The 2014 Okapi Sampler!

"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been." - Madeleine L'Engle. 

I was born in 1970, exactly in the middle of Generation X, the life era of those of us defined by "The Breakfast Club," new wave, and Atari.   We remember public payphones, the fall of the wall, and when MTV played music videos.   We knew Madonna when she was provocative and the New Kids on the Block when they were kids.   Our youth was spent at the mall.   And it was spent living in the shadow of the Baby Boomer generation.  We were labelled, dismissed, and marketed to as the generation of angst loving slackers, while nearly all of America's cultural space continued to be occupied by the Baby Boomers' reminiscences of their youth.  They reminded us through just about every possible cultural medium how they fought segregation and war and blind allegiance to tradition, and how we wouldn't even fight for the right to party.   They told us we were just a "filler" generation, between them and the wizards of tech.   And, to quite an extent, we believed them, despite our generational accomplishments and our contributions to culture and history.

But, we're all older now.  And with age comes new understandings of past experiences.  And the current generation of music creators is helping all of us to re-understand the music of my era so we can all move forward again.  Certainly some of the interest in 80s and 90s music is due to a desire to escape the current headlines, bu they aren't just imitating my generation's new wave, acid house, grunge, and rave music by churning out rehashed "retro" sounds...they are picking up where we left off when we gave in to the labels placed upon us.  Much of the best of 2014 reached back to take us forward.  

So, here's a very biased look at the top 10 of the year....

 # 10  Eskuche & Nu Sky - "Acid Jump"

Acid house.  It's the perfect music history legend...a few kids with some homemade music exploded out of Chicago in the late '80s and created a global movement.  This year, a few kids, who weren't even born when the genre was invented, took a fresh look at squelchy acid trax.   Eskuche & Nu Sky from New York City's underground released "Acid Jump" over the summer and used the tools of today to take us back to summers ago with Jack and Fierce Ruling Diva.   If you gotta believe in something, why not believe in acid?   

 # 9 Ariel Pink - "Lipstick"

Ariel Pink has been piquing my interest for a few years now, and this track is the perfect example of why.   It's one part mid-'80s Echo & The Bunnymen, one part Animal Collective, and one part original Scooby-Doo mystery.   It's reaches into a few decades for eccentricities and still perfectly captures 2014's most hipster of sounds.

# 8 TV On The Radio - "Happy Idiot"

TVOTR = indie rock bliss.   They've been making really solid indie rock since 2001, and this year they released their fifth album, Seeds; the first since the 2011 death of their bassist, Gerard Smith.  It's hard not to hear the early '80s REM and early 90s Sonic Youth influences (and they really remind me of Wire at their best), but it's perfectly relevant today.   With "Happy Idiot" they do what they do best...walk that beautiful line at the intersection of painfully urgent and indulgently atmospheric.   

 #7 Hercules and Love Affair feat. John Grant - " I Try To Talk To You"

Yes, Hercules and Love Affair made it to my year end top ten, again.   Well, it's my top ten, so I can include whatever I please.   Besides, this track featuring alt-folk singer John Grant, is fucking amazing.   Hercules and Love Affair came to be out of a need to take another look at early '90s heyday House.   That's the House that saved lives on the dance floor in the midst of a terrifying plague.   John Grant's almost goth voice sharing the experience of finding out he'd become HIV positive laid down over a life-saving House beat allows us to re-understand that time from the relative safety of 2014.   

 # 6 Jamie xx - "All Under One Roof Raving" 

Jamie xx, from the English group The xx, gave us this tribute to the UK rave scene of a couple of decades ago by overlaying a story of rave day conversations on top of a very current post-dubstep track.  Oh, did I mention the steel drum?   Yes, please. 

# 5 Kiesza - "Hideaway"

Around the same time that Kiesza was learning to walk, Robin S and Ce Ce Peniston were filling dancefloors around the world with deep house infused dance pop.   Those of us who remember the days of "Finally" thought there'd never be that kind of synth bass catchy hook again.   We were wrong.   "Hideaway" gives Rick Astley's biggest hits a run for their money on catchiness...but let's be clear...it's all kinds of good.  

