When Funkadelic sang “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock” on its 1978 LP One Nation Under a Groove, the group was making a declaration of artistic independence. Nearly two decades later, though, this statement sounds nearly prophetic. Given today’s musical climate, the song serves as a cautionary tale about how clinging to hidebound categories can drain pop music of its strength and vitality.
Indeed, instead of embracing P-Funk’s expansive musical vision, most of today’s pop music conforms to commercially viable yet artistically bankrupt radio and video formats. As a result, the country charts are dominated by cookie-cutter hat acts, and the FM airwaves are glutted with generically angst-ridden “modern rock” bands. And even though gangsta rap should be on the outs—given Dr. Dre’s recent musical change of direction and the untimely deaths of Tupac and Easy-E—cartoonish gangstas still dictate hip-hop credibility.
Yet despite the banality that characterizes so much of today’s pop music, 1996 saw the release of many good records. The best and most enduring came from artists who ignored—or consciously pushed—prevailing musical boundaries, people for whom making music is as much a means of ordering, enduring, or repudiating their worlds as it is a way of making a living.
Most of the performers whose records made my top 10 list also explored distinctive rhythmic hybrids. Fugees, Everything But The Girl, Joe Henry, Tricky, and Sandra St. Victor all merged pop, rock, and/or soul with some form of dance-based music, be it techno, jungle, reggae, or hip-hop, while Beck and Cibo Matto also threw in the kitchen sink. Each in their own way proved that George Clinton’s vision of one nation under some sort of groove may still exist, but it’s not an altogether idealistic one.
Top 10 albums
1. Fugees, The Score (Ruffhouse/Columbia) Say what you will about the Fugees, but on the strength of three undeniable singles and a dazzling, history-conscious live show, this Haitian-American trio has sold over 5 million albums and proven that hip-hop can be a commercial, artistic, and positive moral force in pop music. The Score has everything—melodies, beats, the beguiling vocals of singer/MC Lauryn Hill. More than that, though, the record affirms that you don’t have to be hard to be strong. That’s what I call alternative.
2. Everything But The Girl, Walking Wounded (Atlantic) Drum ’n’ bass, a variant of jungle that didn’t hit U.S. shores until late last year, is everywhere now. But unless you’re a deejay or you spend your time in dance clubs, you’re probably playing catch-up—if you’re even listening at all. Walking Wounded finds EBTG rendering drum ’n’ bass accessible to homebodies like me, perhaps because the record subordinates the recombinant virtues of the genre to Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn’s unfailing pop instincts. I didn’t hear a more enchanting, rhythmically dynamic record all year. Thorn conveys more emotion in a single syllable than just about anybody singing today.
3. Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor (Chainsaw) Olympia, Wash., riot grrls Sleater-Kinney rail against the tyrannical values and institutions that silence and commodify people who don’t follow the norm. But Call the Doctor is more than just a bitter pill to swallow. Song for song, its jagged punk anthems make for a stronger collection of Pink Flag-inspired originals than Elastica’s debut LP last year. And don’t think Corin Tucker is being naïve when she sings “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”—she knows that becoming a rock ’n’ roll queen may mean throwing off one oppressive yoke for another.
4. Joe Henry, Trampoline (Mammoth) Ex-Uncle Tupelo coleader and current Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy spent much of the year hyping the emperor’s new alt-rock and disowning his previous recorded efforts. Meanwhile, fellow former alterna-country-rocker Joe Henry quietly made a record that lives up to Tweedy’s bullshit about new musical directions. From hip-hop beats to ambient textures, Trampoline synthesizes virtually everything on the pop music horizon and manages, with unassuming brilliance, to sound utterly unique.
5. Beck, Odelay (DGC) Odelay proves the merits, not to mention inevitability, of cultural recycling. When Beck sings, “It takes a backwash mind to sing a backwash song,” he revives Woody Guthrie’s “Worried Man Blues” to express the unrest of his generation in the same way that Guthrie adapted the Carter Family’s Depression-era lament to give voice to the struggles of dust-bowl refugees. And what is “Where It’s At” but a rewrite of “Chicken Shack Boogie” for the hip-hop era? Some argue that Beck’s junk-shop pastiche betrays a lack of originality. But at this point in the pop-music game, the point isn’t whether something’s been said before, but whether it’s being said in new and interesting ways. In Beck’s grimy hands, recycling becomes redemption.
6. Tricky, Pre-Millennium Tension (Island) Recorded in Jamaica, Tricky’s latest finds him descending further into the netherworld of dub music. Pre-Millennium Tension is harder and leaner than its predecessor—more hip-hop than trip-hop. But it’s equally corrosive, though Tricky obsesses less on his dystopian world view and more on his claustrophobic celebrity. Increasingly paranoid and self-indulgent, his is nonetheless the most necessary voice in pop music right now.
