2019 – Roads To The North

The 10 Best Tracks Of 2019

10. Dave – Black

Dave’s Mercury Prize-scooping debut album “Psychodrama” was my personal favourite record of 2019. The multi-talented artist has head-spinning potential, but still will likely struggle to top the closest UK hip hop has come to its “Illmatic” thus far. For accuracy, the entire record located Dave closer to the dominant conceptual exuberance of Kendrick Lamar, so it is only apt that “Black” references the Compton superhero’s similarly seismic and provocative 2015 track “The Blacker The Berry” in its lyrics. While the album contained bangers and luxuriously textured but chart-ready dispatches from 2019 Britain in the Lamar mould, “Black” is a paced-down number delivered over one of Dave’s trademark haunting piano beats, as the Streatham MC reels off a roll call of the seemingly (and sadly) timeless touchstones of growing up black. International in its panoramic lyrical scope, this was the hip hop track from this year which shook the English shires, even more so than any of Stormzy’s Boris-baiting, as Radio 1 listeners weighed in appallingly to claim that this beautiful celebration of distinct black identity was “racist” against white people, despite the overt references to African colonisation and slave-trading in the very lyrics. As much of the UK continues to slide into hatred and ignorance, young and exciting artistic voices like Dave’s have rarely been as vital as they are right now.

9. Normani – Motivation

Even if it is only one song, “Motivation” alone positions Normani as the ultimate Fifth Harmony breakout star; if her writers (in this case unmistakably including Ariana Grande and Max Martin) can maintain this level of hit factory indulgence, they will have a performer with the potential to surpass Camila Cabello on their hands. Drawing massively from RnB’s mid-Noughties chart golden era, the track vamps and bounces along on the strength of its syncopation, wears an encyclopaedic knowledge of dancefloor-filling on its colourful sleeves and is a making of a star in every sense. It is glorious, pure candy floss, even before arriving at that exultant brass coda. Despite not achieving the commercial success it richly deserved, the song is handcrafted to score endless summer cookouts from here to eternity. Countless listeners found it evocative of one of the most flat out inspiring artistic triumphs of the year, when they watched Beyoncé unable and unwilling to close the levees on a dam-burst of bona fide hits at Coachella on Netflix in the jaw-dropping “Homecoming” movie. For those of us who fell in love with Normani’s potential due to “Motivation”, we hope that in her trajectory the song comes to resemble Bey’s “Crazy In Love” more than Amerie’s “1 Thing”, as well as in the wider lineage of RnB juggernauts.

8. Vampire Weekend – This Life

On “Father Of The Bride”, Vampire Weekend responded to the departure of Rostam Batmanglij, oft-rumoured to be the band’s creative lifeblood, by opening up the American Songbook of Dylan, Springsteen et al. Those aware of Ezra Koenig’s credit on Beyoncé’s gloriously defiant “Hold Up” would have known better. A band which just keeps getting better, even after a much longer time away than most bands attempt nowadays, continues on that path with centrepieces like “This Life”. It’s undoubtedly the Van Morrison page of the aforementioned folkloric tome we land on here, and sonically at his sunniest and most shimmering for sure. The track features one of Danielle Haim’s least explicit contributions to the album, but her harmony is a critical part of the song’s scaffold all the same. Musically, again like so much of the album, every segment sounds primed to soundtrack a murmuration of starlings. When they emerged with a surprising and refreshingly Afro-centric sound in 2008, Vampire Weekend drew countless comparisons to “Graceland”-era Paul Simon. Always a keen hook-master, Koenig’s liberal interpolation of iLoveMakonnen’s “Tonight” for a bridge here evokes Simon’s own musical archaeology and the way the pop-cultural prominence of his pastiche anticipated the emergence of a later totemic figure in Kanye West, whose ear for unrealised value in other artistic cultures has gone unrivalled. For all that, as Koenig rifles off the doubts and not-quite-questions throughout “This Life” (“I know pain is as natural as the rain/I just thought it didn’t rain in California” is the smile-worthy opener), the track bears a quietly penetrating sadness and a grief Koenig can’t quite shoulder regarding the shared infidelity which characterises our communal experience of living in the West (not a Kanye pun!). Yet, he makes it sound euphoric, and I hesitate to call that a paradox.

