My 50 Favorite Albums of the Decade: 2010-2019

Part of the joy of being one man with a blog and not an important publication is that I don't feel any pressure to make an albums list that contextualizes the decade.  Nobody's reading this, so I don't need to fit anything in because it's "important" or "groundbreaking."  No, this list is only concerned with what "slaps" and "goes hard."  The real criteria was slightly more complicated, but only slightly.  In choosing my favorite albums of the decade, I thought about the records that meant the most to me at the time they came out, but often an album can seem great in the year of its release and then you never return to it.  So I also made sure to give credit to the albums that I returned to most often and the ones that still held up when I did my relistening throughout this year in preparation for this list.

They say that the music somebody listens to in their adolescence is the era that resonates the most with them and for me that's true, because if I had to choose, I'd probably say I enjoyed the music of the 2000s more than I enjoyed what the 2010s had to offer.  But that's not to say I didn't think this was a good music decade.  You could stretch the list you're about to read out to 100 picks and it would still include albums I love.  The early part of the decade saw the bombast of the 2000s give way to sleeker, more electronic based sounds, which led many writers to declare that rock music was dead. But really, it was just that great rock music was coming from different places.  Particularly in the last half of the 2010s, there was a boom of women making excellent DIY, punk, and music indebted to 90s alt-rock.  Meanwhile, as rap became the dominant force in our culture, and pop continued to be embraced more as a genre worthy of serious consideration, both scenes gave us terrific examples of the form.  Music was thriving all around, and it's ultimately a good thing that the wealth is being spread and not coming from the traditional modes of yore.

So let's celebrate all the 2010s had to offer...

The rules: In order to maximize the amount of variety on this list and ensure that certain artists don't clog it up, I've limited myself to one album per act.  If a certain artist made albums under two different projects -- like Julian Casablancas with The Strokes and The Voidz, for example -- they would both be eligible.  For my yearly lists, I usually consider EPs, but for this decade list I didn't really include EPs into consideration.  There is one exception, but that EP feels so massive and made such a splash that it's basically an album.  And in this day and age, a mixtape is the same thing as an album so naturally those are included.  Other than that, the window of eligibility includes anything released between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.

I still like the show Girls

HBO's Girls gave birth to the modern thinkpiece culture that we see in writing about TV and film today.  Or at least the show was one of the things that gave that angle the power to dominate modern pop culture conversations.  When the show hit the scene in early 2012, it was met with equal amounts of acclaim and vitriol.  Many critics praised the series for its singular voice, focus on female friendships, and frank depiction of sexuality.  But others criticized it for a number of things like its overwhelmingly white cast, privileged and unlikable characters, and the alleged nepotism involved in assembling the show.  In its debut season, it seemed like a new thinkpiece about Girls was posted once an hour.  The haters and fans fueled each other.  For every article that applauded the show's groundbreaking nature, there was a rebuttal accusing it of being problematic garbage.

But there are only so many ways to talk about a show.  At a certain point, writers ran out of unique takes on it, and the people who excoriated the show got bored and stopped watching.  Since the intense hate that certain corners of the internet have for Girls is what drove its supporters into an aggressively defensive position, there was less reason to keep its positive traits in the collective conversation once the negativity died down.  Occasionally, there would be something that got the internet talking -- who can forget about Marnie getting rimmed last season? -- but in general, the critical community has moved on from intensely discussing it.

What a shame too, because Girls is still a good show.  The difference is that it doesn't feel as special as it did in those first two years, when everyone was talking about it.  Such is the case with art that has a significant influence on its medium.  Because there are so many shows with indie film sensibilities on television now, it's easy forget that there wasn't much else like Girls in 2012.  Its most obvious ancestor would be Louie, which had already existed for two years and was indeed the main point of comparison for reviewers at the time.  Now we've got Togetherness, Transparent, Casual, and countless others.  An increase in peers, coupled with a decrease in its auteur-driven sensibilities, made Girls appear less unique, despite only minor drops in quality.

