Hurricanes, war, avian flu, locust plagues, that annoying song you couldn't get out of your head. It wasn't the greatest of all possible years. Nor was it halfway decent. But to prove that it wasn't all bad, we asked 29 writers to rave about the artists who made 2005 worth living through.
THIS PAST YEAR, my son, who's four and a half, started to reveal a reasonable comprehension of song lyrics and an interest in singing along with them. This was problematic in a couple of ways. First, I'm just not terribly impressed with his command of pitch (put simply: it sucks), to say nothing of his phrasing, which rarely evinces a thorough grasp of the song's emotional complexity. Second, his increased sophistication has forced me to stop playing my more profane hip-hop and rock records around the house, at least while he's awake. For now, I'm not so much protecting him as I am protecting myself. If, for instance, he were to say to one of his teachers, "Hey bitch! Wait'll you see my dick," the chorus from the Ying Yang Twins' brilliant and nasty single "Wait," the teacher would probably call us down for an emergency parent-teacher conference--never the best setting to discuss matters penile.
Now, when my kid is a teenager, he can listen to whatever the ball-sucking fuck he wants. I grew up during the PMRC hubbub and, later, the rise of gangsta rap. My parents, religious and not otherwise especially lenient, didn't restrict my listening or compel me to hide my N.W.A. or Guns N' Roses records, and for that I'm grateful. I have moral or political problems with a lot of my favorite music and books and movies, etc. One can spend a lifetime wrestling with that sort of ambivalence--that play is anti-Semitic, and yet it is also a great work of literature; that song has fucked-up ideas about women, and yet it has an amazing beat. Or one can reject the really problematic works. Given the choice, I go with ambivalence. Easier to say when you're not a Jewish woman, I suppose.
My ambivalence about the Ying Yang Twins' sexism or Sarah Silverman's comedic riffs on racism stems partly from regular old private guilt, and partly from--I'm sheepish about even writing the following pompous, wheezing phrase--public concern. You're familiar with the standard line espoused at various times by Tipper Gore, Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Bill Cosby, and John Ashcroft: All these movies and TV shows and rap albums and video games with their confounded sex and violence and profanity and degradation and other naughty stuff have a negative influence on society, especially on impressionable young people. This, I think, is true.
You might say that artists aren't obligated to be politically or morally correct. (I agree.) And they're just reflecting the crazy shit that's already out there. (I agree.) And at any rate that art shouldn't be censored. (I agree.) And that except for the head cases who would have problems anyway, kids can distinguish between fantasy and reality. (I sort of agree.) Besides, you might go on, what's worse, an untrustworthy, war-mongering government or a CD with swear words on it? (The first one.)
And yet all of those totally reasonable arguments dodge the core of the conservative argument. Let's say, for instance, that all those crunk hits in which the narrator comes on like a drill sergeant at a strip club--let's say these hits haven't had some sort of retrograde effect on gender relations. Let's also say that hyper-violent video games and movies haven't made some players more nonchalant about real-life killing. Let's further contend that loaded epithets dropped in song lyrics or comedy routines don't actually threaten or hurt people. Well, if all that is true, then all this art and pop-culture stuff is inert and doesn't mean anything. Which is to say the Philistines have won. If art doesn't have a negative influence on society, then neither does it have a positive influence on society. But of course it does--not because some of it sends messages of peace and love and understanding, but because some of it is good, and good art inspires people. It challenges and moves and enriches; it helps us form our identities and helps us get laid. Art, as the saying goes, is the stuff that makes life more interesting than art.