7. Young Thug and Gunna – Hot

“Hot” marks a suitable point at which to close the decade in US hip hop. Mainstream American rap became decreasingly lyrically inclined and socially focused as the decade moved on, almost to an accelerationist degree. Its modes and timbres became much more suggestive of shapes and ideas with a surprising melodic direction, the voice-as-instrument contemporary blues, most notably in the work of Young Thug’s fellow Atlanta artist Future, as the city moved to the forefront of the US cultural canon. Thug made some of the most significant strides in the style himself, and “Hot” is as towering a statement as he has unleashed, rewarding him with his biggest hit to date.

With production defined by sharply uncoiling, palatinate horns and flute lines writhing to life like it’s 2017, Thug has his Robin in tow in Gunna, who rides the track with the assurance and style we’ve become accustomed to. Thug is a less predictable entity but brings that twisting, improvisational air raid of a flow, its indefinable character itself a symmetry of Thug’s defiant, androgynous stage identity, which counts as trailblazing within the genre. As always, his voice seeps into every facet of the palette with that glistening, obfuscated, gelatinous tone, the blissful decay at the centre of modern pop music, which can be traced back to William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops” and, by extension, the 9/11 attacks themselves. Every line is a possible hook, every hook might not be THE hook. That is the essence of the titans of today’s American hip hop, who have also paved the way for a younger vanguard of emergent artists blurring the lines between emo, rock, hip hop and pop. All the coding and DNA for the 21st century direction of black American music can be found running through “Hot” (presented below in remixed form with an appended Travis Scott appearance).

6. The 1975 – People

Yes, this is the same band which contributed the Eurythmics fever dream of “Somebody Else” and the cut-and-paste ecstasy of a Daft Punk-Michael Jackson-Blue Nile mash-up that was the best-of-decade contender “Love It If We Made It”. A furious call-to-action strapped to a desert grunge payload of slicing, sirens-blaring riffs, featuring utterly breathtaking pre-hook almost-acapella hang-glides and sequenced after Greta Thunberg’s own opening gambit on the upcoming “Notes On A Conditional Form” album, the track finds Matty Healy in no mood for mincing words, churning out a cacophony of generational diagnoses. “Wake up, it’s Monday morning/And we’ve only got a thousand of them left!” As things seem to collapse more disastrously by the month, Healy is still prancing around dissecting the disaffection of Millennial and Gen Z angst, practically without peer. “Want girls, food, gear/I don’t like going outside, so bring me everything here”. Plus, you never thought you’d hear “my generation wanna fuck Barack Obama/Living in a sauna with legal marijuana” pitched as an appeal for empathy. The 1975 rocketed to the top of the British scene by stunningly incorporating a limitless blend of influences and genres. No fingers have traced as deafeningly beating a pulse as theirs in recent years, and now as what we know of the upcoming record suggests a band reacting to stadium status by attempting to suck both emo and Burial-esque future garage maddeningly and impossibly into the gravitational pull of their aural vortex, there are no shortage of reasons to be excited. However, “People” comes down on only on side of the scales, and anger is the order of the day. This is a band which would rather juggle knives than sit still, and are never likely to be accused of complacency while they continue to be this arresting.

5. HAIM – Summer Girl

“Summer Girl” swaggered into the room like it was instantly the best thing LA funk-poppers HAIM had ever made and it knew it. Sounding like an artefact unearthed from 90s indie culture and drawing a thousand comparisons to Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side”, the mournful but stirringly hopeful track, which dives close to spoken word, is powered by its elastic, rubbery bassline and more centrally by a scorching saxophone part from Rostam Batmanglij, as the Vampire Weekend-HAIM crossover of 2019 enjoyed an epilogue and Columbia’s finest (and I include Ezra Koenig in that) continued to leave often overlooked marks on popular music. The track is as comforting and firelit a piece as you will hear this year, or any year, despite its lyrical content focusing on the cancer diagnosis of Danielle Haim’s boyfriend. The lyrics strike up an unerring, bulletproof notion of support, and are truly heart-warming. The track stands as evidence that a song in 2019, a breakneck period of real-time informational clashes and hyperactive, befuddling artistic expressions, can be brilliant when heavily evoking a past era, without being complicated and without requiring interpretation as an intellectual exercise. In that spirit, it falls to me to recognise that that is enough.