Pure watchability is a highly underrated quality when it comes to television, and what these past few seasons of Girls have lacked in innovation, they've more than made up for in watchability.  I never feel the urge to look at the clock when I'm watching an episode of this show.  In fact, I'm often surprised when the credits start rolling, given the way half an hour just breezes by.  After the severe dramatic turns of season two (still my favorite season), Lena Dunham made a conscious effort to slide back over to the comedy end of the spectrum.  In the process, the show went from being a raw look at the lives of a certain demographic of women to a somewhat more cartoony version of that.  Girls has always been funny, but the most recent seasons have bumped up the comedic energy, giving the show more laughs than many traditional sitcoms.  Part of that is because Dunham and her writers have such a strong sense of the characters at this point, knowing how to perfectly play off of what makes these people tick.

There might not be a better example of knowing the characters inside and out in the entire history of the show than this season's decision to pair Adam and Jessa together.  It's one of those decisions that I wouldn't have thought to make, but it makes total sense now that I've seen it.  They're the show's two most impulsive, eccentric, and destructive characters; so naturally, they would eventually end up together.  Of course, these two are bound to destroy each other, especially once Hannah finds out.  But for the time being, I want to just enjoy them in this current, blissful state, because it's absolutely delightful.

Season five is only four episodes in and it's already full of rock solid choices like that.  After four years of tinkering, the show has finally found the perfect blend of comedy and drama.  One of its other problems was that as the series went on, it became less logical that these characters would even still be friends, let alone in the same room with each other, and as a result Girls felt like four different shows running in parallel.  Season five has the main characters interacting more and in ways that make sense, a welcome return because they bounce off of each other so well.  Most importantly, the show still manages to show off some of its indie film flair, as it did with the Shoshanna material in Japan, which felt very Lost in Translation.  There are still a few frustrating moments this season -- a comedic scene in a coffee shop a few weeks ago was over-the-top and annoying in an extremely "written by Lena Dunham" way -- but Girls has always been a show whose tiny frustrations make it even more fascinating.

Before the fifth season began airing this year, Dunham announced that season six would be the final season of the show.  Perhaps that clear stopping point has given the show a sense of direction, a goalpost to shoot towards.  This has never been a plot-intensive series, so it didn't need an endgame on a story level, but more on a character level.  Seasons three and four felt like the work of a show that was wandering around aimlessly in some middle space with its characters in a way that season five does not.  Girls has always been good, but this year represents the first time in a while that it has felt truly significant and urgent.

My Emmy wish list ballot

I follow award shows, but I've never been one to get emotionally invested in them.  If a good show wins an award, it doesn't validate my tastes, and if a bad show wins something, I don't consider it a crime against humanity.  The Emmys are a weird beast -- the nominations are based on a very specific kind of buzz, and once the voters decide they like something, they tend to nominate that thing over and over again.  After a while of paying attention to them, you eventually start to realize that The Emmys are a pointless endeavor.  So what better way to celebrate a pointless award show than by making my own pointless nominations?

This year's awards will be honoring television that aired from June 1, 2013 to May 31, 2014.  That means, for example, that the season of Orange Is the New Black that's eligible is only the first season.  In formulating these wish list nominations, I took this very meaningless thing seriously by following the rules and going by the official ballot of eligibility in each category.

Now before getting into my nomination choices, let me just explain one thing that confuses most people: The Hanging Episodes Rule.  Obviously, there are many shows whose season runs right through the cutoff date.  For instance, Game of Thrones season four began in the eligibility window (April 6th) and ended outside of the window (June 15th).  The Hanging Episodes rule states that if half of the episodes in a season fall within the eligibility window, then the entire season is eligible, and any episode that hasn't aired at the time of nominations will be made available to voters.  Thus, all of Game of Thrones is fair game.

So is everybody up to speed on all things Emmy now?  Okay, let's dive into my personal picks (NOTE: the choices in each category are ordered from favorite to least favorite)...

