04 December 2023 Strange, beautiful records by Lana Del Rey, Noname, Sufjan Stevens, and more.
In mid-November, the musician André 3000—one-half of the beloved hip-hop duo OutKast, which released six idiosyncratic and irrepressible records between 1994 and 2006—announced that he was, at long last, putting out a full-length solo LP. “Hey Ya!,” OutKast’s biggest hit, from 2003, is the sort of song that belongs on one of those satellite time capsules nasa periodically launches into space, a rare and potent distillation of everything freaky and beautiful about life on Earth. His fans wanted a rap record, and why wouldn’t they? André 3000 is preternaturally good at rapping. Instead, he gave us “New Blue Sun,” an eighty-seven-minute, largely improvised, entirely instrumental flute record with song titles such as “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” Digital flutes, contrabass flutes, bamboo flutes, Mayan flutes. Lotta flutes.
I’ll admit that I have an unusual—my therapist might say pathological—affinity for meandering, ponderous, vibey records that are fundamentally at odds with the pop Zeitgeist. It might be my punk-rock heart, or a response to the tumult of modern life, but, when I first heard about “New Blue Sun,” my reaction was not gentle disappointment or abject confusion but a kind of giddy thrill: Cosmic flutes, presented in the upside-down barometrical spirit of Yusef Lateef or Pharoah Sanders or John and Alice Coltrane? Shoot it in my veins! If that makes me sound like a pretentious gasbag, well, whatever, never mind. I spent my teen-age years pretending to like difficult music because I aspired to be a cooler and more sophisticated person; this year, I found myself pretending to like massive pop releases because to dismiss them as trifling or mercenary seemed, I don’t know . . . ungenerous? Out of touch? Lame? Rockist? While the former practice sorta worked—when I was fifteen, locking myself in my bedroom with Sonic Youth’s “Washing Machine” opened my mind to the thrill and logic of utter cacophony—dutifully listening to Morgan Wallen, the most popular artist of 2023 by a number of metrics, mostly made me feel as though I was on eternal hold with my insurance company.
Instead I really only wanted to hear far-out music that met or reflected our era of generalized collapse. Artists with the courage to challenge institutional dictates; music that felt small and real and occasionally unpresentable. Anything not maximized for palatability. Anything without an American Express presale code. Anything that didn’t plainly prioritize profitability, solipsism, selfishness, or ignorance—things I saw plenty of in nearly every other facet of modern life. For the first time, I found myself thrashing against the seduction of newness, and moreover the presumption that newness is always where the heat is; these days, popular culture is so hopelessly accelerated that the supernovas are perhaps less interesting than the things that manage to remain. My top three records of the year are mid-career masterpieces from artists who have been making serious, thoughtful work for more than a decade.
There are, of course, some great releases missing from my list—boygenius, Caroline Polachek, Elle King, Cleo Sol, yeule, Jessie Ware, Paramore, Miley Cyrus—not because I didn’t enjoy them (I did), but because lists, like records, are best when they’re a little strange and imperfect. In his memoir “Going Into the City,” Robert Christgau wrote of how good art is often born from a desire to “add order and beauty to the inchoate world that radiates out from each of us.” But, he added, “in every culture some humans are better at this than others, and as cultures get more complex, the art they produce starts seeming pretty inchoate itself. So criticism conjures order and beauty from that.” Can a year-end list conjure order and beauty? I don’t know. But here are a dozen records that did it for me in 2023. I learned so much from them.
Photograph by Thomas Bregardis / AFP / Getty.
8. Lonnie Holley, “Oh Me Oh My” (Jagjaguwar)
At seventy-three, the visual artist and musician Lonnie Holley still seems to be discovering new worlds. I don’t know how to describe this music in a way that feels true to its magnitude or its singularity: there are strains of free jazz, folk, ambient, and gospel, but mostly it feels like the apotheosis of a genre that we don’t have a name for yet. Michael Stipe adds vocals to the title track, which, like all of Holley’s best and strangest songs, reckons with trauma and God and perseverance and joy. “I suggest you all go as deep as you can,” Holley sings. His delivery is gentle, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of advice anyone can afford to ignore.