7. Amy Rigby, Diary of a Mod Housewife (Koch) Elliott Easton’s Fleetwood-Ronstadt production takes some warming up to, but Rigby’s solo debut is hardly a sham. Rarely has a singer-songwriter so poignantly and wittily taken up with the entanglements of domesticity, especially the struggle to keep one’s dreams and dignity alive at the onset of middle age. “20 Questions” and “Beer and Kisses” are relationship songs for the ages.
8. Tom House, Inside These Walls (raw bone) A prolific poet and self-described barroom singer, Nashvillian Tom House has been a mainstay of Springwater’s Working Stiff Jamboree ever since he and a handful of disaffiliated left-wingers established the open-mic night more than a decade ago. An unsung and visionary talent, House creates old-timey guitar melodies that belie the fierce and pervasive populist streak of his material. This is House’s self-released debut, and it would be a crime if more people didn’t hear his music; it’s time an independent label like Rounder—or even Red House or Drag City—offered him a recording contract.
9. Cibo Matto, Viva! La Woman (Warner Bros.) This female Japanese-American duo understands well the psychosexual grip that food exercises over women in our culture. But rather than surrender to socialization, they overthrow it with this fantastic odyssey through the worlds of food, sex, and power. Meanwhile, their musical recipes—which include beats, grooves, left-field samples, and found sounds—expand the guitar-based vocabulary of indie and alternative rock to say something new.
10. Sandra St. Victor, Mack Diva Saves the World (Warner Bros.) Latter-day soul men Tony Rich and Maxwell have nothing on St. Victor, whose solo debut expresses a black feminism that’s broad and deep enough to embrace well-rounded men (“MPH!”), great sex (“Wet”), and the Million Man March (“Chocolate”). Without a doubt, this is 1996’s funky, streetwise answer to Waiting to Exhale.
The Next Ten
11. Los Lobos, Colossal Head (Warner Bros.) Not quite up to the epochal Los Lobos-offshoot Latin Playboys, the East L.A. combo’s latest nonetheless finds them extending their mind-boggling fusion of pop, rock, jazz, blues, and Latin music. No one performing today plays with this much consistency of imagination and abandon.
12. The Roots, Illadelph Halflife (DGC) I prefer the Max Roach-meets-Ziggy Modeliste kick of their live-sounding debut, but this Philadelphia crew unquestionably remains one of the bright spots of hip-hop’s future.
13. East River Pipe, Mel (Merge) Shimmering indie pop that would have broken Big Star founder Chris Bell’s cosmic heart.
14. Lambchop, How I Quit Smoking (Merge) The most original thing happening in country music right now, this is the New Nashville Sound.
15. Amy Allison, The Maudlin Years (Koch) Allison’s voice is an acquired taste, but after a handful of listens, her tragicomic songs of heartbreak and romance—steeped as much in ’60s country as in Brill Building pop—prove her to be a performer of singular vision and talent.
16. Fluffy, Black Eye (The Enclave) 1996 may have marked the 20-year reunion of the Sex Pistols (yawn), but British female foursome Fluffy revived the Pistols’ punk self-loathing better than anyone else all year. “I woke up in a bed of vomit,” they sing on “Technicolour Yawn.” “I think I hate myself/I woke up in a bed of vomit/I lost my pink wig and I’m in hell.”
17. Stereolab, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Elektra) The pleasures of Stereolab’s sweet, droning noise-bursts have always sounded a bit abstract to me, but now that they’ve pushed the groove more into the forefront, I finally hear what people are raving about.
18. BR5-49 (Arista) BR5-49’s studio debut isn’t as edgy as it might have been, but it still entertains and swings plenty.
19. Gillian Welch, Revival (Almo Sounds) Welch’s breathtakingly gorgeous Americana will gain even more resonance once she starts singing about her own life and experience.
20. Robbie Fulks, Country Love Songs (Bloodshot) More than the contrivance of a neo-honky-tonk opportunist, future classics “The Buck Stops Here” and “We’ll Burn,” along with Fulks’ punk iconoclasm, make his debut one of the most forward-looking evocations of the Bakersfield Sound to come along in years.
Singles
1. Pulp, “Common People” (Island)
2. Fugees, “Ready or Not” (Ruff-house/Columbia)
3. Beck, “Where It’s At” (DGC)
4. Geraldine Fibbers, “House Is Falling” (Virgin)
5. Busta Rhymes, “Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check” (Elektra)
6. Imperial Teen, “Imperial Teen” (Custom .45s)
7. Steve Earle, “Hard-Core Troubadour” (E-Squared/Warner Bros.)
8. Folk Implosion, “Natural One” (London)
9. Jason & the Scorchers, “Drugstore Truck Drivin’ Man” (Mammoth)
10. Cypress Hill, “Illusions” (Ruffhouse/ Columbia”)
