150 Best Albums of 2017

By 2017, in case you hadn’t heard, nobody was listening to albums and anymore and everybody was streaming playlists instead. Well, almost. And about time — Heck, I’ve been getting paid to make playlists since 2008! If it wasn’t for playlists, I would have starved to death by now. In 2017, Drake — who I’m told is always on top of such things — even called his album a playlist. “Just as Michael Jackson truly knew how to use the music video as a medium, Drake absolutely understands the pace and the culture of streaming,” Zane Lowe of Beats 1 — “a subscription-based Digital music store streaming service” founded by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine that had already been swallowed by Apple Music, Wikipedia reminds me — told Esquire ‘s Matt Miller (and got his own byline out of it) that December. But really it was just a long album — 22 songs, the better to set streaming records with my dear.

Critics worried that playlisting “has the effect of downplaying the individual artist and emphasizing music’s function as mood-enhancing background music — with a playlist for every phase of your day” (Carl Wilson at Slate), though I dunno, isn’t that also pretty much what radio always did? Though I suppose there were never specifically radio stations for, say, “studying” or “exercising” or “road trips” (yes, I’ve constructed unsigned playlists dedicated to all three — what to put on workout mixes totally stumped me until I realized I could just check out other people’s workout mixes!) But certainly radio at midnight has rarely sounded the same as during morning drive time, and Friday evening party shows sound different still. And just like streaming platforms, radio stations were all for keeping you tuned in as long as possible, so as to maximize ad dollars. Did they turn listeners passive?

Still

Please don’t think I’m playing demon’s advocate for “Spotify’s scrubbed-clean, impersonal, vaguely demonic algorithms” (which I’ve never personally used), as Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (also at Slate) put it, much less “mass deregulation and opaqueness in corporate structure,” which activates dangers way beyond musical tastes — just trying to keep things in perspective. That “illusion of choice while mostly steering people to remain in consumerist lock step” Ann Powers fretted about in her own Slate Music Club contribution could just as easily have been levied at whatever star-making machinery reeled in Elvis or Beatles or Michael Jackson fans, and probably was.

I don’t doubt Clear Channel-style entertainment industry consolidation and collusion, ushered in with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and conceivably culminating with Donald Trump-appointed FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s late-2017 rollback of net neutrality rules that disallowed ISPs providing faster service to wealthier websites, made the situation worse than ever. I’m well aware how such issues relate to the evils of Fox News, social media, and the early 2017 inauguration of Trump himself. But culture critics have underestimated the ability of fans to think and feel for themselves since before rock’n’roll and maybe even before there were teenagers, and critics have never been immune to their own lockstep. If Geddy Lee can choose free will, so can you.

As Jacob Kupperman explained it in the student-run Stanford Daily in January 2018, “curated playlists made by Spotify or Apple Music staffers, or generated algorithmically, represent one of the few ways for new music to reach streaming service users who otherwise might be content to stay within the stable of their preexisting collections” — in other words, in his telling, what platforms market these days as music discovery might just make consumers less passive.

Which doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated with the specific stuff that 21st Century consumers insist on choosing. Or at least I don’t choose the same sounds they do nearly as often as I used to. Out of my 150 favorite albums from 2017, I count one that’s gone triple-platinum in the U.S. (the inevitable Taylor Swift), one more platinum (Migos, down near the end of the list since their exuberant word-repeating routine wears on me), three more gold (Kesha, Miley Cyrus, Midland), two more with sales above 100,000 (Darius Rucker, Kelsea Ballerini), and all the rest commercially downhill from there. But that’s okay!

What most listeners overwhelmingly chose to consume in 2017, for the first time ever according to Nielsen SoundScan, was hip-hop and r&b. Rock sold more than twice as many albums, but “streaming equivalent albums” (where 1500 streams = one sale) finally pushed the Black genres past white boys with guitars overall regardless. By my count, six hip-hop singles and ten hip-hop albums topped their respective Billboard charts that year. Lil Uzi Vert’s album got pushed back for months to allow his standalone single “XO TOUR Llif3” to continue to stream 50 million week after week, and Migos’s pass-the-dutchie-I-mean-crockpot-pot “Bad and Boujee” had streamed more than 250 million times before it even broke into radio’s top 40.

Princess Nokia

My younger daughter Annika was in fourth grade that year, and I remember little boys in her class deciding that Soundcloud-boosted, drug-slurred, emo/punk/nu-metal-inspired juvenile delinquents like XXXtentacion (who was shot to death the following June) and 6ix9ine (who is miraculously still alive as of this writing and whose name I still insist on pronouncing “six-ix-nine-ine”) were among their favorite rappers; I distinctly recall one kid picking one of that trap-rap pair as a “hero” he got to portray in a first-person hallway report in an assignment where my own kid picked Helen Keller. To my knowledge, no kids selected Lil Peep, Lil Pump or Playboi Carti (Frank Kogan on the latter’s “Magnolia,” which I wish I could hear with his ears:  “This song is genius, the deep riff sliding in slow motion and the voice nailing the rhythm while seeming to also slide off of it.”)

Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow,” slated for an album that wouldn’t come out until April 2018, went #1 for three weeks in October 2017, “famously” displacing Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” Craig Jenkins asserted in Vulture (shades of Nirvana passing up Michael Jackson — another random chart turnover that hopeful folks once convinced themselves meant something important.) Then it topped the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll singles list a few months after that. Cardi parlayed her streaming success (initially on Vine and Instagram) into more mainstream pop presence than any of those young Soundcloud dudes; as (in Ann Powers’ description) “a formerly struggling Bronx-born child of immigrants, an Afro-Latina, a bilingual hustler who embodies the multiplicity of her Trinidadian and Dominican cultures and an outspoken advocate for young women in domestic-violence situations,” not to mention (per Jack Hamilton in Slate) “a self-made megastar who moved from Instagram to reality television to the top of the charts,” she strikes me as somebody who fans fell in love with more for her grass-roots-celebrity back story and assertive personality than her music, which I somehow have difficulty believing has ever blown anybody’s mind. Though maybe I’m alone in that.

Powers saw the new streaming-platform hip-hop, including Cardi B, as embodying not only rap’s emo side but also “gamer ADHD and an utter disinterest in authenticity reflective of a generation that grew up in a world already ruled by South Park and The Simpsons.” Which didn’t stop Vulture‘s Frank Guan from suggesting that 21 Savage’s guest spot lent “some measure of ‘realness'” to the #1 single “Rockstar” by preposterous face-tatted hack Post Malone, who Guan confusingly compares to rock’s first (super)star ever: “Much like Elvis with rock music, Post seems to have cracked many of the protective codes that have maintained black centrality in hip-hop,” Guan writes, somehow forgetting that no Eminem (among other great white wonders) preceded Elvis by decades. Disinterest in hip-hop authenticity also didn’t preclude Craig Jenkins from wondering why anybody would “give time to prim midtempo love songs that cynically call up tasteful hip-hop beats for momentary tension release when real street rap is delivering on hooks, style, and attitude.” So at least Vulture writers were still keeping rap real, even if nobody else was.

Meanwhile, there was Pitchfork’s Mark Hogan, relaying the revelation from a July Vulture exposé about Spotify “seeding its playlists with ‘fake artists’ and then pocketing the royalties. That was based on a 2016 Music Business Worldwide report about how Spotify pays producers up-front to create certain types of tracks, which the streaming company then owns. A few days later, MBW listed dozens of what it called ‘fictional’ acts whose tracks had garnered more than 500 million streams from Spotify playlists such as Deep Focus, Ambient Chill, and Music for Concentration. Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that shares an investor with Spotify, represented roughly 50 of these artists.” I just hope a fake critic was available to review them!

Personally, my favorite authenticity debate in 2017 revolved around the rookie country group Midland, aptly described by Holly Gleason in the Nashville Scene as “three guys who’re not quite as young as the other kids, dressed up like drugstore cowboys — if the drugstore was on Hollywood and Vine or inside Laurel Canyon Country Store — with résumés that suggest high-level show business ties (MTV videos, modeling, tabloid dating).” On top of that, I feel obliged to note, they don’t even come from Midland — which is 267 miles northwest from the trio’s actual stomping grounds, burgeoning Austin suburb Dripping Springs, or 327 by car if you take US-87. Gleason admits their Nashville Scene country critics single poll-topping hit “Drinkin’ Problem” ably fills the Eagles void regardless. I appreciate the whole album myself, and confess I’m kind of jealous of their Western wear.

Craig Jenkins, by the way, offered the most precise description I’ve come across of how radio and/or chart pop in 2017 actually sounded. Comparing collaborative hits I may or may not have ever heard by Maroon 5 with SZA, Selena Gomez with Marshmello, and Hailee Steinfeld with (deep breath) Alesso, Watt and Florida-Georgia Line, he observes that “All three songs mix mainstream ‘indie’ flourishes — fluttering horns, folk-pop–indebted guitar licks — with fat synth lines played staccato or else broken up into choppy eighth and 16th notes, and drums that nod either to the hand claps and finger snaps of epochal post-millennial Cali rap hits like ‘ Rack City’ or southern trap beats. The mix comes out a little different each time — Hailee’s song sounds like a funeral procession breaking out into a trop-house second line, while Selena’s sounds like Mumford & Sons with drops — but the core ingredients are largely the same.” Closely examining 14 additional recent hits, including Taylor Swift’s “…Ready For It?” and Kesha’s “Learn to Let Go,” Jenkins reports that “The tempos match. The snaps and claps in the beat turn to high hats in the same place. The synths crest at the right time, always offset by some twee melodic touch like a horn or a guitar or a high-pitched warble.” So basically, pop music really does all sound more or less the same.

