Sorry I'm so late with it this week. I recorded this the day before Thanksgiving and then promptly forgot about it, so all these songs have been around for a minute. I've already recorded another of these, but it's not up yet. Right-click to download the podcast. This week's songs:

• OutKast: "Da Art of Storytelling, Part 4"
• J.R. Writer: "We Gettin' It Baby Remix [feat. Lil Wayne]
• Justice: "D.A.N.C.E. (Benny Blanco Remix) [feat. Spank Rock & Mos Def]"
• South Rakkas Crew: "Carry Feelings [feat. T.O.K.]"

Who's got some words of wisdom?

So today's the day I had to have my year-end top-fifty-albums list into Pitchfork, and fifty albums is a whole lot of albums. For the past couple of weeks, I've been going on a real binge listening to every 2007 album I remembered sort of liking and trying to get my list bashed into acceptable shape. When you're writing one of these daily music blogs, you're supposed to stay up on everything, writing about music as soon as it becomes available. Initial opinions certainly aren't invalid, but they do change; I remember writing nice things about Young Buck's Buck the World, for instance, and I can barely make it all the way through that record anymore. And I sometimes end up missing albums that took a little while longer to sink in. Looking at my list, I've got a few albums on there that I haven't written hardly anything about despite writing a couple hundred blog entries this year. These three albums aren't slept-on; every one of them is a critical favorite on some level or another. But they're albums that I needed to hear a few times before I really heard them, and I think it's interesting to look back at them and to think about the ways they work and why I might've underrated them early on.

Seen it all

In the movie Old Joy, Will Oldham plays an aging stoner who's so comfortable in his rootlessness that he can't understand why everyone else isn't as content as he is to drift aimlessly through life. He convinces a friend to leave his extremely pregnant wife at home for the weekend and to go camping, and then he gets the both of them extremely lost in the woods, which suits him just fine since being lost in the woods is pretty much his natural state. I've never met the real-life Oldham, but I've known plenty of guys like his Old Joy character, and I've always imagined the real Oldham to be basically just like them. He strikes me as someone who gets so obsessively devoted to one idea that he forgets everything he was doing before he had it, and when he gets done with that he moves onto the next idea. I have this idea that he's been jumping from epiphany to epiphany for so long that flux has basically become his status quo. And even though he's mostly worked in subdued, rustic genres, he's also taken evident pleasure in confounding the hell out his his built-in audience. That tendency to wander has led to some insufferable music. The last time Oldham recorded an album of covers, for instance, he teamed up with Tortoise and mangled the hell out of a few totally great songs, leaching all the anthemic joy out of "Thunder Road" and turning Lungfish's "Love is Love" into gloopy half-jazz fuzz. But even when Oldham's indulging his worst ideas, he sounds totally committed to them, and he never seems to be forcing himself out of his element. Last year, Oldham released The Letting Go, a gorgeous little pastoral folk album full of wispy tremolo guitars and pillowy female backup vocals and sighing strings. When Oldham hits on a really good sound, I'm always afraid that he'll abandon it just as quickly and move onto something less interesting. So I'm happy to hear that Ask Forgiveness, the new mini-album of mostly covers that Oldham just released, ambles even further down the same aesthetic pathways that he tried out on The Letting Go. On Ask Forgiveness, Oldham sounds comfortable and settled-in, and that's fitting for a record that's actually about feeling comfortable and settled-in.

And I might not even be overreacting

8 Diagrams is about the millionth Wu-Tang album to start with a dialog sample from a kung-fu movie, but this one is different from those that came before. RZA has complicated reasons for just about all of his production decisions, but I have this idea that he usually just picked out the kung-fu samples that sounded the most badass. The sample at the beginning of 8 Diagrams doesn't sound badass. No swords clash, and no threats are made. Instead, a teacher tells a nasal-voiced student how to be a good man, telling him to keep control of himself and to stay patient. Those of us outside Wu-Tang's inner circle can only make fogged-up guesses about the group's internal dynamics, but by all accounts RZA's always been the crew's undisputed leader, and his leadership must've faced its challenges over time. In the documentary Rock the Bells, when the concert promoter was having a stroke worrying about how he'd get ODB to the venue, RZA was the guy he went to to smooth the situation out. And the crew's unlikely period of commercial dominance only started to flag when members of the group started making albums that weren't completely under RZA's control. To tell such a talented and chaotic group of rappers what to do, RZA must have unreal leadership skills, and I get the feeling that he's been repeating that refrain about control and patience more and more often lately. The fact that 8 Diagrams even exists is some kind of miracle, and it's even more amazing when you consider that not one song on the entire album has the faintest chance of becoming a crossover hit. 8 Diagrams is a deeply weird album, a total immersion in weed-fried mythology and willfully obscure tangled-up black psychedelia. It's clearly the album that RZA wanted to make, and recent developments show that he may have burned up all his goodwill with the rest of the group in the process.