#4 Kim Ann Foxman - "Steal My Secrets"

Kim Ann Foxman knows House.  She knows where it came from and why.   As a Hercules and Love Affair affiliate that's not too surprising.   What is surprising is the degree to which "Steal My Secrets" sounds like a long lost record from a San Francisco full moon rave in 1992.   It isn't influenced by that special place and time.  It is that place and time.  And that was a damned good era 

# 3 Neneh Cherry - "Blank Project"

Neneh Cherry's 1988 smash, "Buffalo Stance" made it to # 50 on VH1's top 100 one hit wonders.   And, while there's nothing wrong with being a one hit wonder (the vast majority of us are NO hit wonders), Neneh Cherry is much, much more than that.   She left New York City when when she 16 to join the just emerging punk scene and played in The Slits.   She's created punk, rap, house, and more recently, experimental jazz.   And this year she released this intensely personal piece as an expression of her coping with the death of her mother.   This is what art sounds like.  

# 2 Caribou - "Our Love"

Beautiful.   Provocative.   Straddling the sacred line between joy and yearning.   This track is, to me, perfection.   With flourishes of strings, oddly placed bleeps, and a chunky 1991 techno rhythm line, well just damn.  

  # 1  Shamir - "Sometimes A Man"

The Godfather of House, Frankie Knuckles, passed away in March of this year.   It was hard to understand how a man who invented and created a music movement so based on the energies of youth could have left us and passed into history.   It's such a cliche, but it's also true that his music will live and influence and inspire for generations to come.  Shamir, born in the suburbs of Las Vegas in 1994, has no first hand experience of what happened in Chicago in the 1980s, but his House is directly from Frankie, and his talent is startling.  His EP, Northtown, is downright exciting in scope, from Chicago house, to R&B influenced electronica, to an authentic bluegrass ballad.   Sometimes a man is more than he says he is. 

So, there it is.   The Lair of the Okapi's Top 10 Songs of 2014!   It was a hard one this year, and here are some more excellent tracks that I just couldn't fit in to the top 10...

Foster The People - "Best Friend"
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - "Stranger To My Happiness"
Sam Smith feat. Mary J. Blige - "Stay With Me"

Sinkane - "New Name"

Basement Jaxx - "Power To The People"

Craft Spells - "Breaking The Angle Against The Tide"

Hozier - "Take Me To Church"

and, of course, Pharrel - "Happy"

 

 

 

The 2013 Okapi Sampler!

Soul music.   Music from the soul, from the very core of being.   Soul music came to us from the joy and pain and love and yearning of African-Americans who used the tools given to them by jazz, blues, and gospel music to create a heavenly sound for us here on Earth.   Of course, the music has adapted and evolved over the years from Southern soul, to the Motown sound, to early '70s Philly soul.  It seemed for a long while that soul music had been picked apart and watered down so much by disco, and hip hop, and house, that it became just another historical genre with little relevance today. 

But, 2013 showed us that our souls still yearn to connect and understand and share.   While technology has put the world in our phones, soul music has re-emerged as a real way to connect to the most human aspects of existence, beyond what social media can provide.   Today's soul makers are using technology to reacquaint us with our core selves.   The best music of 2012 seemed to reach out to the world, while this past year, it seems we reached within.  

And, here are the Lair of the Okapi's favorite songs of 2013....

 

 #10 - The Juan Maclean - "You Are My Destiny"

#9 - Sophie - "Bipp"

#8 - Burial - "Hiders"

#7 - Justin Timberlake (feat. Jay-Z) - "Suit & Tie

#6 - James Blake - "Retrograde"

# 5 - Laura Mvula - "Green Garden"

# 4 - Disclosure (feat. Sam Smith) - "Latch"

# 3 - FKA Twigs - "Water Me"

# 2 - Daft Punk (feat. Pharrell) - "Get Lucky"

#1 - Rhye - "Open" 

There was a lot of good music this year, and it was tough to narrow it down to just ten.   Here are some more great tracks that touched my soul this year. 

