In Better Than I Imagined, Meshell Ndegeocello fashions her spoken word portion of the song as a voice mail to her lover. Many parts of it stop me in my tracks, but in February of this year, as I waited impatiently for my name to be called in the vaccination lottery, I most appreciated her closing lines:
“I hope you’re okay. Staying inside. I hope you’re not lonely.”
It’s a prayer. It has been my prayer as we continue to navigate the pandemic. In the past, my hope for others was that they were thriving. As we entered month 12 of the pandemic (and now in month 22), my hopefulness had not waned, but it has become more grounded. I hope you’re safe. I hope you’re making good choices. I hope you’re finding joy in small things.
Better Than I Imagined by Robert Glasper and remixed by KAYTRANADA featuring H.E.R. and Meshell Ndegeocello is my song of the year because it represents how I’m feeling as 2021 comes to an end. It’s bold and reflective. There’s a lilt of melancholy, but it feels bursting with possibility in many ways. It’s grateful for even the challenging experiences. They are worthwhile in memory. The present, even as a new variant and rising cases will wreak havoc on our best-laid plans, is better than imagined.
The rest of my 2021 mixtape is like my Spotify music aura for these last 365 days: happy and bold. There are explorations into jazz (classic and modern), Nigerian pop, hip hop that made you want to nod your head and move your feet, and singers whose voices were infectious. It closes with Charlie Parker’s April in Paris: rekindled hope for the new year.
In a time when popular rap is so depressed or grim or vapid, the whole thing is a wake-up. It’s ENERGY! It’s clever. It’s Tyler at his best, most sure, and most whole, and I can’t help but grin while listening.
The other albums that brought me great joy and comfort this year weren’t all released in 2021 but were essential nonetheless:
As the lyrics begin in the video for Lockdown, Anderson .Paak stands with several other LA-based musicians whose work I admire. Their fists are raised. The names of far too many black people killed by police violence are used to make up the song title’s letters. Paak is wearing a black jersey with the word “riots” presented in the Los Angeles Sparks logo style.
It’s a night in late May or early June of this year. Protests have taken over this city in outrage over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer thousands of miles away. In this city, people scream out in anguish for the extrajudicial deaths at the hands of those tasked, in theory, to protect and serve us over the years. We’re a little over two months into the pandemic, and it’s too much.
It’s all too much. And so the people rise. Black Lives Matter signs go up in our well-appointed neighborhood, including by store owners with boarded-up windows hoping not to be painted with the same brush as those with the guns and the badge. We’re all complicit, though, aren’t we?
Far too often, we vote blindly or with our pocketbooks in mind. We pay little attention to how the city makes decisions. We’re unaware of how it metes out the spoils of government funding or the processes it employs to do so. In any other time, we’d be more concerned with where we needed to get to next than the death of yet another black person.
Any other year, the city would have a more significant complaint about the inconvenience of civil unrest and anguish than the roots of that pain and the merits of those demands.
It was a lockdown, and yet the people were rising. I wasn’t downtown, but maybe I should’ve been.
“We present our first ‘Untitled’ album to mark a moment in time where we, as Black People and of Black Origin, are fighting for our lives. RIP George Floyd and all those who have suffered from police brutality and systemic racism.
Change is happening…We are focused. ”
— Sault
Sault first came on to my radar last year around this time as I explored Best Of lists. I believe they were included on several KCRW DJ lists for their first two very dance encouraging albums, “5” and “7”.
Sault delivered two more albums in 2020, “Untitled (Black is)” and “Untitled (Rise)”. The former was released on Juneteenth with the statement I quoted above released on Twitter as it’s primary promotional effort.
Any time a song from any of their albums shuffles into my ears, I’m compelled to binge their rapidly expanding and impressive discography.
Not only is their music right for this moment in time, but it also seems to be a time traveler. There is a cosmic funk retro sensibility mixed with a constant push through the boundaries like afrofuturistic music explorers.
It’s how I wanted to feel in 2020: present, thoughtful, wise, and focused on the future.
And Little Dragon, as they have for nearly 15 years, light up my brain and heart and spirit with their sounds. Always in new ways but still the same them.
“Miss me with that bullshit. You ain’t really wild, you a tourist. I be blackin’ out with the purest.”
— Kendrick Lamar
Unapologetically black. That’s how I liked my music this year. Not just black, per se, (though that was where my head was tbh) but unapologetically whatever it was trying to be. That could be unapologetically pop. Unapologetically fun. Unapologetically woke. Whatever. Just make me feel like it’s real, that I’m real, that who I am and what I am is not only okay but brilliant.