Wrestling with my feelings about season 3 of Girls

"Who is Hannah Horvath"?  That's the question a book publisher asks Hannah in "Only Child," the latest Girls episode to air.  But increasingly in its third season, it seems like the show itself is having an identity crisis.  It used to feel like it had such a firm grasp on its characters, criticizing them while giving you ample reason to understand them, but now I don't know if it has a clear vision of what it's trying to say about them anymore.  I'm one of the few people who loved how dark season 2 got -- it was willing to put these four women through the ringer, but also had a great amount of sympathy for them.  In season 3 though, Girls has gone back to having a lighter, more comedic feel reminiscent of season 1.

Now don't get me wrong, I loved season 1.  The problem is that season 2 was such a "you can't go home again" season, that trying to go back to the tone of season 1 just doesn't feel right.  It's what I like to call The Buffy Season 6 problem.  That's another season of television that I love, but one that put the show in a difficult position.  After the unrelenting darkness of that year, it'd be easy to make up for it with lighter fare in the next season.  But being a Joss Whedon show, it decided to only step off the gas a little bit when it came to the misery, and the final season is often derided for how dreary it is.  (To be fair, there are many other problems to lob at it that don't have to do with the tone.)  Likewise, if Girls continued following the slope established by its second season, it would be in danger of becoming a depressing slog.  So I definitely understand the tonal choices made by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, but that doesn't forgive the many problems that still exist within this season.

The biggest of those problems is that the characters are approaching the point where they're starting to feel like cartoons, instead of the living, breathing people that they were written to be in the show's first two seasons.  Now the main characters feel so aggressively self-involved, way past the point of seeming real.  Take the end of "Dead Inside," where Hannah pretends to finally have some reaction to her editor's death by retelling a story that Caroline told her earlier, for instance.  The moment is extremely dark on paper, but it's treated like a cute punchline to end the episode on.  It's the biggest example of the gap between what the show was ("These people are awful.  Let's figure out why.") to what it often is now ("Look at how awful these people are!").  I'm just not interested in the show if it wants to point and laugh at the characters.  I know that may not be Dunham and Konner's intention, but it sure does feel that way.  Just look at Marnie's storyline so far this year, where we're supposed to find her constant floundering funny.  When did the show become so cynical?

The introduction of Adam's sister Caroline, doesn't help matters much either.  Gaby Hoffmann is perfectly cast in the role, but the writing has yet to elevate her past the level of being a zany cartoon.  She's just the random force there to disrupt Adam and Hannah's life.  Adam might be a strange guy, but he had depth from almost the very beginning.  You can see how Lena Dunham is trying to say something about the mirrors between her and Hannah, but it feels so half-baked because the show is so distracted by her oddness.  It's surely leading somewhere, but the road to get there could be a little more interesting.

Weirdly, the strongest and most sympathetic season 3 material comes from Jessa.  For the most part, she was everybody's least favorite character, a matter not helped by the relatively shallow storylines she got in the first two seasons.  But this year, her character has been fertile ground for compelling stories.  When watching her scenes in rehab early in the season, it'd be easy to think that it's just another example of the cartoonish awfulness I complained about, but there's something much deeper going on with her.  She's still an awful human being, but the show depicts her maliciousness in a way that exposes an inner pain, not just using it as a setup for sitcom laughs.