Classixx (feat. Nancy Whang) - "All You're Waiting For"

Lorde - "Royals"

Forest Swords - "Thor's Stone"

Holy Ghost! - "Dumb Disco Ideas"

James Blake - "Voyeur"

Janelle Monae (feat. Erykah Badu) - "Q.U.E.E.N."

!!! - "Slyd" 

Jesse Rose - "Dance With Me"
Arrested Development - "Living"

The 2012 Okapi Sampler!

We hear a lot these days about how globalization has made the world small.  Societies and economies have become vastly more interconnected, interdependent, and multicultural.  Thanks to a thousand new technologies, the planet is now fully digitized, wired, and Google-mapped, and people from around the globe can cross national and cultural boundaries in just a few clicks or through social media apps on mobile smart phones. 

Has globalization brought the utopian world that many of us who remember when the Wall fell had hoped for?   Yeah, um, pretty much not.   But, it has brought a sharing of ideas, experiences, and cultures in a way that's never been seen before, and the way we create, share, and experience music has shifted along with it.   The boundaries between musical genres are becoming as porous and blurry as the boundaries between cultures, and this year has really shown us all how big music can get when the world gets smaller.  In past decades, the American pop charts would allow a "world music" novelty here and there and we'd all dread the next play of "The Macarena," and wonder why exactly a dutchie should be passed on the left hand side.   Now, these cross-cultural musical phenomena aren't novelties, they're the new reality.   

Pop music in 2012 was defined by a South Korean techno-pop sensation, a Filipino-Puerto Rican from Hawaii who gave us a new Motown sound, a Barbadian hip-pop princess, and an offbeat Belgian-Australian singer-songwriter who delivered one of the best break-up songs in music history.  This is the year that cultures blended, genres fused, the world got smaller, and the music got bigger.  And, these are the Lair of the Okapi's favorite tracks of the year...

# 10 - Michael Kiwanuka - "Tell Me A Tale"

At first listen, "Tell Me A Tale" is a familiar vintage soul gem - maybe an under-appreciated Otis Redding b-side, or a lost masterpiece from a 1973 blaxploitation film.   Nope.   It's 24 year old Michael Kiwanuka's brand-new soul classic.   Michael Kiwanuka grew up in London to Ugandan refugee parents, and his influences come from far and wide, but he's straight up American soul.   "Tell Me A Tale" doesn't break new ground.  Instead, it shows us that there was still at least one unturned stone from the 1970s, and there is something deeply satisfying in knowing that there might be even more to be turned over.

 # 9 - Grimes - "Oblivion"

For a song called "Oblivion," that warns of the dangers of walking around on a dark night,  it sure is exuberant.   I get the feeling that Vancouver-raised Québécois Grimes (Claire Boucher) hasn't just conjured '80s New Wave and early '90s Rave with some liberal pinches of Bjork eccentricity and Cocteau Twins dreaminess - she is the inevitable magic of those ingredients.  "Oblivion" is bouncy, fresh and playful, but it's built on a solid, obviously smart (and slightly dark) foundation.   It's hard not to hear this without thinking that Grimes is the future of music.  And it's really hard to not click "replay."

# 8 - Antony and the Johnsons - "Cut The World"

Antony Hegarty is nothing less than a savior for the marginalized, the abused, and the forgotten - a Renaissance being for the sensitive souls of our world.   Antony was born in England, grew in San Francisco, and bloomed in New York City.   With the voice of a transgendered angel, and the hurting but defiant spirit of Nina Simone, Antony's music and projects have been damned near impossible to categorize, and "Cut The World" hasn't made it easier.   More a composition than a song, "Cut The World" is an incredibly intimate meditation on suffering the cruelties of this world - made big and beautiful by a collaboration with Danish National Chamber Orchestra.  ***The composition is gorgeous.   The video is disturbing, and if you're even a little squeamish, I'd advise you listen and not watch.***

  #7- A Place To Bury Strangers - "Onwards To The Wall"

A Place To Bury Strangers has done the truly impossible.   They have successfully resurrected the darkly enchanting soul of Joy Division, and made music that is completely relevant today.   Of course, in my opinion, Joy Division was, is, and will always be relevant to everything, ever.  "Onwards To The Wall," thankfully, doesn't sound like a cover, or rip-off.  It, somehow manages to actually take us back to that otherworld that Joy Division came from - with it's ethereal arrangements over an aggressive bass and slicing and melodic wall of sound guitars.

