Archives

Mr. Bill

Post author By
Post date February 4, 2005

One Matchless Time

By Jay Parini

HarperCollins, 433 pp., $29.95

ith One Matchless Time, Jay Parini becomes the sixth biographer to chronicle and analyze the life and work of William Faulkner. Faulkner’s original biographer, Joseph Blotner, benefited from a personal knowledge of the author and his family. He also interviewed scores of individuals who have since died. The challenge then for Parini was to find something new to disclose about Faulkner’s life, develop a compelling theory of the author’s psyche, or demonstrate a more meaningful reading of his work.

Answering the inevitable question — why a new biography of William Faulkner? — Parini cites his treatment of Faulkner’s romantic relationship (from 1949 to 1953) with Memphis novelist Joan Williams. It’s an interesting though misguided answer to the question. While there are letters from Faulkner to Williams scattered throughout Parini’s book — the first of which Parini reproduces twice — there are no references to Williams’ letters to Faulkner. Williams, who died last spring, was one of the few remaining individuals who knew Faulkner intimately, yet two, one-sentence quotations are her only direct representations in the book. Once again, this relationship, so rich in material when both parties are explored, is simply recycled by Parini primarily through existing biographies. Williams’ voice, indeed her perceptions, go unexamined.

The underdeveloped relationship is further hampered by factual inaccuracies. Faulkner’s birthday, for example, appears once as August 25th rather than September 25th. Williams, an only child, is said to have first met Faulkner with her sister’s husband. And Williams and Faulkner’s first “clandestine meeting,” Parini writes, was on Faulkner’s boat during an outing on December 31, 1949. Williams repeatedly corrected this. The outing actually occurred during the summer of 1950 and included Williams’ friend from Bard College, Brandon Grove, and Faulkner’s wife, Estelle.

But Parini is not the first to take license with Williams’ life. In William Faulkner: American Writer, Frederick R. Karl describes Faulkner as presenting Williams with the handwritten manuscript of The Sound and the Fury “under the eyes of Estelle” in 1950. Williams remembers Faulkner giving her the manuscript in private, and their letters make it clear it occurred after their affair was consummated in 1952. The gift was indeed a token of Faulkner’s affection. Still, he remained dissatisfied, writing Williams that though she has slept with him she has not really surrendered, has not given herself completely, has not fully let herself go. How did Williams feel about this pressuring, even bullying? In Parini’s book, the question goes unanswered.

True, Parini writes of Williams’ personal ambitions as a writer and mentions her novel The Wintering, which mirrors her affair with Faulkner. She eventually would publish five novels and a short-story collection. However, when the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Faulkner the Gold Medal for Fiction in 1962, Parini neglects to mention that Williams received an award from the institute that same day for her first novel, The Morning and the Evening, recognition that did not go unnoticed by Faulkner. During her last conversation with Faulkner, on the front porch of his home just 10 days before his death in 1962, he asked Williams if there was any money in the institute’s envelope she received. “No,” she said. “They gave me that later.”

One especially surprising note in One Matchless Time is the idea of Faulkner as intensely loyal. This is a tough sell for those who have read of Faulkner’s dismissal of his Hollywood friend Alfred Bezzerides and his cooling friendship with Phil Stone, who not only personally financed Faulkner’s first book, The Marble Faun, but also championed the burgeoning writer. Loyalty was indeed lacking when in 1961 Williams’ agent asked Faulkner for a book-jacket blurb for her first novel. After years of encouraging her as a writer, Faulkner presented Williams with an unusable quotation: “This is a compassionate and hopeful first novel,” Faulkner wrote, “hopeful in the sense that I dont [sic] believe Miss Williams will be satisfied until she has done a better one.” Then he went on a tirade against those who were “combing the bushes for plugs for your book.”

Faced with the abundance of biographical and scholarly material, the appearance late last year of One Matchless Time again begs the question: Why a new biography of William Faulkner? Rather than revealing fresh facts, Parini’s Faulkner is a (usually) upstanding character committed to regaining the former stature of his paternal line and a man who is fervently attached to his Oxford home, Rowan Oak. In short, Faulkner as a man readers should like. A great artist no doubt, but the essential self-centeredness of Faulkner and his aloofness make the “likable” Faulkner mythological, much like his Yoknapatawpha County. n

Lisa C. Hickman has written frequently on the life and work of Joan Williams.

BOOKS b y

Politics Politics Beat Blog

Harper v. Herenton

Post author By
Post date January 28, 2005

Last week the good folks at WPTY-TV chose to air some comments of mine concerning the recent run-in between Mayor Herenton and ABC-24 anchor Cameron Harper.

I have to say, as I did in a portion of my remarks which didn’t make the cut, that Herenton is my favorite interview subject. In several longish conversations over the last 15 years or so, he has never lacked for candor.

Lookit, Harper is a classy guy, and I definitely have admiration for his gumption as a guest at the Rotary luncheon, in deciding to pick up the cudgels for his station, join up with a WPTY cameraman who was covering the affair solitaire, and turn into an on-the-spot interviewer. But — how to put it? — I don’t think asking Herenton if his resignation would benefit the goal of consolidation is the kind of thing that a Freedom of Information suit could be built on.

Cameron certainly had a right to ask the question. We’d all have been pleased to hear the answer. But just as certainly, the mayor had a right, after a short spell of back-and-forth, to brush it aside. There’s no law saying you have to answer something so clearly hypothetical. And to deny the implied challenge in the question would be disingenuous. Sometimes a question can be simultaneously pertinent and impertinent.

So it’s six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-another on the first count. Continuing to press the question as other reporters attempted their own interviews, which is what a reporter for another station contends on his personal blog and which some of the raw videos of the occasion suggest may have happened, is something else again.