What follows is our annual Artists of the Year issue. As always, it's a collective argument that artists--some of them rich and famous; some of them locals who work regular jobs during the day--do matter. (In keeping with tradition, we begin with the folks around the corner and then head further afield.) Which isn't to say that I'm letting my kid watch Sarah Silverman tell ironic ethnic jokes. Not just yet, I mean. --Dylan Hicks
Artists of the Year by Quinton Skinner by Peter S. Scholtes Jon Ferguson by Caroline Palmer by Karl Raschke by Rod Smith by Georgia Brown by Jeff Chang by Melissa Maerz by Ernest Hardy by Stephen Burt by Rob Nelson by Britt Robson by Greil Marcus by Keith Harris by David Ng by Nate Patrin by Jim Walsh by Chuck Terhark by Jon Caramanica by Lindsey Thomas by Rex Sorgatz by Matthew Wilder by Douglas Wolk by Michaelangelo Matos by Molly Priesmeyer by Dylan Hicks by Craig Wright by Wendy Lewis by Jim Ridley |
By Quinton Skinner
There are moments when I consider conventional narrative theater to be, in fact, less faithful to reality than abstract works (perhaps because movies and television, ostensibly more synthetic forms, often offer more convincing simulacrums of the real). In the same way that dreams have their own ineffable logic, so does abstract theater depict the rough-and-tumble workings of the mind, both waking and otherwise. Off-Leash Area, composed of Jennifer Ilse and Paul Herwig, stepped vigorously into the realm of the unconscious in 2005, with three shows that combined an entirely distinctive visual aesthetic with assured movement and a spooky willingness to shine a spotlight on the realms where monsters threaten to disturb our cozy quotidian reality. In the spring they presented Psst! , based on the work of a Norwegian graphic novelist simply called Jason. This critic chafed at its length (ingrate), but it evocatively captured Jason's world, in which a proletarian protagonist (in a fantastic papier-mâché mask) battled numbing postindustrial life while fighting off dark forces to win his (deceased) lady love. Later in the year Off-Leash returned to its fallback theater space--their "2.5-car" garage--to produce a pair of original works that hauntingly drifted into the realms of madness. Ilse's choreography was crucial to Maggie's Brain, a show about a young woman beset with schizophrenia. It combined full-cast tableaus in which a girl's family painfully, tragically, saw a beloved daughter fading away before their eyes, with solo dance stretches in which Ilse depicted the horror, sadness, and fleeting inspiration of mental illness. Herwig starred in the follow-up, A Cupboard Full of Hate, in which he played a man who locked himself into his squalid room in order to better embrace his misanthropic madness. The set quite literally crawled with creepiness (unseen hands moved props to flip Herwig's wig), and Herwig's Franglais delivery gave us a character unable to embrace what transcendent beauty this mortal realm offers to us in our luckier moments. All three works managed a moving, almost uncanny tone that smartly depicted the bittersweet longing that tinges experience when we wake up on certain mornings, with a forgotten name on our tongue and a sensation that there is something to be done, if we could only remember what it was.Quinton Skinner is a novelist and the theater critic at City Pages.
Ant (Anthony Davis)
By Peter S. Scholtes 
The best scene in Walk the Line, the scene that kids will remember when they're finding their own voices as adults, is the one where Johnny Cash auditions at Sun Studios with a shaky rendition of a gospel tune, "I Was There When It Happened," and producer Sam Phillips turns him down mid-song. That stuff doesn't sell, Phillips says. People want something honest, something felt. If you got hit by a truck and you only had time to sing one song before you died, what would it be? Played dry as ice by Dallas Roberts, this is a Sam Phillips we've never seen before, a subdued, unsmiling mercenary instead of the inspirational whirlwind of old interview footage and Peter Guralnick books. He signals his approval only with a glint in his eyes, once Joaquin Phoenix's Cash, looking a little like an alien breathing oxygen for the first time, saves the audition by leading his trio through an impromptu performance of "Folsom Prison Blues."
Who knows whether Minneapolis hip-hop producer Ant has the same effect on rappers he works with--one of whom, Brother Ali, covers Cash's "A Boy Named Sue." Who knows whether everyone walked into Sun Studios a country boy and walked out a bad motherfucker. (The anecdote is at least half apocryphal: Cash didn't play "Folsom," but Phillips supposedly told him, "Go home and sin, and then come back with a song I can sell.'') All we really have is the evidence of our ears, and the evidence of the liner notes. This year, for Ant, these included his own cool DJ mix CD, Melodies and Memories 85-89, and production credits on three great albums in collaboration with rappers: Murs and Slug on Felt 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet; Slug under the name Atmosphere on You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having; and I Self Devine on Self Destruction--all issued by the local label Rhymesayers. The latter two are exactly what Sam Phillips demanded: Self's "I Can't Say Nothing Wrong" is a tribute to something realer than Lisa Bonet, a love song for women struggling with their own youth and kids, and shit jobs and groceries on the bus. Atmosphere's "Pour Me Another" is a tribute to addiction and the ultimate funky wallow. (It meets the oncoming truck with a smile.)
For one track, Ant provided ancient reggae and gurgling wah-wah guitar. For the other, a descending piano line. But if the role of producer is mysterious, the role of hip-hop impresario is doubly so. Working with other people's lyrics, assembling other people's long-ago-recorded music, Ant's art is ultimately harder to pin down than his live DJing (he stepped out of the studio this year to tour as a DJ with Atmosphere for the first time since they formed a decade ago). I don't know why "Smart Went Crazy" makes me feel like my smarts are going crazy, its disembodied guitar squeal meeting a sampled "Yeah!" over and over like a face to a slap, before ending in a harmonica shuffle that could be straight off an old Sun side. All I know is that I want to go home and sin.
