I always put together some kind of half-year reflection. I thought I might cover a larger breadth this year than last and include more categories. These are my choices for the Best Songs, Album, Credit Sequence, Performance, New Series, and Movie this year (so far). I’m not trying to come up with any pretend objective nonsense. These are my choices, based on what most wowed me, what feels most needed in the world to me.
Best Song #1
“Meet the Grahams” by Kendrick Lamar
The defining musical moment of the year has arguably been Kendrick Lamar’s very one-sided rap feud against Drake, where calling out Drake’s grooming of girls finally seems to have stuck in the public consciousness.
Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is the most playable song that came out of it, and gave us the lasting description of Drake, “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-minorrrrr”.
I slightly prefer “Meet the Grahams”. There are problematic elements in it, obviously. I get tired of derogatory language toward women, but thankfully that’s limited to one line. Even if I’d want one or two changes, I have to admit how surgical the song is as a whole.
It’s one of the most lyrical eviscerations of a human being imaginable, a piece of musical horror that sees Lamar reciting letters to Drake and his family members (including an alleged hidden daughter). It’s all placed over a driving minor chord that repeats to the point of hellishness. The result is relentlessly dark, and if not for Lamar’s unique delivery and the subtly jazzy production, it’s tonally something I’d much sooner expect from a group like clipping.
In other words, it’s not the kind of entry you’d ever expect from Kendrick Lamar, but it still demonstrates the precision of his lyrics, and it employs several meta-layers: the repeated minor chord, literalizing the epistolary nature of a modern rap feud, making the conversation larger by addressing the enablers of Drake, and having it prepared to drop a mere 20 minutes after Drake’s “Family Matters” – suggesting without the aid of any lyric that Drake’s own claims are simply projection.
Best Song #2
“Rouge” by YU-KA
And now for something lighter. I’m a huge fan of new jack, which is an R&B-swing-pop hybrid that loves walking bass lines and synth hits. It saw its heyday in the 80s and 90s with performers like Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, whose “Straight Up” remains one of the clearest examples.
New jack has hung around without really having a ton of evolution. I’m not sure it needs it – its complex approach to syncopation keeps it sounding fresh and has a habit of fusing its disparate elements together in the same way vaporwave art does. It’s clearly of-a-time, but feels separated from the norms of that time. It sounds like 90s music imagining 2020s music for a future that never happened.
“Rouge” by YU-KA is ridiculously listenable – I’ve easily played it 20+ times. It’s classical new jack because of the push-and-pull between the vocalist, that anchor of a bass line, and the aggressively grouped synth hits. They strain to go in different directions during the chorus before slamming back together again when we get to the verse. Yet it also feels like a modernized take because of a driving rhythm, a more intense delivery, some video game-esque riffs, and the unexpected background vocals.
There’s probably a more accurate term for when it’s done on a bass, but one of the little details I love most is that early glissando the bassist does at the end of the first bridge – it sounds like a record scratching, and serves as a re-introduction of the walking bass line. It’s later echoed at half-speed by the backing vocal around 1:13 when the verse shifts away from the bass line and momentarily toward those backing vocals – that now grow in number for the next bridge.
It’s an incredibly clever way to signal backing changes that get a little introduction of their own before adding in with everything else again, and it makes the song feel like it’s escalating toward something as it goes. I love how this is written. It’s a fun bop, but it really demonstrates the nuance and complexity that makes new jack feel like future music from an alternate reality.
Best Album
Prelude to Ecstacy by The Last Dinner Party
This hooked me with “Burn Alive”, which starts out as this emotive, gothic, Marissa Nadler-esque dream pop but increasingly shifts into lead singer Abigail Morris absolutely belting out notes.
The comparisons are numerous – Florence + the Machine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Kate Bush are popular ones, but I’d throw Queen and Anna Calvi in there, too. And it’s wacky that they’re all accurate, depending on whether a song is in a raw emotive phase, going dark and hedonistic art pop, hitting the brakes with sharp staccato choruses, or showing off Morris’ overpowering vocals.
Every song has these shifts. It’s not that this changes song to song, it’s that it changes as quickly as verse to verse in a way that still works. It treats chamber pop as if it were anthem rock designed to be played in a stadium, which: huh?
I also love that this entire first album has centered on celebratory queerness. That’s not exactly new in British music, but Prelude to Ecstacy combines that notion with the COVID experience of being conscious of mortality and finality. The unique result in tone seems not to just celebrate queerness, but to envision a Golden Age, an if-not-now-when, and that is a combination of themes that does feel very unique to the last few years.
CW: next entry contains imagery of genocide
Best Credit Sequence
Gyeongseong Creature
From the very opening, you can tell “Gyeongseong Creature” is something haunting and unique. It’s been a controversial show, setting realistic depictions of the Japanese genocide of Koreans in the 30s and 40s next to a pulpy supernatural mystery, beautiful fight scenes, and a schmaltzy love story. I understand the pushback on it, but I’ve also seen so many projects process and reflect on the Holocaust in part by folding it into other genres. It’s not always ideal, but many indigenous Central and South American experiences of colonialism are turned over through fantasy and horror. I’m not in a place to say whether that’s right or wrong for Korean work, but because those are the frameworks I have, I do have a hard time criticizing “Gyeongseong Creature” for this when it’s clearly still viewing inhumane actions as inhumane – much like Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” or “The Devil’s Backbone”.
This attempt at fusing the real to the genre is done exceptionally well in the unsettling opening credits. They veer from the supernatural to the historical and back in a way that reflects the show at its best. Part of what haunts in the show itself is the supernatural becoming easier to grasp than the real and inhumane. What really happened feels like the cosmic horror that the mind can’t fully comprehend, the part that doesn’t belong in this world. As horrifying as the supernatural images in the credits are, the one that hits hardest is the soldiers dragging the dead child – because that’s a horror we know exists, yet is the one we spend decades still trying to process.