4. Lil Nas X – Old Town Road

At the start of 2019, Lil Nas X wasn’t anybody. By the middle of the year, he was a superstar. How did it happen? The shortest US #1 since 1965 was boosted by the Georgia teenager’s sonic sorcery. A former Tweetdecker, viral video content provider and fan accountant, and a largely failed traveller of those disciplines by my estimation, Lil Nas is surely one of the most phenomenal success stories in the translation of social media curation to music, melding country, hip hop and specifically trap without listeners suffering so much as a hint of whiplash on contact, and sampling Nine Inch Nails superbly enough to draw the praise of Trent Reznor. The track gave America a mirror to look into itself in March, when Billboard banned the track from the Hot Country Songs chart, purportedly for not displaying the requisite number of features of country music. Regardless of Billboard’s denial, this was at best highly regressive and at worst, and certainly in my view, racist, and this applies whether whoever it is that made the decision realised it at the time or not. The sorry debacle is merely another episode in the repeated whitewashing of various ethnic minorities from history, and specifically in this case, African Americans from American folk history. The resulting controversy at least partly helped to propel the song to the top of Billboard’s main chart, all before Lil Nas came out or I heard the track being played and warmly received at the NFL Draft of all places(!). As Billy Ray Cyrus hopped on a remix and records toppled en route to the States’ fastest-ever Diamond certification, one of the most notable battles of the Culture Wars had been won. “Old Town Road” is far more unifying than any politician could ever be, and a jubilant testimony to the potential possibilities of music in the streaming era.

3. Mabel – Don’t Call Me Up

With a rich musical heritage in her familial line (imagine being related to Don Cherry!), Mabel would have seemed destined for musical success. In the event, there is nothing complicated about her biggest hit to date, “Don’t Call Me Up”. The track is a gem of studio pop, located at the presumed apex of a trop-house tidal wave already overdue to collapse on itself. The unplanned sequel to Dua Lipa’s 2017 global smash “New Rules” mines the same vein of neatly-packaged, low-grade feminism, and is nothing if not equally catchy. Feeling comprised of naught but hooky hooks, nobody minds the stapling together of viable choruses when they still affect a natural flow, carry a flavourfully amorphous quality in that bridge and are a vehicle for Mabel to put her recognisable vocal abilities to work in the name of off-the-shelf empowerment. The track, which feels appealingly featherweight in length, nonetheless finds time for even some pitch-shifting, making it structurally as contemporary a pop song as you will find lately. Nothing on Mabel’s debut album “High Expectations” makes even a passing attempt at reinventing the wheel, and that is its weakness in some senses, but “Don’t Call Me Up” is a momentary thrill because it stumbles across the same key to chart success which has reverberated down the decades; earworms will always come out on top if they tap into a universal yearn. I’ve had the most unexpected friends tell me that they love this song.

2. Charli XCX and Christine & The Queens – Gone

This collaborative anthem for party paralysis from two of the late decade’s most exciting and enigmatic pop artists blends all the finest strengths both women bring to the table. The production is intergalactic, Charli seemingly having carefully caressed a range of retrofuturist sonic debris only for the purpose of kitting it out in metal, before launching it squarely into orbit. The result is that sledgehammering chorus flutter, which sounds like liquid mercury. The melodies, carved out like miniature mountain ranges, have the fingerprints of Héloïse Letissier splattered all over them. The entire composition is blinding, vibrant and full-throttle but with the presentation and taste of confectionary. This marvel-inducing, nearly-celebratory aesthetic sits unsteadily with the sheer paranoia on display: “I feel so unstable, fucking hate these people/How they’re making me feel lately, they’re making me weird lately”. By design, the track lyrically captures the agency, solace and confusing empowerment of feeling lonely in company, of overwhelming anxiety in our mentally challenging times. This is the greatest trick the track pulls off; encapsulating the white knuckle ride at the epicentre of social claustrophobia, recognising that something we feel like we can’t cope with can still make our heart beat, an effect which can only truly be appreciated by seeing the duo’s sensationally loving performance of the song in Radio 1’s Live Lounge.

