—Darlin' You're Sweet
TOP ALBUMS OF 2011
And so, we’ve reached the end of the year and it’s time for the annual roundup of the year’s albums. This year’s total number came out to 46, for some reason. We’ll be counting down the albums to number one this whole month.
18. Goblin - Tyler the Creator
Probably the song that tells you most about the kind of rapper Tyler the Creator is isn’t even on Goblin - it’s on Bastard, his release from last year and his debut onto the market, which has probably been overlooked in the height of “Yonkers,” maybe Tyler’s only song that’s reached the mass media. That song is “AssMilk,” and it’s because of the complete comparison to Earl Sweatshirt that shows the differences between the two and defines Tyler. EARL, which was Earl’s debut last year, has a certain flow to it that makes Earl such a desirable rapper: he’s sixteen, he’s creating music that seems to simplistic for him. He can create rhymes that feel so effortless, but so complete at the same time. I would go as far as to call him the best rapper out there right now, and he’s gone, apparently. It’s probably because of this that the face of Odd Future has changed dramatically, and made the chasm between the type of rap Earl releases and Tyler releases grow even bigger. On “AssMilk,” you can tell the complete difference between Earl and Tyler - Tyler has to try a lot harder. He attacks his raps with an effort unmatched by pretty much any rapper, and you can see it mostly in the song “Splatter” on Radical, the Odd Future mixtape released last year as well - he’s literally sweating into the microphone. And the fact that one group can encompass both extremes of the spectrum is a success in its own right, and Odd Future deserves all the praise its getting. Sure, their audience is essentially white kids who want to listen to something hard, but Odd Future is changing the scene of rap in a way that no other rap group or rapper for that matter can. If Kanye and Jay are changing the scene from the other end, successful cemented rappers, Tyler is doing it in the other way, jumping off the deep end and seeing what happens. And by that token, Goblin is an incredible album, because it challenges you in every sense. We have a character whose stuck in his own head, much like Kanye, but struggling his way up as opposed to struggling while already up there. There’s something immediately pleasing about Bastard and the early Odd Future releases, but Goblin is the antithesis to that, in that it has to presuppose a world where Odd Future is famous, and probably for the wrong reasons.
At the heart of all of that, obvious, is “Yonkers,” which is Tyler’s best track by far. The video that accompanies it is pretty much perfect as well, maybe because it is the standard Odd Future track and video. There’s an appeal to videos like “She” and “Bitch Suck Dick,” but those are jokes compared to the realism of “Yonkers.” As a producer, Tyler is ahead of his era, and as a rapper, he’s completely aware of what he’s seen as. And “Yonkers” nails it right on the head. It’s the driving force of the album, and pretty much weighs it down in the end, whereas Bastard was a complete piece in itself. In that regard, Bastard is far better than Goblin, but Goblin is much darker than the already dark Bastard. As it reaches its finale, you almost don’t want to listen because of how dark it gets, on tracks like “Window” and “Golden.” The album does fall apart in that respect, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing because when his next album, Wolf, is released, he’ll have to atone for that. But apart from that, as the middle of his trilogy of albums, Goblin is exactly what it has to be. It’s dark, it’s his Empire Strikes Back. And maybe that’s not the right comparison, but it finds itself with no resolution just as it finds itself already in conflict once it begins.
The album does have its flow, though, and it’s probably seen most as it enters into its comfortably on “Radicals,” and the fact that Tyler can put out a seven middle long track with this intensity is a challenge that works. ” There are moments on that track that completely work, and it’s what Tyler is, essentially: “Fuck cops, I’m a fucking rock star, rabble in defiance makes my motherfuck cock hard,” he yells, and any other rapper you’d hate to hear this from, but from him you wouldn’t want to hear anything else. People will hate this, but people will also love it. There’s something the chant: “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school - I’m fucking radical” that can’t be beat, and Tyler knows that. “She” also follows this same line of logic of being exactly what it needs to be, as does the following few tracks that essentially fall together until we hit “Tron Cat,” probably the strongest rap performance by Tyler here. “Sandwitches,” which essentially launched Odd Future forward after doing it live on Jimmy Fallon, is exactly what you’d expect from the group as well. And there’s a lot of talk about being exactly what you’d expect, and that’s the only fault of Goblin - it isn’t that push forward. Sure, it’s changing everything, but not in the way Bastard did: Bastard was kind of like a “holy shit” album, while Goblin is a “fuck yeah” album. And that’s what comes from fame. It might not be as emotionally moving as Bastard, but it does make you want to break shit. There are songs that work in the favor of Tyler, like “Fish/Boppin’ Bitch,” which finds itself slowed down just enough so that you can play it over and over and like it even more and more - “Tyler swiftly sticks his dick inside of Taylor Swift” - again, anywhere else, you’d hate this, but here you love it.
