Being a person of Hebrew descent who hasn’t totally abandoned the cultural traditions of his ancestors I’m not the biggest proponent of the Gregorian calendar. In my house it’s been the year 5768 since mid-September, and it won’t be “New Year” again for another nine months. That being the case, the turnover to 2008 which most of the world made yesterday wasn’t much more to me than an excuse to eat tasty food, drink fizzy stuff and smooch my lady. Despite my misgivings about the “holiday” a change in time is always important, so the weeks leading up to December 31st 2007 were notable for other reasons… I bought a lot of consumer goods I can’t really afford… I found genuine romance with a woman I’ve loved as a friend for a decade… I saw Tracy Morgan… And I took time to look back at the music I’ve loved this year.
Names like Radiohead, Kanye West, Feist, Common, Benny Sings, El-P, Chromeo, Blu & Exile, LCD Soundsystem, Talib Kweli, Aqueduct, Aesop Rock, Misha, Esoteric, M.I.A., Uncut Raw, Björk, Shape of Broad Minds, Bonde do Role, and 100dBs & Ryan O’Neil (amongst many others) popped up most often when surveying my favorite releases of 2007. But rather than produce a lengthy catalogue of my favorites or simply declaring one record my personal “best” of the year I settled on my two favorite records with the only criteria being that one predominantly feature singing & one predominantly feature rapping, and that they be discs I absolutely loved and played the hell out of during my personal listening time outside of any “professional” context as a disc jockey or author of music-related word-craft. With the ground rules laid out, the two albums that won out over all the rest were Athens, Georgia’s Of Montreal’s eighth studio LP Hissing Fauna, are You the Destroyer?, and Chicago-based emcee/producer duo Serengeti & Polyphonic’s collaborative debut Don’t Give Up.
While these two acts would seem to have even less than nothing in common on the surface I find that I enjoyed their respective albums for many of the same reasons. The most important being that Of Montreal front-man Kevin Barnes and Hip-Hop lyricist Serengeti are both incredible songwriters, imbuing lyrics that dwell largely on their own, often painfully, personal experiences and emotions with unparalleled whimsy, and caustic irony, not to mention the sort of literary and pop-culture references that would make the wittiest of stand-up comedians jealous while giving the likes of Alex Trebek a headache. Writing songs about ones struggles finding love in a cruel world could easily become an exercise in trite sentimentality, pallid whining, or simply a retread of what a million troubadours have already said over the last five-plus thousand years, but both Barnes and ‘Geti avoid such pitfalls with a lyrical grace that transcends the confines of their subject-matter, creating music that is all at once beautiful, affecting, relatable, and thought-provoking. Oh, and it helps that the mix of futuristic laptop Electronica, with traditional Rock and Pop musicality on Hissing Fauna, and chunky Hip-Hop beats on Don’t Give Up, is not only auditorially arresting, but rhythmically compelling as well.
Listen to Of Montreal’s “Gronlandic Edit”
Listen to Serengeti & Polyphonic’s “Lately I Haven’t Been Feeling Well”
Whatever 2008 has in store, be it another Rosh Hashanah, the promise of partnered domestication, a historic presidential election, or more new albums from both Of Montreal and Serengeti, I only hope that it’s filled with as much good music as 2007 was.
- El Keter