“It feels like market expansion by virtue of shrewd centrism, pop stars straining to prove that they can do everything everyone else can,” he concludes. Reminds me of something I wrote about radio/chart pop more than three decades before, in 1985, spelling out how I “despise what might best be termed the ‘beige’ sound: lame post-Thriller, post-Boy George pop that tries so hard to accommodate interracial crossover that it ends up sounding as cautious as the worst white-bread Newton-John pap or Kansas pomp.” And 1985 was actually a pretty decent year for music, I’d say now — maybe even hit music. (I also have more tolerance for ONJ and Kansas than I used to.) So I was probably wrong. I’m less certain Craig Jenkins was wrong about 2017.

Jack Hamilton put forth a theory that fans were just getting burned out on pop stars — hence, underperforming and/or underwhelming album statistics from U2, Katy Perry, Eminem, Taylor Swift (whose killing off “the old Taylor” in “Look What You Made Me Do” was incidentally a very Eminem if not Bob Dylan move), Arcade Fire and Jay-Z, among other letdowns: “The modern pop-media complex relies on overexposure, and in 2017 it was hard not to wonder if the system was collapsing on itself. Some of this fatigue might be runoff from the present occupant of the White House, the most overexposed human being in history who’s spent his entire life as a fraudulent advertisement for himself.”

Over at Outline, Laura Snapes even gave a rundown of how “fake news” and simple-to-spoof sensationalism had worked its way into the music-marketing and clickbait-content ecosystem, on purpose in the case of self-conscious artistes Arcade Fire, Father John Misty and St. Vincent, so “it’s not necessarily the best stuff that gets through, but the most outlandish.” Can’t think of a time when the best stuff ever necessarily got through (1965?), but who knows. “Throwaway quotes are turned into headlines, making musicians scrupulously guarded,” Snapes writes, while at the same time “protracted stories and grabby incidents are a new kind of product — maybe even more important than singles — required to keep an album afloat in the months before its release.” Which helps explain why, as time goes on, I pay less and less attention to what’s happening behind the scenes.

Perhaps as an adjunct to stars wearing out their welcome, or just as acknowledgement that the 2016 presidential election didn’t go as planned, writers like Carl Wilson also noted that triumphantly belted diva-pop, “optimistic empowerment bangers” like Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” and I guess the past couple decades of Pink hits, had receded into the history books along with the Obama era. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd thumbs-upped “the general replaced by the hyperspecifically individual, as embodied by sublime albums by SZA, Kelela, MUNA, and Lorde”; Chris Molanphy, taking his Slate turn, agreed that “much of 2017’s exceptional music seemed more inward and spirit-purging, more reclusive than resistance,” citing for instance Kendrick Lamar’s Pazz&Jop-topping Damn — the second biggest album of the year after Ed Sheeran, according to Nielsen total-equivalent-album-unit bean-counters — as “an exercise in introversion.” Which might be one reason it leaves me nonplussed.

Robert Christgau, who likes but doesn’t love Damn — ranks it 27th on his 2017 Dean’s List, grades it A- like almost every other album Lamar ever made — agonized in his year-end essay (in the Village Voice, of all places) that “Lamar was hardly alone. Rather than amazing satirical political art, many alt types who knew very well that they detested this president and wished they could do something about it decided that their best recourse was to pursue their muse as if he didn’t exist, and so withdrew into the ‘personal,’ too.” Christgau frequently finds this direction tolerable regardless, at least when it involves highish-placing P&J albums “manipulating note sequences to provide the melodic frissons that were an essential yet increasingly insufficient selling point of twentieth-century pop.”

He’s more skeptical of those for whom “the personal equaled the atmospheric if not the downright immersive”: hookless and for all intents songless shoegazers, soundscapers, post-rockers, “post-soul emoters,” post-cocktail-jazzers, “oceanic” whatevers. He wishes there were more of were, well, protest songs. Particularly like the three front-page satires that open his favorite 2017 album, Randy Newman’s Dark Matter — which has grown on me some in its six years, after initially falling flat both vocally and conceptually. “Putin,” released three years after the annexation of Crimea and Russian separatists’ shaking up sections of the Donbas, sounds even more current now.

My list, for what its worth, has its share of both soundscapers and current events, though you might have to dig for them. In the former file drawer, I’d probably start with Milan dubtronicat Still aka Simone Tribucchi, L.A. collage composer Simple Affections aka Sean McCann, Indiana “juke producer” Jlin aka Jerrylinn Patton (#11 P&J and Xgau-approved), Polish jazz/dance/noise art band BNNT, Baltimore-via-NYC-via-Miami instrumental hip-hop miniaturist Suzi Analogue aka Maya Shipman, veteran Finnish Kraut-proggers Circle, and veteran Munich Kraut-droners F.S.K. — any of whom might be too rhythmically inclined to qualify, and even within my top 40 I’m skipping over several avant jazz, reggae dub, techno-funk and Afro-rock artists who may or may not fit. (African polyrhythms + psychedelic guitars, by the way, was a legit trend in 2017, if Ifriqiyya Electrique, Here Lies Man, Group Doueh & Cheveu and Nihiloxica are any indication.)