As for continuing to insist on an answer by putting his hand on the mayor’s arm (which Harper denies and which the various videos are unclear on) well, what we know is that the mayor is heard to tell Harper, “Don’t put your hands on me!” in an unmistakably imperative tone, followed by a softer, “Please don’t touch me. No. Don’t touch me. You’re way off base.” Which was followed, some time and distance later, by the macho line, “For him to put his hands on me, I’m going to drop him, okay?”

Meanwhile Harper is insisting to the mayoral press secretary and to a member of the mayor’s security detail, “I can ask him any question I want to ask him. I can ask him anything I want. I will ask him what I want to ask him.”

One is reminded of the scene in Henry IV: Part One in which the Welsh mystic Owen Glendower boasts, “I can call spirits from the very deep,” and the cynical Harry Hotspur responds, “Aye, so can I, and so can any man, but will they come?”

In a later statement on the incident, the mayor contended that “an observed media employee made physical contact” with him and “had to be restrained and prevented from making further unwanted and offensive contact.” He went on to assert that “under no circumstances” would “the office of the mayor accept the media’s behavior in the future that is of a harassing or abusive nature.”

In its own statement, the station disputed the mayor’s version: “We believe Mayor Herenton is doing this to disguise his efforts to avoid answering pertinent questions from the public and the media. We also feel the mayor falsified and invented the ‘contact’ in order to avoid Mr. Harper and further questioning.” Further: “Mr. Harper did not touch Mayor Herenton deliberately. If there was any contact at all, it was incidental and unintentional and was caused by the close proximity of the media to the mayor. We believe no rational person would interpret any facet of the incident as ‘threatening.'”

For what it’s worth, I am reminded of an occasion in 1997, when we at the Flyer were probing what we saw as a potential conflict of interest regarding Herenton’s awarding of a lucrative consultancy. As a good soldier, I had done my part on that project. Shortly thereafter, both Herenton and I attended a Chamber of Commerce event. Chamber publicist Allan Hester asked us to pose for a snapshot for the chamber’s newsletter. There we are in the archives, both beaming. But the mayor, a former Golden Gloves champion, is saying to me under his breath: “Back when I was a boxer, Jackson, I would shake hands with a fellow and then whip his butt.”

I thought about that in the wake of the current imbroglio: If Harper had really wanted to advance the sum of human knowledge, he might have gone ahead and touched the mayor after being warned. Horrified or fascinated, we’d all have watched that movie.

Film Features Film/TV

Human Nature

Post author By
Post date January 28, 2005

There aren’t any woodsmen anymore, so laments a character in The Woodsman. “Woodsmen,” you ask? You know, like in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Ms. Red was saved by a woodsman who sliced open the wolf that had consumed both her and her granny, thereby setting them free. Seems like these days there are more wolves than woodsmen.

Enter the wolf: Walter. Early 40s. Quiet. Keeps to himself. Played by Kevin Bacon. He’s just starting work at a lumberyard after a 12-year prison stay. His crime? He was a child molester. But, like alcoholism, where a person is considered an alcoholic long after their last drink, is a child molester always a child molester? This is very much on his mind as he leaves the hell of prison only to reenter a different kind of hell: temptation, isolation, and the stigma of Walter’s crime. Not a lot of employers want to hire an ex-con, much less his kind, but a friend of Walter’s brother takes him on at his lumberyard, provided there’s no trouble.

It’s looking like things might work out for Walter. He reconnects with his brother-in-law Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), even though his sister won’t see him. There is even a pair of women at work who find the quiet, aloof Walter attractive. Mary-Kay (played by singer Eve) gets her feelings hurt when Walter’s not interested, while Vickie (Mrs. Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick) won’t take no for an answer. Mary-Kay gets nosy when rejected and snoops around, while Vickie manages to get Walter in the sack. Both women will find out about Walter’s past, and his success at reintegrating into society rests somewhat on the consequences of how they deal with this knowledge.

Meanwhile, in between work, time with Vickie, visits from Sgt. Lucas (Mos Def), a verbally abusive police detective, and required visits with a therapist, there is Walter’s bus ride home a bus ride that also includes a number of pretty, young girls. If he stays on long enough, he can find out where each girl gets off. Why does Walter keep riding the bus long after his stop? To test himself? To satisfy his repressed urges? Walter wants more than anything to be normal, but he feels more and more out of control as his intimacy with Vickie progresses and scrutiny at work increases. One day, when the pressure gets to be too much, Walter gets on that bus and subjects himself to the temptation of following a girl into a densely wooded park. Will he speak to her? Will he touch her?

Bacon, an actor who has been turning in fine work for more than 20 years, finds the role of his lifetime here in Walter. Or, rather, he has found just the right amount of spotlight in a property that showcases his strong points while challenging, successfully, parts of him we have not seen. Regardless, his is a courageously understated performance and one that neither passes judgment nor solicits undue sympathy from the audience. He’s not particularly likable, which challenges our ability to get past his past, so to speak. Bacon is surrounded by an able supporting cast willing to take the same plunge he does. Thus we are treated to career-best work from Sedgwick and Mos Def and strong work from everyone else. (The therapist is played by Michael Shannon, a guy I went to high school with. Talk about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon!)

