![]() Obscurantism is never my goal-as I’ve always carped about critics who pride themselves on “discovering” hot items and next cool things, novelty should never be an end in itself. And this year EP-powering Yonic South, Phoebe Bridgers tip McCarthy Trenching, my second Chicago Farmer pick, and the not yet reviewed Justin Farren and Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow don’t exhaust the candidates. In recent years there've been, to name a varied few, Dawn Oberg, Jinx Lennon, Carsie Blanton, Jealous of the Birds, and Derek Senn, plus African stuff. So OK, it’s not like I’ve never pumped music few readers have heard of before. His 2016 art show was noticed here, his CD only in Britain. And then there’s another blind pull, Martin Creed’s Thoughts Lined Up : the whimsical outcries, musings, tributes, jokes, protests, and word games of a 47-year-old Scottish punk-pacifist-dadaist conceptual artist who's modestly famous in the so-called United Kingdom. review I could find, a superb one by Jennifer Kelly in Dusted. This led me to Group Doueh & Cheveu’s extraordinary 2017 Paris-meets-Sahel Dakhla Sahara Session, which generated but a single U.S. 1 but reminded me that I hadn’t dug around in the Sahara myself for a while. Then there was Amanda Petrusich’s stunned New Yorker Etran de l'Air rave in December, which not only alerted me to that band’s 2018 desert-guitar No. ![]() Rough-hewn DIY singer-songwriter Kirby Heard I pulled out of my unplayed shelves blind and Zambia-born Canadian transgender rapper Backxwash’s hip-hop Deviancy I sought out on the strength of the title-not-music of her Polaris Prize-winning horrorcore 2020 God Has Nothing to Do With This Leave Him Out of It. At 71 selections it was the third shortest of the century, and 10 of my picks weren’t even 2020 records, including three from 2018 that encompass two slept-on EPs by the Roots’ Black Thought and one each from 20 indeed, only three of the five inevitable 2019 misses-the late-released Lil Wayne plus Young M.A and Mannequin Pussy-were records anybody else much knew about. As I pondered my choices for the finest albums of 2020, however, several statistical anomalies bothered me. The Pazz & Jop essays I wrote for The Village Voice from 1975 until 2005 were magnum opuses that wore me out, but post- Voice my year-enders turned easy peasy-chatty and informational while saving room to toss out a few generalizations. As I pondered my Dean’s List 2020, I was struck by how hard it was to write about.
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