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Music, Podcast

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Best Music of 2017

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Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
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It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means: music publications published their year-end coverage approximately one to three months ago. We here at SportsAlcohol.com do not have a list of our 200 Favorite Albums That Came Out Between January and Mid-October, though we will have some individual write-ups of songs we love throughout the rest of the month and maybe into January. But Marisa, Sara, Rob, and Jesse did sit down to talk about our faves (and other opinions) from this year in popular musics. (They also took selfies. See above.)

For our best music of 2017 wrap-up, we decided to take a different tactic and take a roughly chronological trip through the various live shows we all attended, together and apart, throughout the year, and let the discussion spring from there. You’ll find out who we went to see because we’re afraid of death, whose live show exceeded their disappointing album(s), which band(s) Sara cannot deal with right now, and which show got Rob feeling real emotional in a rough year.

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Music

TRACK MARKS, BEST OF 2016: “CRANES IN THE SKY” BY SOLANGE

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Sara
Sara
Sara is big into reading and writing fiction like it's her job, because it is. That doesn't mean she isn't real as it gets. She loves real stuff like polka dots, indie rock, and underground fight clubs. I may have made some of that up. I don't know her that well. You can tell she didn't just write this in the third person because if she had written it there would have been less suspect sentence construction.
Sara
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Let’s get this out of the way now: whatever artistic debt Solange owed to her older sister Beyonce when she first started out is more than paid now. The two make very different kinds of music which, if it wasn’t apparent before 2016, was made clear by the very different albums the two put out this year. I may be in the minority in favoring the younger Knowles but that’s because I tend to prefer my girl power songs introspective over anthemic. While I probably wouldn’t put it on at a party, “Cranes in the Sky” gets more replay from me because it feels like a warm embrace from an empathetic friend, albeit one who is radically woke and wants to pass along her insights into years of oppression as much as she wants to offer comfort in shared pain (also, I don’t have very many parties).

There were several strong records that addressed the singularity of the black experience in America in 2016 (see Blood Orange, Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino, among others) but none were quite as transcendently, painfully gorgeous as Solange’s A Seat at the Table and “Cranes in the Sky” is the album’s early peak. Like the titular birds the song evokes a delicate grace, the instruments and vocals unadorned but stealthily powerful. At the start Solange’s airy voice settles over a simple percussive beat and tentative strings, knitting together in a mournful funk that both enfolds and unsettles the listener. What at first sounds like a litany of post-break-up salves (Solange has variously tried to drink, dance, sex, and read “it” away) soon becomes a eulogy to all the things in life that can’t be changed, particularly for black women trying to make it in a world that, more often than not, devalues them. While the repetition of “away” in the refrain almost seems in danger of floating off, it’s the insistence that “Sometimes I don’t wanna feel those metal clouds” that pins it all back in place. It’s self-assertion as origami, a folding up that also gives oneself shape. We’re all works in progress, and our best chance of surviving together comes from accepting that.