Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2013 | 08:32
xmas mixes (2007-2009)
xmas2007 is all over the place. the previous year's mix was too, but it had a theme, a base that made sense of everything. the flow was determined by the opening song. xmas2007 has no such theme. it is merely the songs i liked at the time. songs that came out in 2007 that buzzed for me.
that isn't to say these were my favorite songs of 2007, though for the most part they are. sometimes i had an artist in mind and i used the song that best fit the time allotted. other times i stepped away from a popular song to highlight a lesser-known tune from that artist. stylistically, xmas2007 jumps a lot, and the blends that may have sounded good to me when i made it don't always work. the transitions are sometimes forced, though a few are inspired (e.g. the orb's "angel 4 matrix" ends with the processed sound of someone puking and goes right into queens of the stone age's "sick, sick, sick"). in the end, though, it's clunky. freed of any particular thematic constraint, it doesn't know what to be.
xmas2008 is subtitled 'choose your leader'. this comes from the cover image, part of a school assignment asking him to make something in the style of an artist. i forget the name of the person he got, but her works tend to be black-and-white photographs with text over them. here the cover is a photo of an eagle statue with the text printed in white. the remaining artwork is photos from the election night rally in chicago's grant park.
musically, it's more focused, and in retrospect pretty grim. this is music made at the end of the gwb presidency, right as the economy was collapsing. america was watching a tense battle between two opposing visions of the future: one offered hope, the other difference. america voted for hope, but these songs were made before that.
xmas2008 covers war, street life, entitlement, desperation, and gas prices. its closest song to hope is squarepushers affermation that women are real and not objects. these were the songs that sparked me that year, or at least the ones short enough to fit on one disc, and i don't think i realized at the time how downcast the overall mix is.
in 2009, victoria bergsman, recording as taken by trees, released a cover of animal collectives "my girls", re-titled "my boys". both versions are great and both came out the same year. the gender change allowed me to structure xmas2009 as a double-disc release with each disc following the gender of the title song.
beyond that, the theme for xmas2009 is eclecticism. k'naan, la roux, converge, hope sandoval, major lazer, band of skulls, etc. taken by trees appears twice, once on each disc, but i couldn't fit two animal collective songs. people were quite taken with the theme, though i am unsure how they felt about the songs themselves. i'm still impressed, and i'm somewhat disappointed i didn't follow more of these artists afterwards. 2009 was an excellent year for new music.
i will add that xmas2009 is the most upbeat of these three. whether that was a function of the music released or my mood in relation to the music i heard i don't know, but, a few metal and noise songs aside, the music moved and the words showed hope. although my artwork is again pictures i took that year, without much thought given to the themes in the music, the cover is a dog rollicking in grass. the inside is a toy soldier on a tree stump, perhaps hinting at the underlying threats that the hopes of 2009 obscured.
