2017 Best Music

I think I officially stopped listening to albums this year. Once I gave up on that, listening to music became a lot easier and I was able to come up with my best-of list pretty easily.

• St. Vincent - "New York" - Masseducation (Loma Vista)
  This was my jam for the year. Beautiful and sassy.
• Rostam - "Bike Dream" - Half Light (Nonesuch)
  I've been super impressed with his post Vampire Weekend stuff. It is earnest and bombastic and really well crafted.
• The Courtneys - "Tour" - The Courtneys II (Flying Nun)
  Hits my sweet spot in terms of fuzzed out garage pop.
• Destroyer - "Tinseltown Swimming in Blood" - ken (Merge)
  Some heavy shades of When In Rome. Super catchy - some may call it derivative. I call it a throwback.
• Wax Idols - "Born Without A Mind" - Evaluate What You Tolerate! Volume 1.
  This isn't on Spotify, so I'm linking here. Cover of a 7 seconds song, that is sadly even more relevant now. Musically, I like the direction that Wax Idols is taking (moving away from the gothiness of their last two albums and bringing in more sonic density).
• (Sandy) Alex G - "Powerful Man" - Rocket (Domino)
  Weird and twangy, in a good unexpected way.
• The Mountain Goats - "We Do It Different on the West Coast" - Goths (Merge)
  A Mountain Goats song, but with a funk bassline that makes you smile. And lines like "Almost always something happening in Ohio".
• Lil Uzi Vert - "XO Tour Llif3" - Luv Is Rage 2 (Atlantic)
  The Ringer describes the anhedonia that this conjures much better than I can, so I'll just link.
• The Drums - "Blood Under My Belt" - Abysmal Thoughts (Anti)
  Synthy pop revival goodness.
• Ariwo - "Alafin" - Ariwo (MANANA)
  I kinda cheated since I only heard this song this morning. But I'm going to put this here anyway. A dubbed out afro-beatish electronic jam that is both new and old.
• Shabazz Palaces - "Eel Dreams" - Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star (Sub Pop)
  Rap is clearly going through a phase change, but its nice to see oldheads putting out stuff that updates indie-rap with some fresh soundz.
• Younger Lovers - "Ballad Of Two Stubborn Men" - Younger Brothers (Southpaw)
  I saw him live and it was the most raw, raunchy, eff-you perfomance I've seen! The record has a very different feel but still captures the lo-fi minimalist punkish aesthetic.

Here is the Spotify version, with a couple of Bonus tracks:

dreams

I've been having a ton of weird dreams lately. Well - not exactly weird - let's call them uncharacteristic. But I don't remember them anymore, which is probably for the best.

paint it black

So for the longest time I thought that the lyrics to Paint It Black were "I see a rainbow and I want to paint it black". Imagine my disappointment when I learned that "rainbow" was, in fact, "red door". Seriously, painting a rainbow black is way more poignant.

I think I'm doing this wrong and this should be a tweet.

books

I'm reading like 8 books right now which feels fun and daunting all at once. Like literally 8 books ...

• Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry by Marcus Thompson
• My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess by Rachel Hoffman
• Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution by Lynn Margulis
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

In this process, I did discover a little lifehacky trick, which is probably totally obvious to the rest of the world, but is a revelation to my idealist, completist brain.

So when I read a book, I really commit to reading it - to expend brain-cycles actually thinking about it. This means I read all the boring parts, footnotes and all. The downside is that I give up on a lot of books that I can't keep up with. Also, I'm not really big on "business books" per se. I sometimes feel like I need to read them, to keep up professionally and get the terminology down but it is hard to get excited about these books.

What I (finally) realized, as I tried to get through Lean Startup is that I don't actually need to read a 300 page tome that basically goes into a lot of detail on some pretty basic concepts. Most of these books have nicely summarized versions on the internet, and these versions along with some Wikipedia / Google foo will pretty much get you all the good parts. Now I can get back to my summer fun reading!

And as I write this, I realize that I just came up with Cliff Notes. 

sports nosports

OK - so I was wrong in my last post. The 2015-16 warriors were not the greatest team of all time. Turns out this year's version are even better (thanks to the new model KD turbo drive). Alas the season is over, and there are no real sports to watch this summer. Baseball seems utterly pointless to me, and this is a non-World Cup, non-Olympics summer. So enough about sports.

ball don't lie

Dubs play the Cavs tonight on MLK day in what seems like a regular season game with some deep implications. I decided to get some court time at Bushrod - I wish I had played more when I was younger. I coulda been a contender ... What else? My favorite 2 basketball players will always be Hakeem and Steph. One of my favorite sounds in the world is the "swish" in nothing but net. In an alternate reality I'd want to be a stats wonk for a professional basketball team. And I really think that the 73-9 Warriors were the greatest team of all time. They should have won the championship - but got unlucky at the wrong time. I guess 2016 was the year of these kind of stupid bad-timing low probability debacles (see also: the election of you-know-who). Almost makes you wonder if Zaphod Beeblebrox hooked up the infinite improbability drive to the year 2016.