For topicality, dig even deeper. Accept tackle climate change in “Race to Extinction” and conspiracy theories (via Jim Jones) in “Koolaid”; their fellow North-Rhine Westphalian metal alte kakers Rage ponder capital punishment in “The Tragedy of Man: Justify” and deaths of despair in “Walk Among the Dead.” Much younger speed-metal Germans Stallion tear through a 28-second hardcore punk blitz called simply “Kill Fascists,” even more timely there than here in the year that near-Nazi quasi-populist Alternative für Deutschland won 94 parliamentary seats, becoming the nation’s third-largest party.

I’m relieved to detect nothing blatantly political on the sophomore set by crust-metal crew Tau Cross, side gig of Voivod drummer Away, given how both their subsequent album and lineup were derailed after frontman Rob Miller, formerly of Brit-punk anarchist cell Amebix, thanked a Holocaust denier in its liner notes. And I wish I knew who “You and All Your Friends,” off Alice Cooper’s most entertaining album since 1980’s faux-new wave Flush the Fashion, was addressed to: “We’re burnin’ down your city, the message has been sent…It’s our way of payin’ you back for plunderin’ our nation…when the sun goes down tomorrow we will no longer be your slaves.” His politics have leaned vaguely right when coherent at all, so maybe don’t tell me.

Migos, meanwhile, touch on inflation in “What the Price” — “prices, prices, going up” — but seem to be talking affirmatively, from the vantage point of seller not buyer. I’m more inclined toward longtime Taylor Swift songwriting collaborator Liz Rose’s “Five and Dime” and mid-2010s Costco employee Walker Hayes’s “Dollar Store,” list songs about money-saving retailers emerging from distinct poles of the country world a half-decade after pop-topper “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore, whose dorky Caucasian flow may well have inspired Hayes’s same (via Sam Hunt — and thematically, maybe via Bobby Russell’s hungover early ’70s suburban dad country crossover “Saturday Morning Confusion.”)

Liz Rose should not be confused with Whitney Rose, whose “Analog” makes pretty much exactly the same neo-luddite statement as Accept’s “Analog Man.” Nonetheless, in country, as George Jones once sang, it was clearly a good year for the Roses. Brad Paisley — whose otherwise largely ignored Love and War made Christgau’s top 10 — chides you to feel ashamed of your selfie because *”#theinternetisforever” after condemning religious hypocrisy in “The Devil is Alive and Well.” “Love’s Not What We Do” by goth-twanging post-rockabilly Jace Everett accepts political polarization as a bitter fact of life. Miley Cyrus does a queer country duet with Dolly Parton called “Rainbow Land”; Kesha calls her whole album Rainbow while bringing in Dolly for a revival of the latter’s 1980 country #1 “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You),” written by Kesha’s mom.

Alan Vega, the former industrial no wave progenitor in Suicide who had died the year before at 78 (and whose IT ranks somewhere between paisley patriachs the Dream Syndicate and ex-Only One lonely planet boy Peter Perrett among 2017’s more surprising new wave comebacks) heckles “hey lousy white racist, stay away!” in “Dukes God Bar.” Manchester after-the-Fall guys Cabbage do “Uber Capitalist Death Trade” and “It’s Grim Up North Korea” and “Free Steven Avery” (about a longtime mentally disabled Wisconsin convict exonerated via DNA testing); fellow Manchester after-the-Fall guys Gnod didn’t title their album Just Say No to the Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine for nothing, the year after their countrymen sanctioned Brexit. And San Antonio Blax-Mex rap trio Third Root, whose lineup includes a UT professor and a high school teacher, ask who’s going to police the police while offering up op-eds on the order of “Justice or Else” and “Flags and Body Bags” and “The Revolution Won’t Go Viral” without skimping on Soul Train propulsion.