Peter S. Scholtes is a staff writer at City Pages.
Noah Bremer and Jon Ferguson with the Live Action Set
By Caroline Palmer 
Making theater about life during wartime presents a delicate balancing act for director and performer alike. Dwelling too long on death and destruction leads to a shell-shocked audience, but excessive levity seems inappropriate, disrespectful. This summer Live Action Set teamed up with performer Noah Bremer and director Jon Ferguson to create Please Don't Blow Up Mr. Boban, an original work about a café in the middle of a battle zone. Performed at the Soap Factory during the Fringe Festival (with a second run at the Loring Playhouse this fall), the show captured the extremes of humanity one would expect to encounter in such a situation: It asked tough questions and featured moments of haunting terror, but it also offered moments of sweet humor and exceptional grace.
Performed in the round, with many of the actors assuming multiple roles, the show was about Mr. Boban, a café owner portrayed by the immensely likable and physically elastic Bremer, who effortlessly inserted clowning into his performance. His antic interactions at the beginning of the show with the equally winning Robert Haarmon provided a poignant contrast to the darker moments to come. I was too stunned at the end of this show to clap immediately. The sadness of the final scene was overwhelming, and it took a moment to recover--and then jump to my feet. Ultimately this was a performance about how life can be affirmed, even celebrated, in the midst of adversity. Many who have survived such experiences have done so by relying on their wit and clinging to their humanity, even in the smallest ways. Please Don't Blow Up Mr. Boban beautifully illustrated this potential while at the same time realistically portraying the horror and absurdity of war.
Caroline Palmer is a Minneapolis attorney and regular contributor to City Pages.
Ryan Sweere
By Karl Raschke 
There's an image that's been stuck in my head since I first saw it last May. It's a little painting called Asian Girl by Ryan Sweere. It's part of a series of pictures he's been making since 2002 of people riding the bus. The paintings all share a hazy quality that replicates the glazed-over, don't-talk-to-me look that's so common in close public quarters. For the series, Sweere has situated himself within the crowd so viewers get images from unconventional angles--the backs of heads, feet jutting out into the aisle. The emphasis is on body language.
In Asian Girl we see the subject in profile. She's sitting in the sideways seats at the front of an MTC bus holding the pole in front of her with her arms and legs extended, leaning way back. The lines are soft. The colors are muted blues and greens except for her warm skin tones and the orange and tan of a rectangular panel that blocks our view of the bus driver's seat. She's alone in the frame and seems lost in a slow reverie.
The anonymity of the subjects in this series and the pictures' generic titles (Blind Woman, Man in Athletic Shoes) belie Sweere's close attention to the posture and gestures that make each of his subjects unique. The paintings ask a simple but important question: When does the person sitting next to you on the bus change from faceless and anonymous to individual and human? Does it take a Hurricane Katrina-sized tragedy to flip that switch and make you empathize, or can something smaller do it?
Karl Raschke is a Minneapolis photographer and musician.
Neil Gaiman
By Rod Smith 
Anyone who insists that literary fiction is somehow more worthy than its genre-based counterparts needs to be neutered and put in a home. Even at its most middling, the latter is fast, fun, full of ideas, and perfectly receptive to any displays of brilliance--technical or otherwise--that don't impede the story. Exhibit A: Anansi Boys. Neil Gaiman's first book for the voting-age set since 2001's award-hogging American Gods happyslaps narrative Newtonian mechanics every bit as soundly as Finnegan's Wake, and with a lot more laughs. Manners, errors, horrors, critters--the novel is a comedy of all the above and more--including (but not limited to) romance and limes.
While in Florida for his estranged father's funeral, Londoner Charles "Fat Charlie" Nancy--a nebbishy bookkeeper with modest expectations and a virgin fiancée--learns that said paternal embarrassment generator and intransigent lech was West African trickster/spider god Anansi incarnate. As the revelation sets Nancy's life to unraveling, Gaiman folds fantasy, horror, and myth into a Hollywood-grade mélange of mistaken identity and conflicting agendas with a chemist's precision.
More importantly, the writer treats plot, places, and people as permeable entities, peppering the action with traditional Anansi tales while letting character traits seep among his inventions like nitrous oxide. Rooms shrink and grow. The dead dance among the living. While Nancy's first trip to the divine realm (the end of the world or its beginning, depending on how you look at it) requires a whole lot of hoodoo on the part of four Caribbean dowagers, the barrier between worlds later becomes as impenetrable as a bead curtain. Despite Gaiman's claims regarding its lightness, Anansi Boys stands as a delectable show of force--hilarious, heartwarming, harrowing, and profound--sometimes all at once.