The Woodsman asks many questions that society in general would be well-advised to ask. The epidemic of child sexual abuse is second in magnitude only to the epidemic of ignorance that surrounds sexuality in general, and The Woodsman is peopled almost entirely by characters who have been damaged (or are damagers themselves) by this ignorance. Nicole Kassell, who directs from a script she adapted with Steven Fechter from his play, handles these questions (and the elusive answers) with sensitivity and wisely defers judgment to the audience. (Dare we judge?) With strange camera angles that occasionally look like the view from a security camera and ambiguously droning music, she places us in a role not unlike that of the detective who haunts and harasses Walter well-intentioned but judgmental snoop. Or is that platonic voyeur? Regardless, that role is not a comfortable one, as it requires at least a little bit of sympathy for Walter the kind of person we are taught to fear and revile and some condemnation for those who fear and revile him, as an angry mob needs not torches and pitchforks to be an angry mob.

Shot on clear, home-movie-style video with bare-bones, basic editing and photography, Paper Clips is not a film that calls much attention to itself. An 80-minute, “inspirational” account of a middle-school class studying the Holocaust, it’s the kind of film you might expect to be shown in classrooms or to be screened at regional or specialty film festivals. It might even pop up on public television.

All of those things have either happened or were planned, but Paper Clips, which tracks a novel project started by students, teachers, and administrators in tiny Whitwell, Tennessee, has risen above its station: This little documentary is distributed by Miramax, home of artful blockbusters and Oscar winners. Now, this doesn’t mean Paper Clips will appear in multiplexes around the country, but it does suggest that the film will be more widely seen than it otherwise might have been. And that’s a good thing, because Paper Clips really is inspirational.

Paper Clips tracks a small thing that grew into something big. Studying the Holocaust is nothing unusual in schools, but the teachers at Whitwell found that their kids were having trouble grasping the magnitude of the event. That six million Jews (and 11 million people total) were killed didn’t quite register. The number was too large to imagine. To make the loss more tangible, the kids of Whitwell decided to collect something as a symbol. It was decided that it would be paper clips, which are cheap and small, and, as it turns out, were worn on lapels in Norway during the war as an act of silent defiance.

And so the kids at Whitwell Middle School started collecting paper clips, with their goal six million. They wrote letters describing their project and asking for donations. They got them, from companies, from celebrities (Bill Cosby, Tom Hanks), from politicians (the past three presidents), and, most movingly, from Holocaust survivors and the children of survivors. And these paper clips came with letters.

Some people sent bulk paper clips, but others sent individual clips dedicated to family members or friends who had perished in the Holocaust. After a few newspaper and television reports on the school’s project, including in German newspapers, assistant principal David Smith had to start going to the post office himself to cart back the daily mail; it was too much for the postal service to deliver. One class of German school children even sent a suitcase full of paper clips, each appended with a handwritten apology note to Anne Frank. Soon Holocaust survivors from across the country were making pilgrimages to the town to meet the kids and tell their stories.

Whitwell is a town of roughly 1,500 people, located 24 miles northwest of Chattanooga. “We’re what’s called a ‘depressed community,'” middle school principal Linda Hooper explains. “But we’re not depressed. We’re just poor.” Like so many rural communities, Whitwell’s a homogeneous place. The town has more traffic lights (two) than Jews or Catholics (zero). The middle school itself had only two African-American children and a sole Latino child. This homogeneity put Whitwell’s kids at a disadvantage when they left the town, especially when they went off to college and confronted a world far more diverse than what they grew up with.

This is why Hooper describes the school’s decision to implement the Holocaust study class in 1998 as essentially a selfish act. “It was no great mission,” she says. “It was a need. Our need.”

The paper-clip project itself takes on a life of its own, and its unlikely, outrageous success is wondrous. The Whitwell kids receive more than 25,000 pieces of mail and nearly 30 million paper clips. A couple of German journalists help the school find an authentic German rail car, one once used to transport people to the camps, and helps get it shipped to Whitwell, where it stores 11 million of the clips as a permanent “children’s memorial” to the Holocaust. Now kids from other towns take field trips to Whitwell to see the memorial, with tours given by Whitwell students.

But as amazing as the paper-clip project itself is, what’s most legitimately moving about the film itself is how the project becomes such a multifaceted teaching tool and how the filmmakers allow this dynamic to quietly present itself.

For these kids (and the adults who guide them), the Holocaust class and the paper-clip project become not just vehicles for learning about tolerance but for combatting the stereotypes and prejudices the people of Whitwell form of others and those others form of them. A Washington Post reporter licks her chops when she learns of the project and realizes that Whitwell is only 30 miles away from Dayton, home of the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” and 100 miles from Pulaski, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded. But traveling to Whitwell challenges her preconceptions of the rural South. And one of the most touching moments comes from assistant principal Smith’s mid-film epiphany about the latent racism he inherited from his father that he desperately wants to avoid passing on to his young sons.

At its core, Paper Clips isn’t just about how studying the Holocaust has transformed these kids. It’s about how the project has transformed the way outsiders see them and, hopefully, others like them. Hooper, an authentic heroic figure (she throws her hands up at how to put together a memorial, but one of her teachers jokes, “God invented the world in seven days, and he didn’t even have Linda Hooper to help him”) purportedly told the filmmakers, “If you make my children look like rednecks, I’ll eat your hearts for breakfast.” She needn’t have worried. They couldn’t have if they tried.

Chris Herrington

Paper Clips opens February 4th at Malco Ridgeway Four.

Opinion Viewpoint

A Bitter Pill

Post author By
Post date January 28, 2005

From its inception, TennCare was a flawed program. Too many people outside of health care were involved in its design and had a financial stake in it. Still, TennCare became the health insurance program for 1.3 million citizens of Tennessee. And, predictably, it was not long before we realized that TennCare desperately needed to be fixed.