An aside about hip-hop now. I’m well aware that some albums I like — not just Third Root, but Open Mike Eagle, Von Pea w/ Other Guys, CunninLynguists, Milo, Damu The Fudgemunk w/ Raw Poetic — may well sound grossly backdated and out-of-it to people who care more than me about, uh, keeping up to date I guess. You could say the same for Southern soul women Melody Gold and Nellie Tiger Travis, or neo-soul women Ledisi and Syleena Johnson, not to mention blue-eyed electro-soul duo Tuxedo. What can I say, I still dig the old school. Also I still carry a backpack sometimes. I do, though, want to point out a few more young ladies of color: Yemi Alade from Nigeria with her third album, Rapsody from North Carolina and Princess Nokia from NYC with their second albums, Reniss from Cameroon with her first, London’s Nadia Rose and Atlanta sister trio Taylor Girlz with their debut EPs. All in their late teens to mid 30s, and even the singers among them toss their wit and beats around like rappers. Can’t promise I’ve kept up with them all since. But in 2017 — the year #MeToo took off and a day-after-inauguration Women’s March became America’s biggest one-day political demonstration ever (I attended in Austin myself) — I’ll count them as a movement for sure.

There’s also Kesha, whose sexual assault accusations against producer Dr. Luke still count as one of music’s biggest #MeToo stories, and who easily made one of the year’s funnest albums. But give or take Haley Georgia, a 21-year-old who evidently self-released then effectively disowned my two favorite 2017 country singles without country radio noticing, mysteriously vanishing traces from the Internet before 2018 was over, my favorite young female artist of 2017 was Rena Lovelis, 19-year-old frontwoman of the L.A. three-girl/two-boy teen-pop-without-pop-sales-figures band Hey Violet. (Their album peaked at #110 in Billboard and didn’t chart a single higher than #68.) More than Lorde, Alessia Cara, Halsey, and other such rebellious up-and-comers, Jon Caramanica pointed out in the NY Times that Fourth of July, Lovelis had “mastered how to make a bad attitude gleam.”

And she did it still chewing on the cologne-marinated drawstrings of her ex-boyfriend’s hoodie and identifying as the neurodiverse outcast goth-girl in the back of the class and dissing boys her age, especially a “fuqboi” down the street so pretty that she covertly peruses his social media profiles only to discover all his selfies tilt the same way and “his favorite hashtag is #beastmode.” Then, seemingly out of the blue, she switches to a stump speech, or maybe Trump parody: “Alright, listen up people far and wide. There is a growing epidemic and it does not just affect America but the whole world. Keep your families inside, keep them safe. We must eliminate these people. And if you elect me president I will exterminate each and every one of them!” Gulp. Who are “these people”? The fuqbois?? No idea. Presumably the epidemic Hey Violet had in mind was the Ziki outbreak, which ran roughly from January 2016 to September 2017. Still, talk about prescient!

New York free jazz double bassist William Parker, speaking of presidents, called a 2017 track “Criminals in the White House”; bridge-and-tunnel harmolodic fusion trio Harriet Tubman, whose very name rides the Underground Railroad, called one “President Obama’s Speech at the Selma Bridge.” Pianist Vijay Iyer dedicates one “For Amiri Barka,” and Baraka-inspired poetry-embracing skronk-jazz ensemble Heroes Are Gang Leaders –whose bandcamp page pictures a dozen members at the top — do a number where they appear to kill Osama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein in Plato’s Cave with a pinhole camera (or something like that — Thurston Moore helps.) Irreversible Entanglements, yet another NY-based free jazz ensemble, are if anything even more explicitly radical. Mass-incarceration/New Jim Crow/prison-industrial-complex snippets, from “Chicago to Texas”: “Since the Southern flag came down, ain’t nothing left except jails and burnin’ churches, and all of them cotton fields, picked bare.” “There’s no justice or rehabilitation, no religion either, just four pills in a paper cup called America.” “She said it took God 272 years to free the slaves, and she don’t mind waitin’.”

Clearly, in what Christgau ominously dubbed “Trumpjahr Ein,” not everybody making compelling music was gazing at their own navel and/or shoes or hiding their pink-pussyhatted head in the sand. I also second the Dean’s toast to “Rhiannon Giddens’s slave songs and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s immigrant songs.” And it’s not hard to interpret the sudden profusion of Latin crossovers and Spanglish remixes on the pop chart — starting with Luis Fonsi/Daddy Yankee/Justin Bieber’s “Despacito,” #1 in the United States through the entire summer and the most streamed song ever up to that point — as a direct affront to Trump’s xenophobic immigration crackdowns, from January executive orders to ban travel from Muslim countries and apply Department of Homeland Services funds to a Mexican border wall to his September elimination of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policies. Ann Powers worried that “the circulation of live music, the most immediate means of connecting across lines of language and national loyalties, might be further curtailed by governmental policies as the decade drags on,” but also took solace that “music is feeding a cultural (and yes, consumerist) internationalism that shows no signs of abating.”

None of 2017’s big mainstream successes from the Latin world, “Despacito” included, did that much for me — I’ll probably never get reggaeton, I still couldn’t identify “dembow” in a blindfold test, and I’m eons behind on bailie funk carioca from the favelas of Brazil. I also definitely prefer Shakira circa 2001 to anybody who’s made the big U.S. pop jump since, and love late ’80s Latin freestyle (not to mention late ’70s Latin disco and mid ’60s Latin frat rock) even more.