Tyler wants people to hate him, he wants people to think, he wants to appear sad and convoluted and he wants to cause a scene, and every other young rapper wants to be him. And so maybe he does want all of those things, but he wants them because it brings him closer to the end game of the rap he’s trying to produce, whereas the other rappers want it because they think its what people want. Tyler has an honest and intensity about him and is incredibly appealing - it’s what makes him the best new artist, etc. Earl is the opposite - you want to know everything about him because he’s that prodigy that is like nothing else, but Tyler is the one who works so goddamn hard that what he’s putting out has to be this good. He’s an icon in his own head just as much as he is to everyone else. The comparisons to Kanye are ones that make sense, when you realize that inside rappers like this, there’s something going on that’s much bigger than everything external. And personally, there’s nothing better than discovering that along with him.
17. These Wings EP - Wise Blood
If you listen to Wise Blood’s EP from last year, ’+’, you probably got a bad idea of what Wise Blood is about. That EP is a different monster than These Wings, and it’s probably a disappointing thing at first. There was an immediate appeal to the rough edges of songs like “B.I.G. E.G.O.” that can’t be matched in the cleaned up sound of These Wings, and on first listen, the new EP sounds like a downgrade. Yes, Wise Blood’s Chris Laufman is a guy sampling music and singing over it, songs like “When The Levee Breaks” and other catchy-ass tunes, but there’s something more to his music. Maybe it’s his personality shining through: to hear him interviewed, he sounds like a madman trapped within religion and pop culture and his own mind. And These Wings is an expression of that, a look deeper into his soul that only moments on ’+’ gave us, like on songs “Mi + Amore,” when you can’t exactly hear what he’s saying, but you know it means more than most other music you’ve been hearing.
It’s most apparent on “Darlin’ You’re Sweet,” which I add to the list of best songs put out these year. It’s not exactly the most pleasant sounding, but after you get over how beautiful it does in fact sound, you begin to listen to the words and realize that at the heart of all this, Laufman is a poet. The song is a love letter, but a love letter that says, “I’m too much for you.” It’s a concept rarely breached, and if I could transcribe all the words here, I would (ex: “I start to crash in the night, ooh, darlin’ you’re sweet”) but the main thesis is an honest statement that isn’t put out in music these days, or really ever. The rest of the EP falls under the spell of this track, that reaches right into Laufman and the listeners’ hearts and says exactly what it needs to say. “Loud Mouths,” the single off the EP, follows suit in its own way, probably being the most catchy on the EP and the most immediately likable. It’s a strong change from “B.I.G. E.G.O.” and company, but the step up in sound quality isn’t necessarily a bad thing, its just a different thing. The rest of the album flows together as well, essentially all as one track, and you kind of realize that at this point in Wise Blood’s career, it’s the most apparent thing that can be put out. “Nosferatu” is a realistic approach to all this, the scariest song on the album, and the one that really speaks to this application of Wise Blood in the real world. “The Lion” is a laugh at all that, but “Fantasize (Intro)” is a looping success, rooted in the lines “I was born in the nile, next to John and to James,” which is a repeated page for the ever-religious Laufman, who mixes this with talking about killing kids and etc. He’s a puzzling figure at that, but again, he’s part of the appeal of Wise Blood. At this point in time, a full-length from Wise Blood seems practically unimaginable. But then again, so did These Wings, and here we are with an EP that struggles with us just as much as it gives to us.