Rod Smith is a Minneapolis writer and a frequent contributor to City Pages.
Jonathan Nossiter
By Georgia Brown
Jonathan Nossiter's Mondovino raised the hackles of not a few people. The hyper camera made them seasick. Zoom, zoom, over the shoulder, under the desk, off to sniff some doggie's behind. Frisky, merry, nosy--a lens with the curiosity of a puppy. And not deferential, no--not respectful at all. Realize, there are very important personages in the mondo of vino--real aristocrats like the Antinoris and Frescobaldis, appointed ones like the family Mondavi or king of wine critics Robert Parker. There are reputations to burnish (or at least to protect), faces to flatter.
Nossiter is not in awe. Some accuse him of tricking his hosts--those who bestow precious time, trusting the flattery (e.g., heavy editing) that has always followed in the past. So, yes, in this sense they were tricked. For who was to expect a real reporter? Who knew, for that matter, that there were real reporters left in the world? ("You really get a better picture of people being themselves instead of trying to act like they're themselves."--A. Warhol.)
Besides being fearless, Nossiter is a true democrat--in the way that Dickens or Balzac were democrats on the page. He treats the wealthy and powerful as if they are on a par with laborers in the vines. He seems convinced that all of us, high and low, are mere characters--frail, foible-plagued players, foolish and dignified in turn, inhabiting for our brief moments the vast human comedy.
Skipping nimbly between France, California, Italy, and South America (Nossiter himself speaks all the languages), Mondovino rolls out in a series of glorious vignettes (French word that comes from vine) that I wish could go on and on. If the movie undercuts pretense, mystification, posturing, its heart is in what it loves. What it loves, of course, is wine--which it presents as a beverage that even poor people drink. It loves the earth that gives us wine, and wants desperately to preserve the earth's wonderful variety. It loves earthy people, some of whom actually work on their own land and grow the grapes that have grown on that land in the past. (And the earthy people, wouldn't you know, are far more gifted at expression than the people from the palazzos.) Finally, the movie loves dogs, giving over a subplot (call it Mondocane) to celebrate dogs high and low, pedigreed and mutt. Although the prizes go to the mutts.
Georgia Brown, former film reviewer for the Village Voice, lives in Italy and sees few movies.
Martha Cooper
By Jeff Chang 
In 2005, hip-hop feminists protested reactionary hip-hop media, organized a historic academic conference at the University of Chicago, published a record number of scholarly works, and, best of all, unleashed the unforgettable "B-Girl Be" Celebration at Intermedia Arts. So let's give it up for the forgotten mothers of hip hop--for Cindy Campbell, without whom DJ Kool Herc would have had no parties to play; for Lady Pink, who put it on the train for future waves of female aerosol artists; and for Martha Cooper, the photographer through whose eyes many of us not born in the Bronx saw hip hop for the first time.
Born in 1943, Cooper started shooting not long after she started walking. Precocious and adventurous, she graduated from Grinnell College at age 19 and enlisted in the Peace Corps, then traveled across Asia and Europe on a motorcycle, like Che across South America. One picture tells the story: There she is in Cambodia, circa 1964, wearing a sensible white blouse and dark skirt, beaming a ready-for-the-world grin next to a bloody red graffito that reads, "U.S. Go Home!"
By the late '70s, she was in the Bronx and Brooklyn capturing the neighborhood youth movement that would become known as hip hop. Those eye-burning photos were collected in Hip-Hop Files: Photographs 1979-1984, published late last year. Another classic photo shows Pink and fellow spray-can star Mare sitting in the heavily tagged bathroom of the High School of Art & Design, looking restless, possessed, and cherubic.
This year, Cooper and writer Nika Kramer set off around the world to document women and girl breakdancers, moving from Rotterdam to Honolulu to Los Angeles, and culminating their journey with the B-Girl Be event. We can now see what they saw in their book We B*Girlz. The pictures may prove as influential on today's teenage girls as Cooper's early '80s photos were to us. Most of Cooper and Kramer's subjects are smiling as they rock. And why shouldn't they? The world is theirs.
Jeff Chang is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin's Press, 2005). He lives in Berkeley, California.
Jonathan Safran Foer
By Melissa Maerz
There's a visualization game psychologists advise for patients who are afraid to fly: Do not try to tell yourself, "This plane will not crash." Ask yourself, "What if it doesn't?"