1. AJ Tracey – Ladbroke Grove

In a year when UK hip hop arguably overtook the US for technicality and ubiquity, which had previously seemed unthinkable, recalibrating the capital cities of global hip hop from their previous coastal strongholds in New York and Los Angeles to Atlanta and London, AJ Tracey’s self-titled debut was an underrated, sharply confident and entertaining exhibition of flow and construction. The crown jewel was “Ladbroke Grove”, Tracey’s unspoken paean to home, and the record’s most instantly memorable and tightly woven piece. Harking back shamelessly to the early-00s heyday of British garage, the ghostly Jorja Smith sample and the mechanically precise catchphrase-ready stardust of every last lyric combined to sensationally vault any threat of a descending production-line sheen. The track is one of the most laidback, effortless sounds-of-the-summer this side of French House, and spent the whole season steadily climbing the charts without reaching the zenith it deserved.

It is fair to say that cultural memory is having its mainstream moment. At a time when you cannot open an issue of the New Statesman without scanning myriad references to the late giant of cultural theory Mark Fisher, and when Tiny Mix Tapes recently afforded major influential heft to the Vaporwave movement in their countdown of the finest albums of the 2010s, British chart music in 2019 also saw a raft of acts queuing up to cannibalise their ancestors, from Kygo’s reworking of Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love” to Kosovan DJ Regard’s repurposing of Jay Sean on the irresistible “Ride It”. Although these were far less subtle explorations of the hidden realities behind capitalist simulacra than plunderphonics and found sound are, they gave blunt cultural force to our political moment as the British constitutional settlement groaned furiously. “Ladbroke Grove” is an original song, but undeniably built from constituent parts of both contemporary pop music and saleable, unbearable nostalgia. Its biggest strengths are that it is joyous, tasteful and written in an utterly economical style, which caused it to run the charts emphatically. We won’t forget this one. One more time, “yo, it’s the hyperman set…”

Quentin Tarantino’s Liberal Anaesthetic: “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”

“Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” is, if virtuosic filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is true to what he once claimed, the auteur’s penultimate movie prior to his eventual curtain call with a tenth and final film in the presumably not very distant future. Tarantino’s films have been among the most acclaimed and academically dissected of the last three decades, and this latest features no shortage of his stylistic calling cards, continuing some of the patterns which observers of his work have seen emerge steadily over the years. Since “Reservoir Dogs” back in 1992, Tarantino’s films have always glowed with the touch of a true cinephile. This flick really takes that aspect of his work to its logical conclusion. The film depicts interweaving storylines during the golden age of Hollywood, specifically the cultural cliff edge that was 1969. The tone and photography are similarly celebratory and effervescent, as is the outstanding soundtrack of contemporaneous tracks which again expertly evidences Tarantino’s sublime traversing of cultural ephemera, while simultaneously exploring a deep sense of loss; of a cultural moment and, in my view, so much more.

The main focus is on Leonardo DiCaprio’s ageing actor Rick Dalton, becoming all too aware of his own mortality amidst an impending descent into European Spaghetti Westerns, after a sobering encounter with Al Pacino’s casting agent. Brad Pitt is Dalton’s dog-loyal stuntman and glorified driver Cliff Booth. Meanwhile, Margot Robbie is Sharon Tate, living next door to Dalton with her husband Roman Polanski. These are the three most notable roles in what is a lengthy and star-studded cast. Reunited with Tarantino, DiCaprio is clearly having a lot of fun here; equal parts tragic and hilarious with sometimes little more than a flick of the head or facial expression. His scenes with child actor Julia Butters are among the film’s most magical, in what is generally a very slow-burning piece. Pitt, also back with the director, puts in one of his most memorable late-career turns. Although generally seen merely prancing around Hollywood, Robbie is exquisite on screen. None of this excellence seems to be a coincidence in Tarantino’s possession.