King’s Dead did that for me from its very first notes. Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, James Blake, and Future with my favorite of all the songs on the epic Black Panther Album (Music from and Inspired by the Movie) is ultimately a villain’s anthem but one that reeks of authenticity. It sounds like California. Black California from the bay to the South of LA. When Jay Rock says, “My name gon’ hold up. My team gon’ hold up,” I feel that shit.
My last.fm charts will say that All the Starz from the same album is my top track, but it’s treating King’s Dead from the Black Panther album and Jay Rock’s Redemption as two separate tracks. Combined, it’s close to 100 spins.
The 2018 Mixtape
My methodology this year for figuring out my faves was to look at each month separately rather than focus on my listens in aggregate though those numbers were a secondary factor. My mixtape reflects my favorite song of each month from January through November as well as my favorite discovery.
I like this approach better because it acknowledges the rhythms of time more than the inertia of routine and the impact of the Spotify algorithms on my listening behavior. So instead of seeing a playlist dominated by a few albums and artists, you’ll hear some tracks that I forgot I loved right next to the records that I played the hell out of for a few weeks at a time. There’s a little symmetry here as well with a song featuring Sza—artist of my favorite track of 2017—and ends with a song by Janet Jackson who I have admired since I was knee-high and who just got nominated for the Rock & Roll hall of fame. She’s still got it.
The Albums
I haven’t looked at many of the end-of-year lists yet, so I don’t know what the consensus is around the top releases though I’m guessing some of my faves like Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy are on them. I know they are both GRAMMY nominated for Album of the Year. They weren’t my very top albums this year despite trying hard to convince myself otherwise.
Black Panther—both the compilation mentioned above and the Ludwig Göransson score—set the tone for everything I would listen to for the rest of the year. It primed me for Jay Rock’s full length, an artist I wasn’t checking for before King’s Dead and his instant anthem WIN which was the theme for the LA Sparks season well before it was played at nearly every sporting event the rest of the year. The score re-ignited my interest in film compositions which led to an April filled with the soundtracks to Arrival and Annihilation and Westworld and many a Black Mirror episode. Combined, Kendrick Lamar’s curated playlist for the best black popcorn movie ever released and that score was the best thing going all year. Full stop.
Beyond that, I enjoyed grown folks hip hop from Beyoncé and her husband and Phonte. I liked expansive sounds from The Midnight Hour and Abstract Orchestra, clever reworks from Kelela, and a pretty perfect pop album from Ariana Grande who is, perhaps, an even more interesting artist than she is a celebrity. She, too, is figuring out how to be unapologetically herself with each release.
For better or worse, I fell whole hog into streaming music this year as Spotify’s player is just so convenient. I don’t think I’ve purchased less music than I have in 2012 in my adult life. That said, I think it’s important to pay for the things you love or because of scarcity—that does work record industry (if it’s good)—so these are the albums I bought this year in some kind of order of magnitude that gets fuzzier the further down the list you get.
Channel ORANGE is my album of the year. Frank Ocean‘s debut haunts my mind and has since the moment it was available on iTunes. It is so rare that a creative work lives up to hype and controversy but this exceeds that. I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite song from the set but Sweet Life and Super Rich Kids (and Pyramids and Lost and Thinking about You and Bad Religion and Crack Rock and on and on) have often been the songs I catch myself randomly singing.
Beyond his album, Mr. Ocean, though, also represents a lot of what appealed to me this year in music. I enjoyed west coast, thoughtful, identity-driven music like that coming from the Black Hippy Crew or Macklemore and Lewis. The Heist which features Same Love is also a reflection of how much queer-focused music was in my ears these last 12 months whether it was Zebra f’n Katz or Ab Soto or Big Freedia or LE1F whose Dark York I just downloaded this morning after finding myself dancing to the Liquid EP by him and Boody earlier this week.
And then, of course, there were the artistes who are always pushing their genres forward. Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, Meshell Ndegeocello, Fiona Apple, Flying Lotus, and Solange all did that well in 2012.
The Hunger Games was my favorite soundtrack this year (and my favorite movie) but Beasts of the Southern Wild and Skyfall also have that kind of instrumental music conducive to getting in a rhythm at work or with a book.
And I shouldn’t forget the catchy tracks that end up topping my actual charts because they end up on my workout mixes. Shout-out to Maybach Music Group and Radio Disney faves like Carly Rae and Bieber and internet sensations like Gangnam Style and Hot Cheetos and Takis.
Honorable mention to Miguel and Usher and Brandy who all made really solid R&B albums that I have yet to see fit to purchase yet.