Also, this was a great album cover

Look, it's a slow news day. These happen. It's the end of the year, and pretty much the only albums coming out are crappy Christmas records or crammed-in tax-writeoff fourth-quarter rap records, and I just can't write about those things every day. I'd say something about the Busta Rhymes' Dilla-tribute mixtape, but too many people are jamming up Mick Boogie's website, and the stream is all fucked up. I honestly considered writing an entire entry on this photo of Kanye West posing with Evel Knievel, but that's just too much. Instead, I'm going to tell my Quiet Riot story. Kevin DuBrow, the band's singer, was found dead in his Las Vegas apartment on Sunday, and, as fellow Voice guy Mike Clancy just pointed out, everyone has a Quiet Riot story. I never felt any particularly strong connection to Quiet Riot beyond their two big singles, the bigger of which was a cover of another band's song anyway. They were about seven years past their peak when I picked up my first copy of Hit Parader, and even before Nirvana, pop-metal bands were more likely to namecheck Mott the Hoople or David Bowie as precedents than to talk about any of the actual pop-metal bands they probably actually grew up listening to, so I never even experienced them as a cool influence. I was never a fan, and after DuBrow's death, it's not hard to find testimonies from actual fans. But I do have a Quiet Riot story, and here it is.

Bad popcorn

The title to this post is totally, utterly misleading because I didn't learn anything watching I'm Not There: not about Bob Dylan, not about myself, not about the Dylan myth. In fact, the act of watching the movie felt almost like an afterthought. You probably know all the relevant facts about the movie already: rather than making anything resembling a straight biopic, Todd Haynes split the multitudinous Dylan myth into six component parts, turned each of those parts into a separate character, and went on a stunt-casting binge to find the right actors for those characters: Cate Blanchett plays the mid-60s Don't Look Back press-hating trickster version of Dylan, for instance, and a little black kid named Marcus Carl Franklin plays the rootless fabulist Dylan who fixated so hard on Woody Guthrie that he tried to become the guy. All those different Dylans have their own names, and no one in the movie ever utters the phrase "Bob Dylan." Haynes has done this sort of free-associative film-essay on his musical heroes before, but even Velvet Goldmine, which I loved, is as linear as a Mentos commercial compared to I'm Not There. Haynes could've just as well invented three or ten or 136 separate Dylans, and the effect would've been basically the same. He releases his various free-floating Dylans into a miasmic anti-narrative, and it never becomes entirely clear whether all these various Dylans occupy the same world. The Heath Ledger Dylan is an actor who portrays the Christian Bale Dylan, for instance, and the Marcus Carl Franklin Dylan turns up in what I guess was a dream of the Heath Ledger Dylan's wife. "Mystery is a traditional fact," the Cate Blanchett Dylan argues near the end of the movie, and the movie takes him on his word. Haynes never tries to pin Dylan down the way biopics generally do; instead, he celebrates Dylan's elusiveness by making a deeply elusive movie. The problem is that I'm Not There is so elusive that it's barely a movie; instead, it's a collection of riffs, and 135 minutes of cinematic riffs is too much.