The Hollywood setting allows Tarantino to indulge in a Greatest Hits-style scene parade; a schlocky Nazi-killing spoof is a naked nod to the masterful “Inglourious Basterds”, while the generous dollops of Western tribute, which clearly locate the director in his element, continue in the vein of his last two movies; that other outstanding film “Django Unchained” and the underrated chamber piece “The Hateful Eight”. Incorporating fourth-wall breaches into the set up, this is pure playground territory for an individual of Tarantino’s razor-sharp writing prowess. These scenes are those in which the love and tribute for the golden age of Hollywood are most keenly felt, reminiscent of, though not as extensive or varied as, the Coen Brothers’ playfully pitched gem “Hail, Caesar!” In my previous take on Ari Aster’s “Midsommar”, I described as ‘synthetic authenticity’ the ability of writers to make divergent aspects appear natural, even historic, in the context of a story. Tarantino has been a master of this artform, fusing the Western with martial arts and Samurai flicks (“Kill Bill”), and with American race history (“Django Unchained”, which with its incorporation of the apocryphal concept of ‘Mandingo fighting’ and an embryonic version of the Klu Klux Klan, to name but two examples, is an exhibit par excellence of the technique) in ways which have made generations of discerning film fans swoon. There are no finer hands through which to experience a romantic fictionalisation of the era.

All of this said, to truly move on to some of Tarantino’s specific trademarks, we start to encounter some of the most interesting and perhaps troubling aspects of the film. One of the patterns I mentioned earlier has been Tarantino’s swing towards the revisionist in the second half of his career. In “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained” he dealt in only the grandest of scales and panoramas, tackling Nazi Germany and Antebellum-era American slavery respectively, in what were explosive, exhilarating, maddeningly entertaining reimaginings of history; the deepest of revenge flicks writ large. The former was the film which sucked me into cinema when I first saw it in 2011, and ran around the house from sheer giddiness for a couple of hours afterwards. Although “The Hateful Eight” was not of this vein, it explored racial tension in the hangover of the American Civil War in a most understated fashion, nestled between the lines of its rich, engrossing script. In this film, Tarantino is back to taking a red pen to some of the history which stalks our contemporary imagination most vividly, but his focus is much more precise, zooming in to a specific incident in ’69 Hollywood. For anyone who knows the story of the Tate murders by the Manson Family cult, Tarantino’s film is laced with a venomous foreboding, which tastes all the more potent when coupled with Rick Dalton’s mourning as his career begins to slowly, tantalisingly unfurl. The entire script fizzes as it builds to a denouement which will allow Dalton to eclipse his supposed shortcomings while offering the viewer the comfort of seeing history remoulded into a more comforting, salving alternative to its vicious reality.

So many of Tarantino’s films have been about time, even before he began to take a scythe to the most discomfiting of historical events, as seen from his liberal Los Angeles vantage point. His masterwork, 1994’s “Pulp Fiction”, remains one of the most sparkling and canonical works of cinematic post-modernism, especially to mainstream audiences, as a result of its non-linear narrative structure. Tarantino has employed the method several times, though never as satisfyingly as in that film, where it was one of those high five-inducing, “why-has-nobody-done-it-as-well-before?” strokes of genius. This kept his stories alive with the possibility of subversion, but largely as an illusion generated by structural fragment. The time in these films still moves as one thread, just like time as we experience it in life. The same applies to his more recent revisionist output, including this film, but in these cases while we sometimes experience the same method from Tarantino, the films themselves represent alternative realities with different outcomes to those in our own timeline. The source of the change to the timeline is never conclusive. We see overlapping, layered storylines between Dalton and Booth on one side and Tate and Polanski on the other, until they begin to converge via the Manson Family angle. We see non-linear storytelling in a particularly riotous segment involving Bruce Lee, where Booth reminisces about why he is unlikely to be hired by a particular person. As examinations of what time means, these are more bludgeoning, direct but visceral cinematic levers than the intricately constructed mazes of Christopher Nolan, whose output is also almost all an interrogation of how time is experienced, but instead questions whether it is possible to alter future events by altering the perception of time, rather than changing history.

