l is the closest to a perfect album I've heard in a long time. It is the epitome of a diamond in the rough. It shouldn't work. It is, in fact, difficult to listen to at times, but that's part of its charm. It's a chaotic, genre hopping mess, released in a year that seemed to bewitch every release, and yet it is astoundingly wonderful. I find it almost genuinely upsetting that I haven't had this album in my life for the last eight years, and if doing this project is what it took to have it for the rest of my life, well then - it was a fair trade.

A still from the "Bizness" music video by Tune-Yards.

Now, if you're wondering how you managed to live through 2011 without realizing just how dreadful the music was, it might be because you were tuned into your television instead, as I was. And if you were tuned into your TV, you may very well remember 2011 as a great year for music, because in those early summer months we were given the biggest musical reality show of the decade: The Voice.

It feels like The Voice has been around forever. It's going on its 17th season now. The only original judge that's still there is Blake Shelton, probably because it's by far the best thing to ever happen to his career. And the show that revolutionized the swivel chair simply feels played out at this point. But in 2011, The Voice was kind of a big deal. So, to honor such a major moment in music/TV history, I decided to go back and watch/listen to every winning performance from the first season of The Voice and ascertain, in a very definitive way, what the best performances were. Welcome to The Voice Bowl 2011.

I like top fives a lot. (I kind of like lists in general, to be honest. Maybe you've noticed?) So, I'm going to count down the Top Five Voice Performances of season one. Number five earns its spot simply because it's the first winner's audition. Like, how can you not include that in a top five? It's great. He deserved the win, and this is where the whole show really started.

Okay, so I don't want to inundate this blog with the actual video thumbnails to all of these performances, but this video thumbnail is just so badass. The whole performance is badass. The song choice is badass. Beverly is badass. This is the fourth best performance from that first season.

For these last three I'm going to link the studio versions of their songs, because their performances are hard to come across in quality. Also, because the studio versions are full songs, and that's just vastly superior. Anyway, here they are - the final three contenders.

Maybe you, like me, are shocked with how little Kanye West has been mentioned in this blog. Perhaps you thought you would make it an entire So blog without me shoving his musical achievements in your face. If you thought that, I'm sorry but you're wrong. The third best performance is by Dia Frampton, and it's a cover of Kanye's "Heartless." I won't go so far as to say that it's better than the original, but it's definitely an award-worthy spin on a classic song.



At first I couldn't believe how much I liked this next entry, the runner up in The Voice Bowl. It's a folky cover of Jessie J & B.o.B.'s 2011 pop hit "Price Tag." I was shocked by how much better than the original it is. Then I remembered that I'm actually a country boy at heart, and I have a sweet spot for covers, so it's really not that surprising. But holy fuck is it good.



Do you know the amount of emotional power one must have to cover a Florence + the Machine song? Cause I don't. I actually can't put into words how much power it must take to do Florence's voice justice. But Vicci Martinez, in just the inaugural season of The Voice, found the equation, and she did it in astonishing fashion. So congrats Vicci. You're the winner of The Voice Bowl 2011.



So, that's it. That's 2011. If it was painful for you, I do apologize, but I hope you at least found some pleasure in the pain, as I did. Now, maybe I'll be able to sleep. 𝄌

w h o k i l l by Tune-Yards, 21 by Adele, & Cults by Cults.

Author's note: You can find my 20 essential tracks of 2011 on Spotify if you search for Coda 2011. They are in a playlist in the order listed.