The best beard in rap

If onstage body-language is any indication, Jay-Z loves Freeway. The two times I've seen Free make guest-appearances at Jay's shows, Jay's made the same faces during Free's "What We Do" verse that he made when Free did the song in Fade to Black: a sort of enthralled disbelief, a fan's reaction. But even if Jay loves Free, that doesn't mean he has a whole lot of commercial faith in the guy. Free At Last, the new Freeway album, is coming out into an absurdly crowded third quarter, and it's coming with absolutely zero Def Jam marketing muscle. Three cheap made-for-YouTube videos of Free At Last tracks hit the internet this week, and they're all pretty good, but I haven't seen a single one of them on TV yet, and I still DVR Rap City every day for some reason. "Step Back," the track Free did with Lil Wayne, which Free played during the album's listening party a couple of weeks back, is nowhere to be found. Free At Last comes out two weeks after Jay's American Gangster and two weeks before Beanie Sigel's The Solution, which effectively forces Free to compete in the marketplace with both his mentor and his mentor's mentor, along with every single end-of-year Def Jam tax writeoff. The purported 50 Cent exec-producer credit is nowhere in the album's liner notes. And as Free complains on "It's Over," there's not a single Kanye West or Just Blaze track anywhere on the album. Back when Free released Philadelphia Freeway a billion years ago, there were a few indications that Jay actually thought he might make a star out of Freeway; it had guest-spots from Nelly and Mariah Carey, and Just Blaze produced virtually every track. But as Kelefa Sanneh points out here, the idea that Freeway might ever become a major star were always sort of ridiculous: he's a raspy-voiced sparkplug with a giant beard and no crossover appeal whatsoever. So it's not even especially sad to see Def Jam treating this guy like a B-lister. After all, he makes a great B-lister.

Never again

Congratulations are due to the American Music Awards. During yesterday's running AMAs diary, I pointed out that if it weren't for the Billboard Music Awards, the AMAs would be the single shittiest annual music-awards show. Earlier today, Idolator reported that the Billboards won't be happening this year, which saves me from two excruciating hours of TV and which officially renders the AMAs the worst award-show of the year, a distinction that Sunday night's show certainly lived up to. The Billboard Awards have been happening every December since 1990, but their cancellation this year is no great loss whatsoever. Even back in middle school, when my critical facilities were still so weak and underdeveloped that I paid good money for an Ugly Kid Joe album, I knew the Billboard Awards were some bullshit. I knew they were bullshit because nobody who won an award ever seemed the least bit shocked or surprised. In fact, nobody involved in the production of the show ever bothered to manufacture any sense of suspense whatsoever. I can remember watching Kris Kross win the Best New Artist award in 1992 (I think they beat Nirvana), and rather than coming out of their seats in the audience to accept the award, they burst out of a giant Christmas-present box onstage and performed before making their way to the podium to accept the award. While I was watching the show, I remember feeling really gypped. Kris Kross obviously wouldn't have been sitting onstage in that giant Christmas-present box unless they knew they were going to win that award, and if they knew beforehand that they were winning, that what was the fucking point?

We switched over to a new server late last week, so there was some drama with the site: Thursday and Friday's posts not showing up until Saturday, stuff like that. This podcast appeared briefly and then disappeared, so here it is again. It's a good one, I think. Right-click to download the podcast. Songs this week:

• Cam'ron: "Bum Bum [feat. Penz]"
• Radiohead: "Ceremony"
• Wu-Tang Clan: "Life Changes"
• Burial: "Archangel"

Just impale your eyeball on one of these things right now

Oh man, OK, so the American Music Awards should really thank the Billboard Music Awards for being the only reason the AMAs are not the least relevant music awards show on the face of the planet. In theory, I kind of like how the AMAs don't even pretend to base their decisions on the actual quality of the musicians they salute. But the whole "Favorite" thing has a massive drawback: nobody famous ever wants to appear on this show. Somehow, the AMAs have managed to become progressively more boring over time, which means that this year will probably be the most boring AMAs in AMA history, at least until next year. This is going to be a long three hours.

8:00: Oh Jesus, they're really starting the show with Fergie? And she's doing "Fergalicious"? And Will.I.Am is standing next to her doing the robot and wearing a tux with a top hat and white gloves? Who's going to see this opening and not realize that we're heading straight into trainwreck hell? Things actually go downhill during this opening, as "Fergalicious" (which I sort of like OK) becomes "Clumsy" (which I don't) and then "Big Girls Don't Cry" (which I actively hate). Seriously "Big Girls" always makes me feel like I'm waiting for surgery, and she does more or less the whole song. Whose idea was it to let her do three goddam songs?