When we arrive at the moment where it is time to present that altered version of events, there is no denying that Tarantino does so devilishly. He reaches for that most Tarantinian of moves, the aestheticised violence served with lashings of wicked humour. Even by the standards of Tarantino flicks, the brutality somehow manages to be moved up a notch or two, intensified by the film’s gradual climb and the fact that the pivotal action of the movie is all packed into one tinderbox of a scene. I give Tarantino particular credit for avoiding the boring overreliance on guns which is typically omnipresent in not just most of American cinema (including his own catalogue) but cinema in general. That said, in one of the film’s most chortle-worthy frames, Mikey Madison’s Manson cultist is roasted with a flamethrower, but this brings a certain novelty to proceedings! This climax is a furious eruption of violence, which brutally refutes historical accuracy. I have no objections to that as a storytelling device, least of all as a fan of Tarantino’s oeuvre.

It is perfectly possible to say that a piece of cinema is of an excellent quality, as “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” is, finding an elite filmmaker still somewhere in a never-ending prime, while also acknowledging that it decants some interesting implications. It is clear when studying Tarantino’s work that his films are of what we would today refer to as a ‘liberal’ persuasion on issues such as, most prominently, race, if we are employing a binary dichotomy of socio-political markings, which is obviously dangerous in and of itself, and has perhaps irreversibly corrupted the American public sphere already. Tarantino’s relationship with liberal identity is less comfortable when we consider that this is the first film he has made in his career without the involvement of Harvey Weinstein, after the producer was heavily alleged in 2017 as a grotesque and prolific sex criminal. On a different but still related note, the most interesting moment of the film left dangling in mid-air is an isolated micro-scene which implies that Booth murdered his wife, which goes unexplored for the remainder, in a way which ought to complicate viewer sympathies somewhat. All the same, the events of this film, in line with those of “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained” before it, are symptomatic of a political problem in a climate where people who are apparent fans of Nazism and the subjugation of black people can freely parade around expressing such views without shame, all the way into the highest of political offices.

The problem I am referring to is that by abandoning the future in favour of attempting to win battles which were already lost in the historical past, liberals (of which I am one) are widely vacating the political space needed to win the arguments of the day and thereby secure electoral success. It seems to be fitting that the film was released exactly 50 years after the particular calendar year it paints, with all the tumult of Woodstock, the Moon Landings and, yes, the Manson murders. This was a year in technicolour, both brilliant and barbaric, giving little inkling of the dreary, insidious 1970s. Tarantino, on behalf of liberal culture at large, mourns the end of a chapter of American history, using a reframing of the Manson murders as a particular incident through which he can summon an anaesthetising, becalming nostalgia, to which Rick Dalton’s redemption in the face of certain defeat is a most blinding of mirrors. Even if you interpret it as sad to see this from a figure of Tarantino’s stature, it remains spectacular and dizzying story-writing in so far as sociocultural significance goes. One of the most surprising omissions of the film is that the white supremacist ideology running through the Manson cult is not referenced, which would have made the themes I mention here more overt and would have made the murders’ centrality to the plot of this movie more obvious given Tarantino’s vibrant recent tradition of discussing race in his works.

As mentioned earlier, there is reason to believe that Tarantino will make his final film the next time he sits in the director’s chair. One of the most interesting and logical of the ideas he has mentioned for a future film, of which there have been many in a largely speculative and scattershot fashion, would be a biopic of the 19^th century white abolitionist John Brown, who took up arms against slavery. What we can tell from “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”, and all of Tarantino’s recent films if not every film he has ever crafted, is that the subject matter would be in more than capable hands. However, since this is the only biopic which he has expressed an interest in making, it would be most intriguing to see if Tarantino could resist the urge to tinker with the past in a way designed to massage the insecurities and doubts of modern day liberals unable to articulate a vision of how a self-confident, equal and peaceful society would look in future and be brought into being today. Brown was, after all, convicted of treason by the Commonwealth of Virginia and hanged. Such narratives continue to cast a shadow over the daily news bulletins of modern America, and as a most prominent filmmaker, for whom this film became the second highest gross of his decorated career behind “Django Unchained”, Tarantino is at the very epicentre of the culture wars. Even if his stories and the forms in which he tells them throw up some discrepancies and shortcomings, cinema will be a far less gripping and gloriously engaging field when he is gone.