But Powers’ point about inexorable global outreach still rings true. And it’s all over my 2017 album list: from the top, leaving out the um European diaspora, I’ve got wild-and-crazy Istanbul dark-wave cheeseheads Jakuzi, Tunisian industrial hybridizers Ifriqiyya Electrique, synthesized Syrian dabke wailer Omar Souleyman, 80-year-old Nuyorican pianist Eddie Palmieri with his 40th-plus album, Rio De Janeiro noise-sludge punks Deaf Kids, Bahrain-Brit Arabic jazz flugelhornist Yazz Ahmed, São Paulo samba/jazz/”MPB“-rockers Metá Metá, Brooklyn bhangra-funk jammers Red Baraat, Kingston dub/dancehall/digital posse Equiknoxx, San Juan plena-jazz alto saxist Miguel Zenon, on and on — including four releases from Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes and three from Lisbon, Portugal’s Principe, two labels whose bandcamp-enabled dissemination of electronic African-derived syncopation has only accelerated since. My Pazz & Jop singles ballot in 2017 had three records from India (Baghi Mann “Soorme,” Kabeer Nasha “Aaj Club Mein,” Meet Bros. “Roar on the Shore – Party Mix”); one from Syria (Omar Souleyman “Ya Bnayya”); and one from South Korea (Heize “Hello! UFO”), along with five from closer to home (Haley Georgia  “Shots” and “Becky,” Lindsey Buckingham & Christie McVie “In My World,” Sevyn Streeter “Before I Do,” Tuxedo “2^nd Time Around.”)

If some of these fusions, or others I recommend, seem the sort of middlebrow pop-eclectic compromises that used to be marketed (and dismissed by purists) as “world beat,” so be it. Either way, foreign affairs were at our cosmopolitan fingertips like never before, much to the chagrin of the hard right’s supposed America First isolationists (quasi-, obviously, when threatening to attack Mexico or supply West Bank settlers with automatic weapons.) Thing is, do you know how I usually listen to the artists I’ve been naming, international or not? If you guessed via playlists (put together by me, but still playlists) streamed on random shuffle, you win. It’s just like home mixtapes, or even compilation albums (K-Tel or otherwise). I wish the performers themselves were better compensated, but other than that I’ve no real complaints. “Downplaying the individual artist” doesn’t bother me because I’m not sure what was supposed to make the individual artist, or individual album for that matter, sacrosanct in the first place.

Even worse, I also play all this music in the background (gasp!), while doing other stuff. Which, sorry, I don’t believe is an unfortunate side effect of the streaming scourge, because as far as I can tell that’s how music has always been listened to. Even back in the actual vinyl era, when modern-day mythology pretends everybody just sat around and focused intently on song after song until it was time to flip the LP over, perhaps assisted by whatever foliage they’d sifted on the gatefold.

Here’s Lester Bangs, in an essay in Stereo Review where he envisioned what music would be like in the impending new decade known as the ’80s: “Housewives now leave the rock’n’roll station on while they do the dishes. That’s ambient, and so is disco. Meanwhile, ‘environment’ records featuring the sounds of waves rolling in on the seashore or birds chirping in the trees are selling like crazy. Eno himself has remarked with some surprise that his ambient records are actually outselling his song discs. In reality, we’re rapidly reaching a point where, in the broadest sense, the two are interchangeable. The average housewife or office worker doesn’t know or care about John Cage’s dictum that everything in our environment could and should be perceived in musical terms, but the idea has penetrated nonetheless.”

That was 44 years ago! Or 37 years before 2017, if you prefer. Way back when people quaintly and/or sexistly still assumed “housewives” washed all the dishes. (In our house, that’s almost entirely my job, along with laundry, vacuuming, grocery shopping and lawn-mowing.) If streaming has pushed listening habits even closer to the ambient abyss, so what? It’s good to pay attention to other stuff when 2017 kicked open a whole new whoop-ass can of American Hell. Those dishes over there filling you with despair ain’t gonna wash themselves. Whatever gets you through the perilous night is alright with me.

