“Without music, life would be a mistake,” writes O.G. Krautrocker Freddy ‘Phat Mo’ Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, his substack on the entertainment industry. But walking my ears and soul back through 2024, I’m not so sure he’s right. Not straight up, anyway. In terms of the big end of town, the cash-money end, this hasn’t exactly been a bell-ringer of a year. What’d we get?
A country album from Beyonce.
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Which, yes, passes muster, and shows she can do it, and so on and so forth, and, gosh, well done Ms. Beyonce.
But in the hope of some grit, some sweat and tang, something tangible and legit, I click PLAY on this year’s discharges by Jelly Roll and Post Malone.
Oh mah lawd. Any real feelings on their albums are quickly overrun by generic, formulaic drivel.
What else did we have in ’24?
Let’s face the Taylor in the room. There was way too much of the saintly Taylor — she’s-going-to-save-every-one-of-us — Swift.
Billboard’s album charts opened the year topped by her 2023 director’s cut of 1989, her album from 2014. When that rehash died down and she was finally getting defeated in the sales war, Swift ran a celebrity-overload psyops campaign by dating a guy in the Super Bowl.
Then, having tea-bagged the ball-lovin’ Murican heartland, in May she seized the Billboard throne again with The Tortured Poets Department. Sometimes it feels that the only solution, the sole route to serenity in this third-rate annum, is running headlong through plate glass. Instead, however, I just mouth sorry to all Marilyn Manson’s allegedly wronged girlfriends and crank the fuck out of “The Beautiful People.”
Speaking of going nuts, our Black Fuhrer also topped the album charts this year, albeit in a “supergroup” duo with Ty Dolla $ign. I can love the music, art, or literature of someone whose political views or personal conduct appall me, but my problem with Vultures 1, the chart-topping collab (or Vultures 2, the non-chart-topping follow up) was that it just isn’t bonkers enough. Where are the masterfully what-the-fuck headspinners like “Wolves,” Kanye West’s artfully deranged gangsta-Maronite primordial fusion epic from 2016’s The Life of Pablo? This year’s effort is just … not as good.
Sometimes it feels like everyone is off the boil. So many albums are crowded with filler, even at the happening indie end. D’ya love Waxahatchee’s sublime duet with MJ Lenderman, “Right Back To It”? Yep, me too. Listened to the rest of the album and you’re … underwhelmed? Yep, me too! Meanwhile, once-potent forces like the Jam’s Paul Weller and Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett both ‘gifted’ us unnecessary long-plays.
Anyway, what does it matter. As Weller sang when he wasn’t phoning it in, “that’s entertainment.”
But there were high points in 2024. They just weren’t so much in the big room. They weren’t prime time. They were in smaller moments, like at a house party in Seattle’s University District watching the Black Ends work through impulses more given to psychological spasms than marketing.
Or in absorbing Laurie Anderson’s mesmerizing Amelia — her beauteous, immediate, dreaming of a woman whose courage took her into the void, and history. Or in getting down to the new male-gay glory-hole pop-opera album of Frenchwoman Rahim C. Redcar.
The cutting edge this year was … on the edge, as it so often is.
You might love our choices for the Year in Music. Or hate ’em. You might even want to catch us in the parking lot tonight to express your difference of opinion.
READ THE REST OF THE YEAR IN MUSIC!
Don’t call it a comeback (but it is)
Musicians of the year
Thing of the year
Please go home (we’ve had enough of these people)
Albums of the year
Songs of the year
Breakout artists of the year
The year of the CD
The Fyre Award: crappiest festival of the year
10 albums you should have heard but didn’t
The year in EDM
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