Yet despite some of my fears and misgivings, I think this season is strangely engrossing nonetheless.  Every week, I find myself hating the first 15 minutes of a given episode, only for the second half to really grow on me.  By the time the end credits roll, I'm eager to see the next episode.  Even when it's frustrating, Girls feels as if it's an experience unlike anything else on television.  I throw my hands up in annoyance, but I also find it so daring.  Regardless of the actual intent, the inherent darkness of the final scene of "Dead Inside" is ballsy stuff.  And look at the jarring way that "Only Child" just ends.  In my blurb about it on my year-end list last year, I mentioned how Girls is a insane highwire act.  It hasn't quite fallen yet, but watching it struggle to maintain balance is both frightening and fascinating at the same time.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2013

Are you sick of hearing about whether or not we're in the golden age of television?  There has been alot of hand-wringing about that lately, spurred on by the fact that 2013 was an unequivocally great year for TV, the best that I've seen since I started following the medium closely.  Not only was the year remarkable for its depth of quality, but also for its breadth.  Good television has been popping up from every corner, with networks like Sundance making their debut in original programming and online sources like Hulu and Netflix expanding their market.  One of the shows in end of the year discussion, Borgen, released episodes on LinkTV -- whatever that is!  It's interesting to think that a little over a decade ago, most of the talked about TV shows came from the big four networks (CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC) and HBO.  Now I literally get anxiety thinking about all of the great television coming from so many different places that I'll never get around to watching.  (For how much TV I already watch, see the full list linked to at the bottom of this post.)

Television lists are harder than music and film lists to do, because the main television season is spread out over two calendar years, with many shows starting their seasons in September and not ending until April or May.  This is becoming less of an issue, as summer is seen as a television ghetto less and less every year, and cable shows tend to air their entire seasons in a single calendar year.  Nevertheless, for each television show, the only episodes eligible for ranking purposes are the ones that aired in 2013.  That seems like an obvious thing, but it always throws some people.  This can sometimes work to a show's advantage.  For example, Parenthood was very high on my list last year because it aired all of its best material (the end of season 3 at the beginning of year, the beginning of season 4 in the fall) in 2012.  On the other hand, New Girl was never going to land in my top 20 this year, but it ended up being way further down on my full list because its third season has been so terrible, it's tarnished the quality of the back half of season 2 that aired at the beginning of the year.  Is all of that clear?  Okay, good.

For all of my talk about the breadth of the television landscape, my top 20 consists of a small cluster of networks, but there are still some unexpected ones.  The list heavily favors cable to network, with 16 belonging to the former and 2 belonging to the latter (and 2 coming from internet-only sources).  My top 20 is also low on straight comedies, consisting of mostly dramas and shows that are listed as "comedy" but are mostly dramatic.  This is mainly because of how good this year was for drama, but it also was a very weak year for comedy, particular network comedies.  So enough analysis of the list, let's move on to the actual thing...

Girls Concludes a Messy, Complicated Season With a Messy and Complicated Finale

It feels like everybody watches Girls for slightly different reasons.  Some watch it to get a laugh, finding the show to be a comedy about the misguided lives of 20-somethings living in New York.  Some watch it just for the nudity and raunchy sex, as if there aren't a million places on the internet where you can find that.  There are those that watch it for the well-observed character drama, and even those people can be split into subgroups.  Half of them might be able to relate to the struggles that the characters are going through, while others may watch from week to week wondering just when these spoiled, narrow-minded upper class people will just get a grip already.

Even though it took a few episodes to nail the tone down, season 1 of Girls managed to maintain a great balance of all its elements, which was probably why it was able to gain such a wide variety of acolytes.  One week you'd get an episode like "The Return," a meditative episode that delved into Hannah's life back at home, and then the very next week the show would drop something like "Welcome to Bushwick aka The Crackcident," which was 30 minutes of pure comedy.  Season 2 shifted the weights of its various tones and I wouldn't be surprised if it lost some fans in the process.  It was messy and complicated and by the end I was marveling at just how dark things became.  Surely, this wasn't the Girls that the people who tune in for the weekly sex scene bargained for.

Yet, for all its structural looseness, I can't help but be more enamored by this second season than I was by its first.  Part of this is because of how much deeper the show began to look inward and explore its characters this year.  If season 1 was about chronicling the relatively unchecked lives of 20-somethings with myopic worldviews, then season 2 was largely about those same characters being forced to examine themselves and their actions.  This season wasn't just about Hannah either, it gave the other 3 girls much meatier stories, and if the show lost some narrative tightness because of that, it gained back tenfold in thematic connectivity.  Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, and Jessa interacted with each other much less than they did in season 1, which made the fact that they all were struggling to obtain some direction in their lives even more poignant.

