The Year in Review

Real-Life Power Puff Girls Three bands of fem action heroes flexed mightily this year: Northern State, a trio of liberal, well-heeled MCs from Long Island; Fannypack, a street-smart, multi-culti tag team of Brooklyn singing-rappers; and Puffy AmiYumi, a pair of rock semiotics savants from Tokyo. Each made some of the catchiest, most undeniable recordings of ’03, and each came armed with a TV-ready theme song: “Trinity” (Northern State), “The Theme From Fannypack” and “Teen Titans” (Puffy). “So Stylistic” is the way that a spongy dub workout by Fannypack put it—and how.

Alternative Country? 2003 was the year Music Row trumped alt-country at its own game. Patty Loveless made a mountain-pop classic that eclipses anything in Alison’s or Gillian’s catalog. Tony Brown and Tim DuBois put out a Louvin Brothers tribute that rivals the best of Gram and Emmylou. George Strait made a Texas dancehall record for the ages, while Toby and Hank Jr. released nuanced throwdowns worthy of the Bottle Rockets. Vince and a half-dozen upstarts did themselves proud too, but best of all was Brooks & Dunn’s Red Dirt Road (Arista), a country-soul wonder that has all the rootsy “authenticity” Uncle Tupelites crave—punch, heart and loads of the requisite retro sonic allusions. Had alt-country spawned an album as totemic as Red Dirt Road—and as filled with transcendence and grace—it indeed might have become the next big thing.

Year of the Blues Sure, the glut of reissues that greeted the Congress-appointed “Year of the Blues” was swell, even if the cultural imperialism inherent in all the “secret history of rock ’n’ roll” marketing was galling. And the less said about the Scorsese series on PBS, the better. But the real testimony to the durability and elasticity of the blues were the new releases by the likes of Eric Bibb, Howard Tate, Robert Cray, Johnnie Taylor, James Blood Ulmer and, especially, Betty Lavette, whose A Woman Like Me (Blues Express) might be the best contemporary blues album since Cray’s Strong Persuader.

Olympia Vernon, Eden (Grove Press) Gritty doesn’t begin to describe Vernon’s Eden, a gripping first novel about a 14-year-old girl from rural Mississippi and her embattled female elders. Redolent of the rawboned recordings of Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson, Vernon’s visceral prose commingles dirt, blood and other human stains to convey a haunting, and often erotic, sense of the blues as lived.

Dan Baum, “Jack Leg,” The New Yorker, Sept. 15 The most absorbing piece of writing about music I read this year wasn’t a feature about a band or a record review, but a voluminous study in pharmaco-ethnomusicology that appeared in The New Yorker. In “Jack Leg,” Dan Baum traces the spread of a palsy-inducing epidemic cited in prewar recordings by everyone from Gene Autry to The Mississippi Sheiks. Also known as “jake walk,” the condition was attributed to the ingestion of a cost-cutter brew of Prohibition-era patent medicine consumed mainly by drifters and poor folk in the South and out West. The piece isn’t just a dazzling bit of writing and detective work; it serves as haunting testimony to the misery that invariably attends poverty—and to how it so often gets swept under the rug.

Second Helping? Critics heralded 2003 as a Southern rock renaissance par excellence, but apart from the Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day (New West), a grungy, empathetic beacon worthy of Street Survivors, don’t believe the hype. Critical faves My Morning Jacket sound less like a Southern Radiohead than like Neil Young fronting the Moody Snooze. And the much ballyhooed Kings of Leon are all right, in a Foghat sort of way—that is, except when they slow the boogie down, at which point they devolve into Savoy Brown. Or is it Golden Earring? At least the Bottle Rockets are back, not that they’re Southern or anything.

God and Globalization in Hip-Hop On Spirit in Stone (Quannum Projects), good-humored Oregon rap trio Lifesavas push God, life and decency and rarely get preachy; it helps that they have the beats—hard and steadfast, with dollops of jazz and dancehall—to back it all up. On Wooden Leather (Atlantic), Bowling Green’s Nappy Roots take their barnyard rap worldwide, siding with hard-pressed people everywhere, just as liberation theologians promise God does. Damn positive, all around.

James Wood, The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Thomas Bunting, the protagonist of this often riotous novel of ideas, is a lapsed Ph.D. candidate and compulsive liar whose crisis of faith has him secretly compiling a tome arguing that the existence of suffering means God must be a monster—or dead. It’s only with the death of his human father, a theology professor turned Anglican vicar, that Bunting starts gaining a measure of second sight, in the process giving lie to his secret project—as well as this novel’s title.