Governor Phil Bredesen’s recently announced “remedy” leaves 320,000 people to fend for themselves in a very frightening health-care world. While most readers’ eyes glaze over when they read the word “TennCare,” everyone in the state will have a friend or a loved one or a co-worker who will be dramatically affected by what is about to take place. It will not strike quickly like a tsunami but will instead leave people to slowly suffer — with few or no resources to turn to when they get sick.

There are other solutions to the financial crisis brought on by TennCare than the one Bredesen has proposed. Adjustments could be made. For example, TennCare currently provides patients with any medicine on the market, yet physicians can manage the majority of illnesses with only 30 drugs, most of which are sold as generics.

If we are to save TennCare, we must return to its original intention, and that is to manage care. Primary-care doctors should be paid an adequate fee to help keep people healthy enough to work and avoid disability. Instead, TennCare’s provider fees are so low that few physicians agreed to even treat patients on TennCare.

To improve care, physicians must have the confidence to do the right thing. As long as physicians are afraid of being sued, they will continue to order unnecessary, expensive tests. Tort reform and cost control go hand-in-hand. In the meantime, young (sometimes inexperienced) physicians who treat many TennCare patients practice defensive medicine by admitting patients more often to hospitals and ordering more tests — dramatically driving up the cost of care.

The solution to TennCare’s woes requires shifting our focus to prevention and disease management. We would have to do more with less. High touch rather than high tech. And the legal system would need to be held in check.

On the other hand, Bredesen has inappropriately blamed the lawyers at the Tennessee Justice Center for providing obstacles that could not be overcome. In particular, he accuses center director Gordon Bonnyman of single-handedly bringing down the system. The Tennessee Justice Center has served the rights of poor people in Tennessee well, but its representatives cannot be blamed for the demise of TennCare. They simply do not have that much power.

William Sloane Coffin, the famed activist and chaplain, once said to me, by way of offering advice for the work of the Church Health Center: “Never let charity get in the way of justice.” Soon tens of thousands of newly uninsured patients, many of whom already have serious diseases, will be knocking at our door, seeking help. I know now more keenly than ever what Coffin meant.

Why should people who work, pay their taxes, and care for their families be dependent on the charity of others when they get sick? In America, we offer ourselves as a model for the world of a just society. How can we spend $5 billion a month on a war halfway around the world when we are unwilling to care for the very people who are working to make our country strong?

I have criticized the structure of TennCare since its inception. It has always needed to be fixed. However, Bredesen’s plan to allow 320,000 of our most vulnerable citizens to stand alone is morally wrong. n

The Reverend Dr. Scott Morris is the founder and executive director of the Church Health Center and the Hope & Healing Center of Memphis.

News The Fly-By

Presumed Open

Post author By
Post date January 14, 2005

Last week, the Tennessee Supreme Court adopted the first set of mandatory guidelines determining the status of court records. Enacting a series of rule modifications, the high court deemed that records in civil cases are presumed to be open to the public and may be sealed only in limited circumstances.

The new guideline, Rule 1A, was adopted along with other amendments to the rules of procedure for cases in state trial and appellate courts. “While most of these are technical changes, the adoption of new Rule 1A of the Tennessee Rules of Civil Procedure is a significant change,” said Chief Justice Frank Drowota. “Prior to the adoption of this rule, there were no written guidelines for judges to use in deciding whether or not to seal, or close, certain court records.” He said the rule was designed to promote openness in court cases involving the government.

The Sealing Court Records rule states that it is “the public policy of this state that the public interests are best served by open courts and by an independent judiciary.” The rule applies to all documents filed in cases before any civil court. Under this provision, court records may no longer be removed from court files, and court orders and opinions are presumed to be open. Settlement agreements in these cases were also deemed open records, whether or not they are filed in court. Only the monetary amount of settlements may be kept confidential.

Had Rule 1A been in effect eight years ago the Flyer would not have had to sue the city of Memphis for details of a settlement agreement in a civil rights suit between the city and a University of Memphis student’s family. In 1997, the city settled the suit with the family of Adam Pollow for $475,000 but required the family to keep the settlement terms confidential. Pollow died while in police custody. City attorneys denied disclosure of the records on the grounds that they were bound by court order. Two years, and several court appearances later, the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Flyer.

University of Memphis assistant law professor Stephen Mulroy said the new rule would also greatly affect domestic-relations cases. “Many times in divorce cases litigants have requested to have records closed for one reason or another,” he said. “I think [Rule 1A] is a good thing because we need to have uniform guidelines when determining which records are open and which are not. It’s better for everybody.”

Under the new rule, records may only be sealed in three instances when they might have a “probable adverse effect upon the general public health or safety, or the administration of public office, or the operation of government.”

“There should be some protections,” Mulroy said. “You don’t forfeit your right to privacy because you become a public figure. If there is some kind of reasonable argument [for opening records], then the public’s right to know would trump the privacy matter. I’m much more interested in knowing the details of a record that affects the public than knowing the steamy details of a divorce.”

For litigants requesting the sealing or unsealing of court records, Rule 1A requires a written public motion, followed by a hearing. During the hearing, the litigants supporting the sealing of records must prove that it is appropriate. Once the status of records is determined in court, litigants may appeal the decision. The appeal becomes separate from the main action in a case, which may continue through the court system. The rule also allows for intervention regarding the records by third parties. A reconsideration to seal records will only be made with proof of changed circumstances.

Rule 1A will be submitted to the state legislature later this month, along with other amendments. If approved, it becomes effective July 1st. State justices decided on the rule after surveying similar rules in other states, specifically Texas. Nine rules of the Tennessee Rules of Procedure were also amended by the court, including actions on subpoenas, entry of judgments, and judgments and costs. •

Music Music Features

On the Record

Post author By
Post date January 14, 2005

A couple of weeks ago Flyer music critics named their favorite local records of 2004. Now we close the books on the past year by counting down 2004’s best national releases.