#6 - Rhye - "The Fall"

"The Fall" is beautiful.   It's just beautiful.  Sensual, tender, intense, sexy, honest, driving, elegant, and beautiful.  It's cool jazz, piano house, and the Quiet Storm.   It's everything.  As a kid, I imagined my adult life, in my New York City penthouse, with its sprawling city night view, with this song playing.   The vocals sound a lot like Yvonne Elliman meets Roisin Murphy, but the voice is actually Mike Milosh, half of the all-male, half-Canadian, half-Danish duo, Rhye.  "The Fall" is their first single, from their upcoming first album, due out in March.   I cannot wait.

#5 - Gotye (featuring Kimbra) - "Somebody That I Used To Know" 

About once a year, there is a song that is so inarguably good that underground music snobs, like myself, are powerless against loving it despite its pop chart success.  Last year, it was Adele's "Rolling In The Deep."  I challenge you to find anyone in the world who didn't have at least a slight obsession with this one last spring.  And, it's not a guilty pleasure, it's just a great song.  Belgian-Australian Gotye, and New Zealander Kimbra, gave us all a authentic vessel to channel our past and present heartache, and a really catchy chorus.  Go ahead.  Click play, and sing along.   You know you want to.

  

#4 - Tanlines - "All Of Me"

Tanlines exemplifies all that's good about Brooklyn's hipster scene - and there is a lot of good synth-pop goodness that comes with all of those bow ties and "ironic" mustaches.  Since the electroclash hype of ten years ago faded, Brooklyn (and Berlin) have continued to push danceable retro-wave into the future, and with the amazingly infectious hooks, deep into our brains to be replayed over and over and over again.   "All Of Me" has the urgency of a youthful crush on an hot summer day.   Oh, and a great dance beat.   

#3 - Santigold - "The Keepers"

Santi White, now known as Santigold, is the face and the voice of the new America.  The country's "Leave It To Beaver" days are long gone, much to the November surprise of a whole lot of well-to-do white Republicans.   Had they listened to "The Keepers" when it came out this summer, they would've been a lot less surprised, and maybe, just maybe they'd be a little more ready to walk away from their delusional American dream, and on board for America's bright future.  Santigold has been putting out awesome genre-fusing music for a few years now, but "The Keepers" shows us that she's taking her creative brilliance to a whole new level.  

#2 - Django Django - "Default" 

Django Django is a four-man outfit from Scotland, but I think it'd be impossible to listen to "Default" and not feel like you're on a dusty Route 66 road trip.  Analog synthesizer sounds, 60's surf guitars, a driving bounce, and psychedelic-y vocals = one very happy listener. It seems a simple formula, but this default is anything but formulaic.    

#1 - S O H N - "The Wheel"  

I've spent the past two months trying not to be completely consumed by this song.  It begins innocently enough, with a strikingly minimalist opening, and then I become submerged in its truth.   It is a deeply personal message from the next realm about how to navigate this one.  Subtly intricate in structure, and simply and deeply profound, this song is just mesmerizing, to "the very last breath."  


So, there you have it.  The completely and totally biased 2012 Lair of the Okapi Top Ten.   I hope it's been fun.  I'm going to try to have a few posts between now and December 2013, but until the next post, here are some great songs that I just couldn't fit into the Top 10...

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - "Baby"
John Talabot (featuring Pional) - "So Will Be Now..."
Pet Shop Boys - "Leaving"
Lana Del Rey - "Ride"
The Scissor Sisters - :"Let's Have A Kiki"
Kim Ann Forman - "Return It"
Jai Paul - "Jasmine"
Matthew Dear - "Her Fantasy"