1. Jacuzi Fantezi Muzik (City Slang)
2. Hey Violet From the Outside (Capitol)
3. Ifriqiyya Electrique Rûwâhîne (Glitterbeat Germany)
4. Charlie Worsham Beginning of Things (Warner Bros.)
5. Omar Souleyman = عمر سليمان To Syria With Love (Mad Decent)
6. Kenji Minogue En Dermee (Music Mania Belgium)
7. Cabbage Young Dumb and Full Of.. (Skeleton Key UK)
8. Kesha Rainbow (Kemosabe)
9. Eddie Palmieri Sabiduria (Ropeadope)
10. Still I (Pan Germany)
11. Deaf Kids Configuracão Do Lamento (Neurot)
12. Simple Affections Simple Affections (Recital)
13. JLIN Black Origami (Planet Mu Europe)
14. I, Ludicrous Songs From the Sides of the Lorries (Old King Lud UK)
15. Louis Sclavis Frontieres (JMS France)
16. Irreversible Entanglements Irreversible Entanglements (International Anthem Recording Company/Don Giovanni)
17. BNNT Multiverse (Instant Classic Poland)
18. Argus From Fields of Fire (Cruz Del Sur Italy)
19. Tuxedo II (Stones Throw)
20. Jesters Of Destiny The Sorrows That Refuse to Drown (Jesters of Destiny)
21. Here Lies Man Here Lies Man (Riding Easy)
22. Mausoleum Gate Into a Dark Divinity (Cuz Del Sur Italy)
23. Suzi Analogue Zonez V.3: The World Uwinds but the Sound Holds Me Tight (Never Normal)
24. Yazz Ahmed La Saboteuse (Naim Jazz UK)
25. DJ Lycox Sonhos & Pesadelos (Principe Portugal)
26. Ninos Du Brasil Vida Eterna (Hospital Productions)
27. Contributors Contributors (Monofonus Press)
28. Metá Metá Gira (Grupo Corpo Brazil)
29. Red Baraat Bhangra Pirates (Rhyme & Reason)
30. Taylor Swift Reputation (Big Machine)
31. The Dream Syndicate How Did I Find Myself Here? (Anti-)
32. Equiknoxx Colon Man (DDS UK)
33. Open Mike Eagle Brick Body Kids Still Daydream (Mello Music Group)
34. Riddlore Afro Mutations (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
35. William Parker Quartet Meditation/Resurrect (Aum Fidelity)
36. Scooter Scooter Forever (Sheffield Tunes/Kontor Europe)
37. Steve Coleman’s Natal Eclipse Morphogenesis (Pi)
38. Walpyrgus Walpyrgus Nights (Cruz Del Sur Italy)
39. Melody Gold Zero to a Hundred (Nlightn)
40. Miguel ZenonTipico
41. Circle Terminal (Southern Lord)
42. The Moonlandingz Interplanetary Class Classics (Chimera)
43. Kirk Knuffke Cherryco (Steeplechase)
44. Coldcut x On-U Sound Outside the Echo Chamber (Ahead Of Our Time UK)
45. Third Root Libertad (Third Root Music)
46. Nona Hendryx & Gary Lucas The World of Captain Beefheart (KFW)
47. F.S.K. Ein Haufen Scheiß und Ein Zertümmertes Klavier (Martin Hossbach Germany)
48. Nicole Mitchell Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds (FPE)
49. Firma Do Txiga (Principe Portugal)
50. Walker Hayes Boom (Monument)
51. Horisont About Time (Century Media)
52. Liz Rose Swimming Alone (Liz Rose)
53. Haloo Helsinki Huluuden Highway (Ratas/Sony Finland)
54. Nellie Tiger Travis Mr. Sexy Man the Album (Wegonsee)
55. Nídia Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida (Principe Portugal)
56. Sunny Sweeney Trophy (Aunt Daddy)
57. Stallion From the Dead (High Roller)
58. Miley Cyrus Younger Now (RCA)
59. Harriet Tubman Araminta (Sunnyside)
60. Roscoe Mitchell Bells for the South Side (ECM)
61. Faust Fresh Air (Buerau B Germany)
62. Vijay Iyer Sextet Far From Over (ECM)
63. Brad Paisley Love and War (Arista)
64. Night Demon Darkness Remains (Century Media)
65. Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet December Avenue (ECM)
66. Malokarpatan Nordkarpatenland (Invictus Productions/Tje Ajna Offensive)
67. Rapsody Laila’s Wisdom (Jamla/Rock Nation)
68. Ibibio Sound Machine Uyai (Merge)
69. Darius Rucker When Was the Last Time (Capitol Nashville)
70. Otim Alpha Gulu City Anthems (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
71. Hurray For The Riff Raff The Navigator (ATO)
72. Princess Nokia 1992 Deluxe (Rough Trade)
73. Kadavar Rough Times (Nuclear Blast)
74. Talaboman The Night Land (R&S Belgium)
75. Elder Reflections of a Floating World (Armageddon Shop)
76. Mazozma Heavy Death Head (Feeding Tube)
77. Spaceslug Time Travel Dilemna (BFSD/Oak Island Poland)
78. Kiko Dinucci Cortus Curtos (Kiko Dinucci Brazil)
79. Protomartyr Relatives in Descent (Domino)
