Beyoncé wins 2011 simply for loving the job more than everyone else. This year’s “4” is on a par with 2006’s lean “B’Day,” and is a huge step up from 2009’s loopy “I Am … Sasha Fierce.” Beyoncé can win us over repeatedly because her exuberance is equal in strength to her desire to go straight for sequins and wind machines when stumped. Her new live DVD captures the tightly corralled ecstasies of her four-day run at Roseland this past August, and includes all the videos from “4.” The Roseland show was split into very predictable halves—the first was a narrated medley of her career up until “4,” including politic comments on breaking with her manager (Matthew Knowles, her father) and her time as the Diana Ross of Destiny’s Child. The second half was a sequential run-through of “4,” which served the torch songs (“1 + 1”) well but blurred the edges of high-definition pattern tracks like “Countdown.” It was thrilling to watch not because the show was unusually clever—Beyoncé was simply born to be on stage, wear shiny clothes, and work a room—but because Beyoncé means it, wants it, has the voice, and knows whom to hire to flesh out her ideas. And this vision does seem to be hers, as it’s too idiosyncratic a mesh of tastes and textures to reflect some timid P.R. plan.
Rihanna and Katy Perry don’t seem to be entirely masters of their own destiny, though these teleologies are never fully revealed and the party line is always “I’m an artist.” (Ask the songwriting team The Matrix how messy it gets when you step up and reveal who wrote what on a pop star’s album.) None of this process is necessarily bad—the classic assembly-line pop star makes up in flexibility what he or she may lack in songwriting royalties. This has been Rihanna’s greatest strength, her role as delivery vehicle, the gelatin for this year’s flavor. She has been equally plausible on “S.O.S.,” a track that is disco by any other name, “Umbrella,” a track that is either rock music or the version of rock music you’d find in a romantic comedy, and the various tracks that draw from Jamaican music (“Man Down,” “Pon De Replay”). On her new album, “Talk That Talk,” a song called “Where You Have Been?” uses a synthesizer bass line lifted directly from acid house and Rihanna sounds entirely at home. Katy Perry isn’t as adept as Rihanna because she has been narrowly branded as the Naughty American Neighbor from the beginning of her second, non-Christian music career. (The first career was conducted briefly under the name Katy Hudson.) In 2011, Perry rode her 2010 album “Teenage Dream” to the last two of its five consecutive No. 1 singles; all of these involved Dr. Luke, Ester Dean, or both of them. This is how you get Doug Morris to give you your own label.
Ashton Shepherd released the excellent “Where Country Grows,” part of continuum of Nashville pop that doesn’t fear the vocal twang that Taylor Swift drove carefully around on her way to becoming an US Weekly staple. A song like “Look It Up” (pardon the embarrassingly literal video) is in the no-nonsense vein of feminism-by-any-other-name that Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn helped establish as an accepted mode in the country canon. Shepherd’s instrument is as flexible and nuanced as Beyoncé’s, though she is unlikely to do a four-night stand anywhere in New York.
My favorite male singer of the year was Bill Callahan, who is sneaking up into a canonical spot, if keepers of the canon are alive and listening. “Apocalypse” isn’t available on Spotify, so you will have to go and buy it, an act I endorse. (This animated version of a song from “Apocalypse” called “Riding for the Feeling” will make you want to sit very still, or ski jump, or both.) Callahan has made his mark by delivering jokes and heart-rending epiphanies in the same even, resonant tone. The male singer who paved the way for serving up unwholesome information unadorned (after Johnny Cash) is Lou Reed. And in 2011, Reed may have attracted more press than any other male singer. If you don’t know why, watch Darren Aronofsky’s video for Lou Reed and Metallica’s “The View” or go to the relatively clean Web site for “Lulu” and poke around. I’ll wait.
“Lulu” is Lou Reed’s version of the Frank Wedekind plays, set to a collaborative roar played by Reed and Metallica. The reaction has been decidedly negative, though not as negative as the negative reviewers imagine. (On Metacritic, the album has averaged a 44 out of 100, hardly a wipeout.) At Grantland, Chuck Klosterman used “Lulu” as fodder for a series of comic barbs; in New York magazine, Nitsuh Abebe was typically reasonable and concluded that “Lulu” gives art a bad name. James Parker flat-out defended “Lulu” for The Atlantic. What’s the fuss? It’s eighty minutes of an old man croaking over very loud music. The tracks tend to go on: three are over ten minutes. But “Lulu” is a gorgeous piece of sound, and it’s hardly dull to hear Reed try to inhabit the voice of a sexually aggressive young woman. The problem is length; saw this bad girl in half and everyone might have spared us the one-liners. Which isn’t to say “Lulu” is a triumph, just a satisfying oddity.
The year’s most vexing album comes from a woman who spends time in many places but has two homes in America, so we can grandfather her in to this discussion: Björk. You want a lusty takedown? Here’s Carles, of Hipster Runoff, on Björk’s recent appearance on Later With Jools Holland. Generous? No. Accurate? More or less, according to the performance I saw this past July at the Manchester International Festival. Several instruments were invented for this album—with Tesla coils! and acoustic pendulums!—and Björk put together a twenty-four-woman choir to aid and abet her. The new songs form “Biophilia,” an exploration of organic shapes and the aesthetics of nature.
I am not against this album because I don’t like mushrooms (I do, very much) or because Björk’s new wig makes her look like Roseanne Roseannadanna after a vigorous day of spin art. As a collection of songs, “Biophilia” doesn’t create a line, even a wiggly one. The album works, though, but as a system, not an album. The iPad application created for “Biophilia” is a successful fusion of visual design and conceptual seeding that turns every song into a starting point for extended play. Instead of listening to “Crystalline” or “Virus,” you manipulate visual representations of sound and tone. You have the ability to let any song play through as it exists on the album, but opting to mash together two big continents that contain all of a song’s chords in colored, sedimentary layers feels like the response Björk wants: an active engagement that brings music closer to the process of growth itself. She isn’t joking around, any more than Reed and Metallica were, though her album is infinitely weaker. But she wasn’t necessarily trying to make a traditional album; the richness of the “Biophilia” app shows an artist engaged and moving into an art form that is barely even a recognized form. Being Björk, she has sacrificed the known for her version of the unknown.
Illustration by Jim Stoten; photograph by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images.
Read more from The New Yorker’s 2011: The Year in Review, at News Desk and at Culture Desk.
