150 Best Albums of 2023

As the hottest year on record so far wound down to a holiday season portending what’s sure to be an even hotter and otherwise frightening on many fronts 2024, an article began making the rounds on what little social media I tune into wondering whether rock music is dead, over, kaput. In 2023, no less!…

40 Best Country Singles of 2023

The conversations I saw online this year about country music generally revolved around either white male Southern small-town lost-cause grudge-keeping (Jason Aldean, Oliver Anthony, and Maren Morris’s backlash to the same) or alternate viral routes to popularity (Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Oliver Anthony again, Bailey Zimmerman and Jelly Roll maybe, and I suppose Warren Zeiders…

70 Best Singles of 2023

By now, my calling these things “singles” instead of “songs” like everybody else has for years probably just seems obstinate or, what was that word colleagues used to throw at me, oh yeah “contrarian.” (Just this month finally saw my only indexed mention in Steve Waksman’s 2009 book This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict…

Is Current Pop Country Really Reactionary?

Eric Weisbard wrote on facebook this week that he was “thinking, casually, about why country seems to have become more right wing this century. Would these factors make sense? 1) Country stations, like Republicans who dread getting primaried, fear even more tightly programmed country stations, not AC or Top 40. 2) In cases like (Jason)…

Jelly Roll Blues

Finally just realized that what Jelly Roll’s “Need a Favor” reminds me of isn’t so much country or rap or gospel or Jamey Johnson or even Everlast so much as an HBO theme from the ’00s. Probably thinking of A3’s “Woke Up This Morning,” but maybe I need to go back and bone up on…

Pazz & Jop Product Reports, 2023

Slow start this year; still catching up on all the years that weren’t 2023 yet! And there were a whole lot of those (particularly since 2017.) Will eventually most likely get around to scrawling some sorta intro beyond the words you’re reading right now, but don’t hold your breath — Should probably write last year’s…