Chris Herrington

Albums:

1. The College Dropout Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): With its scholastic framework, conflicted relationship to hip-hop proper, admittedly grating skits, and overwhelming hubris, Kanye West’s undeniable, ubiquitous, endlessly compelling debut is the newer, better version of an earlier sure shot, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. But where Hill got by on sonics organic production and sixth-sense vocal arrangements West is an idea and detail man: confrontational kiddie chorus defending drug-dealing as survival, “token blackey” rolling a blunt on break at the Gap, autobiographical anthem rapped through a wired jaw, literal salvation on the dance floor, family reunions and handed-down civil rights history, the first nigga with a Benz and a backpack.

2. Horse of a Different Color Big & Rich (Warner Bros.): Like The College Dropout, this debut tour de force challenges the assumptions of its largely conservative genre from squarely inside the belly of the beast. If Big & Rich’s mainstream-country-as-classic-rock-as-hip-hop conceit was a notion whose time had definitely come, it wouldn’t have been as sweet without such an avalanche of inspired music and deceptively elegant songwriting: classic-rock crunch and honky-tonk swagger, calypso & western and rap en espanol, soaring choruses and endless Everly Brothers-style harmonies, witty boasts, Walter Mittyish fantasies, and novel romantic metaphors. And though the pair played coy when it came to party politics, “Love Everybody” seems like a pretty welcome message given what we learned on Election Day.

3. All the Fame of Lofty Deeds Jon Langford (Bloodshot): “Hard work, get it while you can,” Brit-turned-Chicagoan Jon Langford cackles sarcastically midway through his outsider’s appraisal of a country gone crazy. Once an unintentional preemptive strike at George W. Bush’s debate strategy, it’s now the comic-horror refrain that haunts this president’s almost surely disastrous second term. As for Langford, he’d like to condemn his adopted home to damnation but he loves it and its music too much to give up: “The country isn’t stupid even though it’s silent,” he promises, against all countervailing evidence. “It still has eyes and ears, it just can’t find its mouth.”

4. Van Lear Rose Loretta Lynn (Interscope): This is just the kind of high-concept reclamation project (see all those Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin records or Solomon Burke’s borderline-unlistenable Don’t Give Up On Me) so consistently and predictably overrated that I found myself underrating it until a late-year round of relistening reminded me how grand it really is. Lynn’s all-new songs are shockingly, uniformly excellent (tell me “Family Tree” isn’t the equal of “Fist City” or “You’re Not Woman Enough To Take My Man”), but hipster-backlash victim Jack White deserves equal billing for his genius production. With Lynn a better singer than Meg White or Holly Golightly and a better songwriter than Jack himself, Van Lear Rose might be a better lovestruck mash-note follow-up to the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells than Elephant was.

5. A Grand Don’t Come for Free The Streets (Vice/Atlantic): With its linear narrative, this sophomore platter from Brit one-man-band wunderkind Mike Skinner is pop music as novella where his heroic debut, Original Pirate Material, was more a collection of self-contained short stories. Skinner’s plotline about missing cash and sketchy friends can be a little hard to follow, but the relationship songs at the core comprise a sure romantic arc untouched by anything else in hip-hop or techno history. A love song about coming to the realization that you’d rather lie on the couch at your girl’s house watching TV than go boozing with your mates speaks the kind of common truth rarely heard in a pop song. And when it sounds like the Chi-Lites, Valhalla awaits.

6. The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me The Hold Steady (Frenchkiss): Craig Finn and Tad Kubler’s previous band, Minneapolis’ Lifter Puller, earned a nationwide cult following what seemed about six months after they called it quits. Relocated to Brooklyn to pursue real work, they’ve been pulled back in: “She said, ‘It’s good to see you back in a bar band, baby,'” Finn sneers on “Barfruit Blues.” “I said, ‘It’s good to see you still in the bars.'” Trading in Lifter Puller’s heavy-machinery new wave and spastic punk-funk for the bar-band basics, including Skynyrd guitar, Clarence Clemons sax breaks, and the essence of Meatloaf and Billy Joel, Finn continues to write insanely quotable songs about nightlife glitz and grime that he may or may not have any actual experience with.

7. East Nashville Skyline Todd Snider (Oh Boy): This career-best effort from onetime Memphian Snider is the saddest, funniest, and most deeply humane “protest” record of the year even if it isn’t overtly political. Snider is too modest and too nice to lecture anybody about anything, but he seems to understand in his bones just how extreme American life has gotten over the past three years, and he is certain of at least one thing: The bad shit always rains down hardest on the poor.

8. Sonic Nurse Sonic Youth (DGC): Though I guess there might be some, um, Aerosmith fans who would disagree, Sonic Youth has evolved into the most durable American rock band ever, as good or better more than 20 years into their run as they’ve ever been. Their singular career arc from pure chaos to relatively straight-ahead rock into a more organized noise has landed them in a place where it seems like they could rock out in their own urban-pastoral free-jazz kinda way forever and ever, amen. I still think 1998’s A Thousand Leaves is their finest “post-sellout” record, but this is a close second.

9. More Adventurous Rilo Kiley (Brute/Beute): I’d heard of but never actually heard Rilo Kiley until More Adventurous, and even though I haven’t had the chance to backtrack through their discography, I find it unfathomable that earlier records could match this indie-rock breakthrough. Even in this age of clueless commercial radio and overwhelming listening options, pop music this glisteningly tuneful and strongly, soulfully sung can’t stay hidden long.