It's ironic then that season 2's 4th episode, "It's a Shame About Ray," was the installment that kicked off the show's great creative stretch.  Perhaps the last episode to put everybody together, "It's a Shame About Ray," let all of the characters play off each other and slowly showed things come to a boil.  What followed was a string of great episodes that are notable for just how different they feel.  "One Man's Trash" and "Video Games" couldn't feel less alike, but they both are incredible half hours.  For a while, Girls ascended to an "art" status, where it just didn't feel like anything else being produced on television.  In that way, it reminded me of season 5 of Mad Men.  Now let's be clear, this season of Girls is nowhere near being as good as the most recent season of Mad Men, which belongs in the pantheon of all-time great seasons of television.  However, I often remarked how season 5 of Mad Men felt like Matt Weiner was just doing whatever he wanted and letting the story follow.  Nobody would confuse "Signal 30" with "Far Away Places," but they're each their own little masterpieces.  Lena Dunham also seemed less interested in the common conventions of television and instead told each story in whatever way she found to be interesting that week.  It resulted in sometimes frustrating, but often fascinating television.

Everything culminated in "On All Fours," the penultimate episode, which was one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences I've ever had.  Taking cringe drama to a new level, "On All Fours" showed everyone at their lowest lows, a rock bottom that was at once inevitable in its occurrence and surprising in its depth.  With the way everything was building up, we were being primed for some kind of catharsis in the finale.  Well, what we got was...something.  For the first two-thirds of the episode, "Together" looked to be snaking down the same dark hole that the other nine episodes slowly were, only to end on a complete turnaround into sweeping romantic territory.  This caused much consternation with many people who were fans of the show.  They wanted to see Hannah and the gang wriggle off on dry land after drowning in the depths of their own despair for so long, but not in a way that felt out of the blue and unearned.

It was only in the second viewing that I was able to confirm what I already had a sneaking suspicion of when I watched the finale for the first time.  "Together" reveals alot of information through its clever editing, which constantly links these characters who've been so disparate all year by choosing how to cut scenes together.  Where the meaning of a scene may be a bit opaque in isolation, it becomes completely clear when paired with similar scenes featuring different characters.  We see it in the very beginning where three awkward sex scenes are shown one after another, indicating that nothing good will come of any of these pairings.  It's a neat little trick really, allowing for a wonderful build that feels like emotional dominoes crashing down.  The technique is employed again in a series of knockout scenes, Shoshanna's breakup with Ray and Hannah's voicemail message to Jessa, where simmering emotions finally explode.

What follows is where people begin to have problems, with Adam running across town to find Hannah and Charlie and Marnie choosing to be together.  If those moments felt off, like something out of a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy, it's only because they were supposed to.  Girls has always been about being aware of something in its characters that they don't see within themselves.  So when Charlie and Marnie think that they've finally worked things out between each other and Adam "rescues" Hannah from herself, with swelling strings scoring both scenes, we're supposed to not buy what we're seeing.  It's an unhappy happy ending of sorts, informed by everything we've seen before to indicate that things most likely won't end well.  The show has never been about finding that one person to save you and make you feel whole.  Instead, it's about having this small subset of people who are the only ones willing to put up with you and make you feel just a little less broken, and that idea was reinforced in the finale.  It's there in Shoshanna and Ray's relationship, it's there in Hannah's phone call to Jessa, it's everywhere.

A recurring element of this season has been people calling others out on their crap, demanding for them to get their act together.  Everyone wants the next person to pull themselves out of the ground, but nobody realizes that they're saying it while their own head is only just crowning above the soil.  "Together" brings the gang closer to a point of clarity, while also showing that there are miles to go before everything will be fully okay.