80. Nduduzo Makhathini Reflections (Gundu Entertainment South Africa)
81. Sinkane Life and Livin’ It (City Slang)
82. Midland On The Rocks (Big Machine)
83. Accept The Rise of Chaos (Nuclear Blast)
84. Shit and Shine Some People Really Know How to Live (Editions Mego Austria)
85. Neptune Power Federation Neath a Sin El Sun (Erotic Volcano Australia)
86. Sounds of Sisso (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
87. Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society Simultonality (Eremite)
88. Ledisi Let Love Rule (Verve)
89. Jace Everett Dust & Dirt (Hump Head)
90. Group Doueh & Cheveu Dakhla Sahara Session (Born Bad France)
91. Haram = حرام When You Have Won, You Have Lost = بس ربحت, خسرت (Toxic State EP)
92. Von Pea & the Other Guys The Fiasco (Hipnott)
93. Saint Abdullah The Sounds of Evil Volume One (Boom Arm Nation)
94. The Dirty Denims Back With a Bang! (Handclap Netherlands)
95. Lee Ann Womack The Lonely, the Lonesome and the Gone (ATO)
96. Nadia Rose Highly Flammable (Relentless/Miracle. of Sound Recordings UK)
97. Nihiloxica Nihiloxica (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
98. Randy Newman Dark Matter (Nonesuch)
99. Carlinhos Brown Semelhantes (Candyall Brazil)
100. CunninLynguists Rose Azura Njano (A Piece of Strange Music)
101. Pagan Altar The Room of Shadows (Temple of Mystery Candada)
102. Madonnatron Madonnatron (Trashmouth UK)
103. Alan Vega IT (Fader)
104. Headroom Head in the Clouds (Trouble In Mind)
105. Kamasi Washington Harmony of Difference (Young Turks)
106. Songhoy Blues Résistance (Fat Possum)
107. Treponem Pal Rockers’ Vibes (Juste Une Trace France)
108. Alice Cooper Paranormal (Earmusic)
109. Reniss Tendon (New Bell Music Cameroon)
110. Celine Dion Encore Un Soir (Columbia)
111. Yemi Alade Black Magic (Effyzzle/Rebel Movement)
112. Richard Dawson Peasant (Weird World UK)
113. The Night Flight Orchestra Amber Galactic (Nuclear Blast)
114. Lindsey Buckingham & Christie McVie Lindsey Buckingham & Christie McVie (Atlantic)
115. Frozen Nation Dark Belgian Disco (Sub-Continental Belgium)
116. Arduini/Balich Dawn of Ages (Cuz Del Sur Italy)
117. Milo Who Told You to Think??!!?!?!?! (Ruby Yacht)
118. Maryam Saleh/Tamer Abu Ghazaleh/Maurice Louca =موريس لوقا , تامر أبو غزالة , مريم صالح Lekhfa = الإخفاء (مستقل Egypt)
119. Kelsea Ballerini Unapologetically (Black River Entertainment)
120. The Clientele Music for the Age of Miracles (Merge)
121. Heroes Are Gang Leaders The Avant Age Garde I Ams of the Gal Luxury (Fast Speaking Music)
122. Carly Pearce Every Little Thing (Big Machine)
123. Rage Seasons of the Black (Nuclear Blast)
124. Whitney Rose Rule 62 (Six Shooter)
125. Syleena Johnson Rebirth of Soul (Shanachie)
126. Weather Weapon Weather Weapon II (Bandcamp)
127. Tau Cross Pillar of Fire (Relapse)
128. Pere Ubu 20 Years in a Montanta Missile Silo (Cherry Red)
129. Institute Subordination (Sacred Bones)
130. Zeal & Ardor Devil is Fine (Reflections EP)
131. The Heliocentrics A World of Masks (Soundway UK)
132. Lauren Alaina Road Less Traveled (Mercury Nashville/19)
133. Ulan Bator Stereolith (Bureau B Germany)
134. Rhiannon Giddens Freedom Highway (Nonesuch)
135. The Mavericks Brand New Day (Mono Mundo/Thirty Tigers)
136. Gary Numan Savage: Songs From a Broken World (BMG)
137. Lunar Shadow Far From Light (Cruz Del Sur Italy)
138. Xênia França Xénia (Agogo Cultural Brazil)
139. Caligula’s Horse In Contact (Inside Out Music)
140. Migos Culture (Quality Control Music/300 Entertainment)
141. Novembers Doom Hamartia (The End)
142. Daymé Arocena Cubafonia (Brownswood Recordings UK)
143. Damu the Fudgemunk & Raw Poetic The Reflecting Sea: Welcome to a New Philosophy (Redefinition)
144. Peter Perrett How the West Was Won (Domino)
145. Dev I Only See You When I’m Dreamin’ (Devishot)
146. Midnight Sweet Death and Ecstasy (Hells Headbangers)
147. Manilla Road To Kill a King (Golden Core)
148. Karfagan Messages From Afar: First Contact (Caerllyss Music UK)
149. Gnod Just Say No to the Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine (Rocket UK)
150. Taylor Girlz Who are Those Girlz!? (Taylor Boi/RCA EP)