10. Hidden Vagenda Kimya Dawson (K): More than a dozen listens in, a few songs on this hopelessly obscure, partly homemade collection of anti-folk ditties still don’t connect. But the ones that do provide the finest guide for living pop music provided this year, from a part-time day-care worker skilled in imparting wise advice in instantly graspable language.

11. Shake the Sheets Ted Leo/Pharmacists (Lookout!): With classic-rock reach and a punk-rock heart, Leo & Co. pack one feverishly kinetic, achingly sincere, politically committed anthem after another, making Shake the Sheets the perfect alternative for rock fans too put off by Bono’s martyr complex to give themselves over to U2.

12. Get Away From Me Nellie McKay (Columbia): Flipping the bird to Norah Jones with the deliciously sarcastic title of her debut album and signaling its contents with a gloriously silly album cover (the Lil’ Red Riding Hood of Manhattan Avenue, replete with “parental advisory explicit content” label), this cabaret-piano-playing, drama-queen hip-hop fan proved a little too weird to be embraced by the NPR-listener fan base she courted. But from gin-soaked reveries to deceptively prickly cocktail-jazz to a gleefully guileless paean to the transformative powers of adopting a pound puppy, this double-disc opus is so teeming with ideas you know she’ll be back to give it another shot.

13. To Tha X-Treme Devin the Dude (Rap-a-Lot): This laconic Houston underdog with his smart, funny, and comparatively gentle tales of weed, women, and not much else delivered the second-best American rap record in a year dominated by one.

14. Showtime Dizzee Rascal (XL): Officially released in the U.S. in January but widely available as an import months prior, Brit teen rapper Dizzee Rascal’s debut, Boy in Da Corner, was the sound of a kid whose world ended at the end of the block but who knew the landscape intimately. This quick-footed follow-up is an after-the-goldrush record from a kid hungry for a prime place in global hip-hop culture. With standard-issue hip-hop bluster balanced by sharp, regretful reportage, the cold-eyed threat of violence informed by a menacing sense of humor, and everything made stronger and more purposeful by a foundation of generosity, Dizzee might just be the most compelling MC on the planet, even if it’ll take most American listeners a dozen listens to cut through his Donald Duck brogue enough to find out.

15. Laced With Romance The Ponys (In the Red): With their chugging-and-chiming duel-guitar attack, yelping vocals, danceable rhythm section, and open-hearted personality, this Chicago quartet was the indie-rock little-engine-that-could I rooted for hardest this year.

Honorable Mentions: Good News for People Who Love Bad News Modest Mouse (Epic); Last Exit Junior Boys (Domino); Mm Food? MF Doom (Rhymesayers); Madvillainy MF Doom & Madlib (Stones Throw); Franz Ferdinand Franz Ferdinand (Domino); Encore Eminem (Interscope); The Dirty South Drive-By Truckers (New West); Red Bedroom The Fever (Kemado); We Shall All Be Healed Mountain Goats (4AD); When the Sun Goes Down Kenny Chesney (BMG); The Present Lover Luomo (Kinetic); Here for the Party Gretchen Wilson (Sony Nashville); Van Hunt Van Hunt (Capitol); Harder and Harder The Paybacks (Get Hip); The Grind Date De La Soul (Sanctuary Urban); Universal United House of Prayer Buddy Miller (New West Records).

Singles:

1. “99 Problems” Jay-Z: How a man can go from concocting this the most blistering rap-rock hybrid in the long, proud history of the form to doing an entire album with Linkin Park is a mystery beyond my comprehension.

2. “Maps” Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Right, we were all putting this on mix-tapes a year and a half ago, but 2004 was when I first heard it on the radio or saw it on TV. My most telling musical moment of the year: The shock of hearing this brutal lovelorn plea on a local modern-rock station followed by the predictable sound of a deejay making strip-club jokes.

3. “All Falls Down” Kanye West: Invoking Lauryn Hill’s meltdown and making something of the impulse, West puts hip-hop, black America, consumer culture, me, you, and even himself on the couch.

4. “Happy People” R. Kelly: Kelly may be a creep in real life, but he’s a genius in a recording studio, and this is his most beautiful single ever. Soft soul so relentlessly gorgeous Smokey Robinson himself couldn’t have topped it.

5. “Remember When” Alan Jackson: This indelibly delicate and clear-eyed adult love song makes every competing nostalgic Nashville product sound like the ad copy it no doubt is.

6. “Jesus Walks” Kanye West: Liberation theology via Hot 107.

7. “Redneck Woman” Gretchen Wilson: I doubt she really knows all the words to every Tanya Tucker song, but I totally believe that Lil’ Miss Pocahontas Proud buys her lingerie at Wal-Mart and wills it into looking as good as anything in a Faith Hill video.

8. “Love Me for a Little While” Janet Jackson: Buried under the hoopla of the “wardrobe malfunction” and quickly forgotten, this shoulda-been-a-contender wasn’t just the best guitar-driven R&B since “Hey Ya!” but nearly the best since Prince’s “When You Were Mine.”

9. “This One’s for the Girls” Martina McBride: Ostensibly “country,” this nifty, righteous little guitar-pop anthem crossed over to soft-rock radio and should have gone a lot further.

10. “Yeah” Usher, featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris: The blandest superstar sex symbol imaginable, it’s fitting that Usher was by far the least interesting component of his own biggest hit. Usher’s verses are entirely forgettable and Ludacris’ cameo is put-out-or-get-out misogyny at its worst. But none of that matters with Lil Jon’s sproingy synth riff implanted in your hum matrix or when the producer du jour comes back with the beat that makes your booty go clap.