Imagination isn't just a vehicle for fear--it's sometimes the only escape from it. Which is why, when his father dies in the World Trade Center on September 11, Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old hero of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, doesn't search for an explanation. Instead, he invents more questions: What if New York was outfitted with extra-long ambulances so that as soon as you got into one, you'd already be at the hospital? What if, instead of flying in an airplane, you could wear a birdseed suit and pigeons could carry you to your destination? What if there was a skyscraper that could retract below the ground like an elevator to protect it from passing planes? There's a deeper fear hidden in those words, too. Not What if we could have done something to prevent September 11 from happening? but What if, because it did happen, we can no longer create open-ended What ifs?
How ironic, then, that Foer's own passionate question mark of a book was panned in the New York Times for broaching the Tragedy That Dare Not Speak Its Name without offering any answers. For proposing that the very process of creating fiction--which all of us, authors, daydreamers, and hypochondriacs, go through--might itself be the best way of coping. Contemplating Oskar's precociousness in a different article, Times scribe Deborah Solomon wrote, "Some dreams are so romantic that they're destined to failure." I suppose that's Foer's problem, too. He's written a gorgeous mess of ideas, filled with the kinds of things only a 28-year-old wunderkind posing as a 9-year-old protagonist can convey: too-great ambitions, semi-naive insights, doomed brainstorming sessions. And something that, like Foer's novel, is beautiful precisely because it's often unrealistic: hope.
Melissa Maerz is associate editor at Spin.
Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown
By Ernest Hardy 
Never doubt the rewards of backdoor entry. When Bravo first signed Bobby Brown, crack-mouth and all, to do a reality series, 100 percent of the people who took notice scratched their heads and went WTF? The dethroned "kang of R&B" had long ago devolved into a cultural curio, a tepid punch line to jokes told by the witless and the tardy. But his tabloid-magnet wife--fallen Queen of Pop, the amateur-hour paragon before Mariah claimed that spot, was the real coup. The resulting show earned the duo a Tackiest Couple nod from a scandal rag, while viewers and critics deemed the show a hypnotic car crash. Bobby emerged as a loveable, beleaguered husband and father, while Whitney played the role of spoiled, narcissistic bitch to the hilt. And yet Whitney--erratic, jumpy, and other terms that for legal reasons I cannot use--is the one I love.
Nowadays, jury-rigged pop stars coo plastic endearments to fans while seeking 24-hour coverage, and rap stars feign hardness but have custard centers. Whitney really and truly does not give a fuck. In one episode, Bobby says that he became a singer because he loves people and wants them to love him. "My wife ain't the same," he laughs. Her gift might be tethered to a lot of dark and dysfunctional poles, but it ain't attached to a need for your emotional validation. In Whitney's view, you put down your money, you get the CD or the movie, and that's the end of the transaction. If you run up on her when she's naked in a spa, asking for the autographs you just received to also be dated so your friends will know when you got them, you pretty much deserve the "Bitch, please" face.
So set aside the relentless misrepresentation of what unfolded onscreen, how, for instance, countless articles and bloggers tsk-tsked Whitney for telling how Bobby gave her an impromptu enema--doodie bubble, y'all--when in truth, it was Bobby who told the story while a clearly embarrassed Whitney waved her arms to shut him up. Consider instead that at the core of the show--a combative, fucked-up relationship in the standard, sneering judgment--is in fact a depiction of genuine affection. Bobby and Whitney are that 'hood couple who will fight in the street, kicking each other's asses up and down the block, pulling knives and cracking bottles to improvise shanks, and then turn around and cut the shit out of anyone who threatens or harms their man/woman. After Bobby tells the doodie bubble tale, Whitney mockingly growls, "Now, that's black love." Naw, it's just love. I cannot wait for the DVD extras.
Ernest Hardy's Blood Beats, a collection of interviews, essays, and reviews from the last 10 years, will be published by Red Bone Press in April of 2006.
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From the Archive
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- As Seen on TV! Your Tivo won't tell you who shot J.R. — DVDs will! (Cover Story - Dec 7, 2005)
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- Cold Weather Culture Eleven things we're looking forward to that aren't the spring thaw (Cover Story - Dec 7, 2005)
- Noisy Neighbors Seven new local releases for jazzheads, historians, and fans of Bob (CD Review - Nov 30, 2005)
- Nine Things We Learned Last Tuesday Some highlights from the city elections that time (and voters) forgot (News - Nov 16, 2005)
- Big Hits of Mid-America, Volume 412 Five new local CDs Range from Spaghetti Westerns to pot paeans (Music - Oct 12, 2005)
- Sweet Sixteen Beautiful (mostly) and all yours, our sneek peek at the 6th Annual 'Sound Unseen' (Arts Feature - Oct 5, 2005)
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