D.L. Anderson

That's ee-vayr to you, Nicki Minaj.

​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Greetings to you four from Bloomington, Indiana, a happening college town perhaps one or more of you have flown over at some point. It's the birthplace of Hoagy Carmichael and David Lee Roth, and the home of John Mellencamp and Jagjaguwar Records, a label which this year released an album called Bon Iver, Bon Iver that you may have heard of. Most critics liked it, some liked it a lot, Rosie O'Donnell wanted more, pop lovers and rockists alike united to sneer at the smoothness of his album's textures and its ostensibly outré signifiers (I prefer the first album, but am a sucker for the Bruce Hornsby vibes of "Beth/Rest"). At the time of writing, 317,375 music fans have purchased it—40,000 more than Fleet Foxes, 40,000 less than LMFAO. Yet once the album was nominated for several Grammys last month, lots of people microcasted their ignorance of this album on Twitter. Quickly, another person culled this proudly professed ignorance into a Tumblr called "Who Is Bon Iver?" A member of a long-dormant Australian DJ concern accused him of "selling out" for lending his increased profile to something so horrifying as a whiskey concern, even though the accuser's own group hypocritically endorses deadly mountain calamities.

So what happened? Did the Bro From Eau Claire break through, or is he still a secret? If you follow music on the internet with any regularity, you couldn't go a day without hearing about him, but if you don't, there's a good chance you don't have any idea how to pronounce the name, and wait, the white guy from Kanye's album made his own album and everyone loves it apparently? To Twitter! It's clear why Bon Iver in 2011, just like Arcade Fire in 2010, made ripples critically, popularly, and awardishly—they fit long-established rock tropes into a modern, gently hip, and well-executed form. And it's also clear that this is happening at a point when with very few exceptions, good weird rock music is the last thing you expect to hear released by a music label owned by a multinational corporation.

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Colin Stetson
Glasslands Gallery
Sunday, April 17

Better than: Plan A, whatever the hell that was...

Colin Stetson didn't play on every track of the Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, but it's both fortuitous and ironic that the saxist contributed to "Suburban War", the wistful song in which Win Butler tosses off the following line: "Now the music divides us into tribes/You choose your side, I'll choose my side." Fortuitous, because let's face it, how many sax expressionists get to play on the Album Of The Year, to say nothing of going on to open up the road show for the band that made it? The ironic part is perhaps more pointed, though: Stetson's career has taken off because he seems to have steadfastly not chosen any sides. It's true that at first glance the crowd coming to Williamsburg for a late Sunday triple-bill capped by Stetson's solo reed recital may seem somewhat tribal--cut from Win Butler's claque--but Stetson's music is a clear indication that he cadges inspiration from many; he's also worked with Tom Waits, TV On The Radio, Bon Iver and the African-inspired Judaica-rock combo the Sway Machinery.

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​Good news: The music industry is starting to sell more records in 2011. Bad news: They're Now compilations and Justin Bieber remix records. The latter takes Billboard's top spot from the former this week, with Never Say Never: The Remixes selling a brisk 161,000 copies, and why not, since Never Say Never: The Movie is such a hoot. At #2, we see a continued robust Grammy bounce . . . for Mumford and Sons. Yes, that mega-rasping hoedown clusterfuck with Bob Dylan won people over. Imagine if they'd won Album of the Year.

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This picture is from Arcade Fire's Tumblr, where it's captioned "Win jumping up and down, thanking the world." Because why wouldn't it be?

​Radiohead may have already surpassed last night's Grammys as the au currant news of an indie-rock world that is all of a sudden drowning in good tidings, but--despite already having written an epic liveblog and a near-instantaneous 46-word think piece--we're not quite ready to let last night's bizarre spectacle go. Because, you know, ARCADE FIRE. Also, other things (like, say, Gang Starr's Guru, inexplicably omitted from last night's "In Memoriam" montage in favor of a bunch of entertainment lawyers). And so, below, Zach Baron and Rob Harvilla go one more round on the whole What It All Means, or Should We Even Be Asking That Question? question.

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Via you-know-who

​So. Arcade Fire won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Maybe you heard about it. And maybe you are aware that this is a momentous occasion, an unprecedented generational coup, a Barbra Streisand-delivered clarion call that launched a thousand think pieces on the Death/Triumph of Indie. This is one of the first. But don't worry, it's real short.

Ahem:

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​"The whole chart thing is kind of like sports," said an unimpressed Merge label chief Laura Ballance, back when Arcade Fire hit #1 on the Billboard charts. That may well be true. But if selling records is like sports, Arcade Fire are weirdly good at it, considering they're a bunch of spindly indie-rockers with weird haircuts in marching band clothing. For one, the Grammys just announced that, following up on the band's nomination for album of the year (where they'll go up against Eminem, Katy Perry, Lady Antebellum, and Lady Gaga), they've invited the band to perform at the ceremony, which takes place early next month. As long as they keep the Jonas Brothers offstage while this happens, this should be a wonderful moment. For another thing, it turns out the band's #1 debut was a harbinger of a very respectable sales year. From Eric Harvey's rundown of sales numbers for Pitchfork's 2010 top 50 albums:

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​Not every great song this year was released by Katy Perry. From a snarling avant-electro NPR lecture to a haunted-house posse cut to a ludicrously profane viral sensation, here are 10 examples. "Teenage Dream" might still be better than all of these, though. Better get this started before I change my mind.

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Welcome to Sound of the City's year-in-review rock-critic roundtable, an amiable ongoing conversation between five prominent Voice critics: Rob Harvilla, Zach Baron, Sean Fennessey, Maura Johnston, and Rich Juzwiak. We'll be here all week!

Happier times for us all

​My friends,

It's the conflict-averse, namby-pamby Midwesterner in me that's triggering this urge to defend every artist this panel has so far attacked. Quite a list we've got going so far, guys!

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​It's been quite a day so far for incredibly detailed statistical analysis that I barely understand: I'm still puzzling over this "Complete Map of Optimal Tic-Tac-Toe Moves," and am barely more literate when it comes to parsing friend-of-SOTC and noted Voice jazz guru Tom Hull's master chart of records with the most year-in-review mentions so far, culled from Metacritic, individual blogs, and so forth. The results may not necessarily surprise you. As Tom notes, "My guess is that about 80% of the blogger lists are from young white guys, and that has its effect. Most professional critics fit that demographic too, so you're stuck with that." Therefore, this, for the moment, is the Top 10 you're stuck with:

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Ah M.I.A., it just wasn't your year, was it? Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.

​In 2010, Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire both had #1 records. LCD Soundsystem, Spoon, MGMT, the National, M.I.A, and Sufjan Stevens all had albums debut in the top ten. Kanye West joined Twitter. Drake started a riot in New York. Converse opened a recording studio in Brooklyn. M.I.A. went to war with the New York Times. Pavement reunited. Juggalos went mainstream. From our vantage point, this year in music was one of the most lawlessly entertaining--purely ridiculous, even--in a long, long while. So in the spirit of the deluge of year-end lists even now beginning to rain down upon us (don't forget to vote in Pazz & Jop!), we figured we'd look back on our ten favorite storylines of 2010. They weren't necessary the biggest, but they were the ones that SOTC had the most fun with, and the ones we cared most about.

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