Honorable Mentions: “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” Big & Rich; “Float On” Modest Mouse; “Yeah (Crass Version)” LCD Soundsystem; “Wild West Show” Big & Rich; “Suds in the Bucket” Sara Evans; “Dream” Dizzee Rascal; “Rubberband Man” T.I.; “Dirt Off My Shoulder” Jay-Z; “Toxic” Britney Spears; “Take Me Out” Franz Ferdinand.

Stephen Deusner

1. Funeral Arcade Fire (Merge): At the top of the indie-rock heap sits this full-length debut from the Montreal-based Arcade Fire, a quasi-concept album about the fears of childhood and the disappointments of adulthood about, as its title suggests, death and grief. Win Butler sings about old neighborhoods and lost friendships while the band takes the songs down dark roads into new wave, punk, folk, heavy metal, and the best string parts in ages, all with a passion that is no less heartfelt for being so big and ambitious.

2. Get Away From Me Nellie McKay (Sony): A precocious psychotic with one of the most gleefully anarchic debuts in recent memory, McKay gets AOR soft rock in a headlock and gives its pretensions a well-deserved noogie. She flying-tackles Eminem rap (“Sari” beats anything on Encore), Doris Day weepies, art-metal bombast, and supper-club jazz, while eulogizing her dead kitty, seducing her own clone, taunting President Bush, and dissing men in general. The year’s most invigoratingly fearless album.

3. Van Lear Rose Loretta Lynn (Interscope): Van Lear Rose introduced a new generation to the feisty Butcher Holler native Loretta Lynn and added “producer” to Jack White’s c.v. Lynn sounds best vulnerable, heartbroken, steely, strong-willed on quieter numbers such as “Trouble on the Line,” the spoken “Little Red Shoes,” and “Miss Being Mrs.” Generous and good-hearted, closely observed but casual, they’re less songs than late-in-life ruminations, coming from somewhere beyond the stage, the studio, and the record label.

4. Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters (Universal): These dozen tracks, which straddle as many gay cultures as possible, prove intelligent, inventive, and forthrightly emotional. Stronger stuff than your average dance album, this debut moved hearts, minds, and booties.

5. Shake the Sheets Ted Leo/Pharmacists (Lookout!): Listening to Shake the Sheets on November 1st made me hopeful that I could make some sort of difference in the way my country was run, that millions like me could save the world. Two days later, listening to the same songs was a sobering experience: The album’s message had changed profoundly, and on the eve of another four years, Leo demands we not let life go back to normal, that we try to maintain this level of involvement and activism, that we keep shaking the sheets, no matter who’s in power.

6. Anniemal Annie (679): If bubblegum pop is going to be the new garage rock, then Annie is the new Strokes. A Norwegian dance-music veteran, she sings in a whisper like Kylie Minogue but her hooks are more shameless and satisfying, which is saying a lot. Subtle shades of emotions, perhaps sparked by the untimely death of her musical and romantic partner Tore Korknes, color each song, so that “Me Plus One” possesses a potent self-deprecation and “Heartbeat” sounds perfectly, even exuberantly heartbreaking.

7. SMiLE! Brian Wilson (Nonesuch): The album we all knew he had in him but we never thought would actually get made, SMiLE! was Wilson’s “teenage anthem to God,” which he started back in 1967. Almost 40 years later, it’s catchier than garage rock, more sincere than emo, and more challenging than post-rock as it pushes American pop music to its compositional limits.

8. The College Dropout Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): This would have been higher on my list it’s the most innovative rap album since Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx but for that last track. The man who created “Jesus Walks” indulges the sin of pride as he reminisces about his career in a long, self-worshipping monologue. On the other hand, West has 20 songs leading up to it that earn him the right to boast.

9. Our Endless, Numbered Days Iron & Wine (Sub Pop): Improperly lumped in with freak-/neo-/nu-folkies such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, Florida’s Sam Beam transcends any trendy scene label. His second full-length is a gently sung, percussively strummed Americana folk album that’s easily better than those of his supposed scene competitors. While “Naked As We Came” devastates as Beam contemplates his and his lover’s mortality, “Cinder and Smoke” proves perhaps even more fearsome, if only for the out-of-nowhere coda in which Beam aiih-yigh-yighs his way to an oncoming apocalypse.

10. The Slow Wonder AC Newman (Matador): One of four satellite albums this year orbiting Planet New Pornography, Newman’s solo debut proves, perhaps inadvertently, who the brains behind that supergroup really is. Each of these 10 songs is a Frankenstein’s monster of verses and anti-verses, choruses and pre-choruses, and bridges and counterbridges. Despite the stitched-together aspect, they move fluidly and organically, each hook outdoing the previous as Newman sings about creative frustration, bruised romance, and political hypocrisy.

Honorable Mentions: Too Much Guitar! The Reigning Sound (In the Red); Thunder! Lightning! Strike! The Go! Team (Memphis Industries); The Dirty South Drive-By Truckers (New West); All the Fame of Lofty Deeds Jon Langford (Bloodshot); Good News for People Who Love Bad News Modest Mouse (Epic); Franz Ferdinand Franz Ferdinand (Domino); East Nashville Skyline Todd Snider (Oh Boy); A Grand Don’t Come for Free The Streets (Vice/Atlantic); Showtime Dizzee Rascal (XL); Mignonette Avett Brothers (Ronseur).

Andria Lisle

1. The College Dropout Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): In 2004, Kanye West’s big mouth finally paid off when the braggadocios producer dropped his own album on an unsuspecting audience. West who literally came back from the dead after a near-fatal car crash breaks all the rules by mocking his peers (“All Falls Down”), pulling off badass rhymes (“Through the Wire,” where he spits “There’s been an accident like Geico/Thought I was burned up like Pepsi did Michael”), and, most importantly, singing about faith (“Jesus Walks”). Gaudy and glorious, The College Dropout is a real stunner.