Best Series Performance
Maya Erskine, Donald Glover, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”
There’s no separating these two for me. There’s no saying one’s better than the other because they both do so much work to let the other shine. The complete rethink of the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” premise gives us two of the rawest, most realistic performances of a troubled relationship. It just also happens to be taking place during clandestine missions for an agency neither one can trust.
There’s a scene where Erskine is opposite Parker Posey, and it feels like a genuine handing of the baton from one legendary indie comedy actress to another. It occurs as tension mounts, but toward what we haven’t learned yet. It’s emblematic of the show’s ability to layer dry humor over increasing tension to realize the unsettling unspoken as it careens toward disaster. We cringe away at the social awkwardness, and keep looking because we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Glover offers an incredibly realized character who’s exceptionally skilled in this trade, but probably doesn’t have the caution and self-preservation to survive long in it. He trusts too much, he’s honest too often, and he improvises too guiltily. It’s a complex portrayal that’s rare in the genre.
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” explores the morality of spies who aren’t always fully up to the task, especially when the tasks they carry out are so inexplicable. There’s no tracing their actions to an outcome, there are just actions and events detached from impact. Are they doing right for the world? Are they doing wrong for it? Who knows?
But it’s also exploring a relationship between a disaffected, emotionally numb woman who can’t connect and who compartmentalizes her morals away, and a deeply feeling man who knows exactly who he is but can’t compartmentalize anything enough to endure.
The combination of these two ideas shouldn’t work, but what comes out of it is something exceptionally human and utterly unique. That’s precisely because these are two actors whose versatility easily embraces such rangy concepts.
Best New Series
Fallout
Simply put, “Fallout” is an exceptional modern satire. Its use of Americana and kitsch in an apocalypse that’s largely business as usual lampoons corporate exploitation and the exceptionalist narratives we cling to just to get through the day. People and cockroaches and whatnot might survive the apocalypse, but what survives most intact is conflict and the exploitation that drives it.
It perfectly embodies the video game series on which it’s based, not only by capturing that dark and witty sense of satire and poking fun at moral ambiguity, but by centering itself on concepts of its characters’ agency. This is what the best video game adaptations – such as “The Last of Us” and “Arcane” – have grasped as they shift from movies to series formats.
Video games as a medium give players the ability to explore concepts of agency. Every play-through by every player is slightly different, even for a very linear game. That theme of choice, agency, the relationship between action and hesitation, being frozen by choice or making the wrong one but committing to it and making it work, these are the experiences that video game-to-screen adaptations completely dismissed for so long. They adapted stories alone and thought them thin, barely coming up with enough for 90-minute movies, instead of also adapting the act of exploring a world and the motivation for the choices you make inside of it. That’s what video game adaptation has finally gotten right in the last few years and why these 10-hour series adaptations are filled to bursting.
It’s a perfect time to see “Fallout” adapted because its themes are based on how individuals and entire communities can be manipulated, re-written, capitalized, and set against each other through both mythology and media narrative. The apocalypse as a setting means that our modern manipulations become their mythologized ones, ways of thinking that are then built upon with new manipulations. It’s an exploration of how norms are shifted, not just in the moment through shock doctrine, but how those big, immediate movements justify themselves through centuries of constantly re-written cultural mythology and the endless wars they birth. That might sound a little silly, but how’s Ukraine looking? How’s Sudan looking? How’s Gaza looking? The youngest of those conflicts traces back at least 100 years in cycles of eruption and preparation, the oldest at least 1,500 years.
“Fallout” as a franchise has always explored how these cycles endure, and satirizes our enabling of them. Yeah, there’s lots of action and the equivalent of a cool zombie cowboy – the show’s hilarious, but it manages through laughter to make us look at some of the most disturbing human mistakes we keep repeating. Its unique way of disarming you to make you look at that abyss can feel like being in a delirium, rapturous and disoriented.
Best Film
Love Lies Bleeding
“Monkey Man”. “Furiosa”. “Dune: Part 2”. It’s been a stellar year for vengeance. But the film that wowed me most was a dark, $10 million 80s noir starring Kristen Stewart. She plays Lou, a gym manager who falls for Jackie, a bodybuilder passing through town. They start a romance, complicated by steroids, an FBI investigation into Lou’s estranged father (Ed Harris), and the domestic violence her sister (Jena Malone) is suffering.
This is some of the best work those three have done, so it’s even more impressive that the standout is Katy O’Brian’s Jackie. We don’t get her backstory in any detail, but the writing and performance give us everything that’s resulted from it. It creates a kind of negative space, a silhouette of backstory that we can tell the shape of. She is anger in search of a target, desperate for agency in her own story, and the targets she chooses to topple are cathartic. I’d write a separate heading for best film performance, but I’d only write what I just did.
Director and co-writer Rose Glass is a name to watch. Her previous film was another A24 production, “Saint Maud”, which earned two BAFTA nominations. The setting, color, and tone of her first two films are wildly different, but she’s given us two visually audacious, confrontational pieces that are sometimes darkly funny and sometimes border nightmare. She’s written and directed riveting performances out of her ensembles in both, exploring mania, obsession, and self-destruction as metaphorical responses to generational systemic violence.
The wildest thing about “Love Lies Bleeding” is that I can write all that and then tell you it’s one of the sweetest movies I’ve ever seen about two people seeing each other for who they are, in large part because they’re able to do so unfettered by the harm the world wants for them. Its most violent moments are sometimes its most tender, because when the systems that hold them in place respond violently, they finally have in each other the strength to respond in kind. “Love Lies Bleeding” is an incredible film.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 