2. Van Lear Rose Loretta Lynn (Interscope): The blacktop highway that stretches from Nashville to Memphis is exactly 200 miles long. It’s listed on maps as Interstate 40, but everyone from truckers to tourists knows this ribbon winding between the pine trees as “The Music Highway.” Loretta Lynn and Jack White burned up that road working on Van Lear Rose, recording on location at Lynn’s Double L Ranch and Memphis’ Easley-McCain studio. On the self-explanatory “Story of My Life,” Lynn hammers her point home: She’s gambled on her life, and she’s loved, laughed, and lived and lost a few things along the way. But, with Van Lear Rose, she’s scored a winning hand once again. “I have to say that I’ve been blessed/Not bad for this ol’ Kentucky girl I guess,” she sings with a laugh on the song’s last verse. It’s the perfect ending to a perfect album typically understated, characteristically jubilant, and 100 percent Loretta Lynn.

3. Laced With Romance The Ponys (In the Red): Led by guitarist Jered Gummere, the Ponys channel Television’s gritty street style, flavoring the sound with equal parts melancholy and wonder. Initially, jaded Brooklynites hardly cocked a collective eyebrow toward this solidly indie Chicago rock outfit, but songs such as “Let’s Kill Ourselves” and “Sad Eyes” quickly won over the naysayers.

4. Exhibit A The Features (Universal): Don’t send your skinny ties and white belts to Am-Vets yet: Just when new wave seems unbearably passé, the Features blast off with this impeccable major-label debut, which blows Franz Ferdinand and the Strokes out of the stratosphere. Remember when Pavement dropped “Summer Babe” on an unsuspecting world? With handclaps, Buzzcocks-worthy guitar riffs, a wailing organ, and Guided by Voices frontman Bob Pollard’s flair for songwriting, Exhibit A marks a similar milestone for a new generation. Who knew that tiny Sparta, Tennessee, could birth such a wonderful band?

5. Half Smiles of the Decomposed Guided by Voices (Matador): By the time you read this, Robert Pollard will have pulled the plug on Guided by Voices: The band’s final concert occurred on New Year’s Eve at Chicago’s Metro theater. Clocking in at just 45 minutes of music (much shorter than earlier, epic releases such as Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes), GBV’s swan song is grandiose nevertheless. Pollard’s soaring vocals make “Girls of Wild Strawberries” sound like the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” updated for the 21st century, while “Sing for Your Meat” is pure pop insanity.

Honorable Mentions: Before the Poison Marianne Faithfull (Anti-); Sunshine Barato Mosquitos (Bar/None); Juve the Great Juvenile (Universal); Uptown Top Ranking EP Scout Niblett (Secretly Canadian); The Drifter Waylon Payne (Universal).

Andrew Earles

1. The Doldrums Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti (Paw Tracks): Discovered hiding out in the Los Angeles hills by the band Animal Collective, Ariel Pink makes music that will quickly polarize the room. You may think you hear shades of Guided by Voices or Bobby Conn in New Doldrums, but Ariel Pink has that distinctive feel of someone who is completely oblivious to contemporary music. Maybe he was a latchkey kid who grew up next door to a thrift shop and only devoured 25-cent Little River Band and Pablo Cruise LPs until deciding to take a crack at his own brand of afternoon rock. The ultramurky recording will be the first quality to turn some listeners away, but those willing to pay very close attention will be rewarded to no end. If this guy could be utilized in some sort of underground Brill Building situation, we’d have unforgettable hits everywhere. Again, this is not for everyone.

2. On/Off Mission of Burma (Matador): When a once-seminal band reunites to wide acclaim, a new studio album is not far behind. I usually let someone else tell me how inevitably bad it is, but I’m such a huge fan of Mission of Burma that I gave this one a chance. Color me impressed. This has more energy and passion than a large portion of the younger bands attempting post-punk these days this from a 53-year-old man (band leader Roger Miller) with acute tinnitus.

3. Pass the Distance Simon Finn (Durtro/Jnana): Mired with legal issues upon its initial release, this obscure folk anomaly from 1970 has been hard to come by until re-released this year. By all accounts, and there are few, Finn was a folkie embracing a (very) customized version of Christianity not an unpopular route for hippies of the day. Sounding addled and unhinged, Finn’s minimal but maniacal open door to his singular (and admittedly, confusing) spirituality will have some listeners white-knuckling the armrest. He makes Syd Barrett sound like Dan Fogelberg. The album’s centerpiece, “Jerusalem,” is like the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” as performed by a stripped-bare Skip Spence, and there’s so much outpouring of emotion toward the song’s climax that Finn starts coughing uncontrollably.

4. Witchcraft Witchcraft (Rise Above): The degree to which this band makes it sound as if the last 25 years never happened is almost overkill. Just when I thought that the Doom/Black Sabbath clone movement wouldn’t yield another worthy listen For fans of Dead Meadow, Pentagram, Electric Wizard, etc.

5. Probot Probot (Southern Lord): The guest vocalists on this record are exactly that guest vocalists. That erstwhile Foo Fighter Dave Grohl wrote every song, played every instrument (Motörhead’s Lemmy did play bass on his track), and managed to make each song sound so true to the source band providing each song’s lead singer is a gross show of talent.

Honorable Mentions: Panopticon (Ipecac); Leviathan (Relapse); Your Blues Destroyer (Merge); Blue Cathedral Comets On Fire (Sub Pop). •

Tags National Music Year-End List