The Home Key #21: 2025 Music I Liked (Protest Edition!)

   Yes, I believe the following to be self-evident—that in times of the tempest amassed on the horizon, in times of scoundrels and extrajudicial justice, in the low and dishonest decades when the cheapness of life is become routine—then is more protest music essential. While it is to be understood that some protest music is weak, undercooked, dreadfully earnest, sentimental, ineffective, this should not invalidate the endeavor. Indeed, for every oversimplification about dolphins or for each deracination of John Henry and his railroad employ by psychedelic musicians from San Francisco there is some more astringent call-to-awareness (“Capital It Fails Us Now,” by Gang of Four, say, or “Shipbuilding,” by Robert Wyatt, or We Insist! by Max Roach) that bears the marks of a correct approach with respect to the correct historical moment. We need more protest music now! Of the astringent and life-changing variety! Throw off your chains! Yes, the need for protest music now is so acute that every navel-gazing top-forty confession about overly sticky aspects of human sexuality feels not only crass but like it is shilling somehow for Mr. Tech Bro. When some nonsense singer makes as to write a song about how firm is the personage of her football-player husband, I can only think that the music-streaming baron who is funding military tech these days is made happy by her frivolous inattention to history. The same with whatever rap beef is of the moment. Rap beef=distraction from authoritarianism. While I am resistant to most or all dialectical pairings, it's hard not to feel that music that does not protest now amplifies despotism, gives it a comfortable home. (Like: Kiss at the Kennedy Center.) This is not inevitable, this amplification, this does not have to be the way. We need more protest music now! Throw off your chains!  

       And: it is true, according to the realisms of the present, that I have in some cases here invented protest music. That is, owing to a dearth, some of my list of great protest music 2025 imagines music that has yet to exist, though no doubt it will come to pass. These recordings will be recorded. And: then my list of protest songs is then followed then by a list of all other music I liked this year. So, first the protest songs, then other stuff.

Dirty Projectors, Song of the Earth (Nonesuch) 

This is a conceptually ambitious band, of course. Every album is markedly different from every other album, always with the ideas leading the way, especially ideas about personnel and timbre, but sometimes ideas about how to collect songs, how to think about what an album is, what music is and why. For example, the album before this album, by the Dirty Projectors, was a collection of EPs, called 5 EPs,  in which each disc had a different lead vocalist. And then, well, you probably know, there was Rise Above, e.g., in which the concept was rerecording a certain album by Black Flag but without listening to it. From memory. And so on. But every now and then, too, there is an intensive thinking-through-a-theme that is also happening with Dirty Projectors. One album is besieged with the loss of band member Amber Coffman. And then, similarly, there are moments in the oeuvre when they are thinking about the natural world. For a long span of time, I felt like the best album by the band was the one they made with Björk, Icelandic chanteuse. Mount Wittenberg Orca. The fact that the entire project orbited around eye contact made between Amber Coffman and a whale off the coast of California was/is to me just a really perfect example of purpose. I can feel that gaze. Songs of the Earth sort of picks up the thread from the Björk collaboration, in that it is a bit of a climate crisis album, it is thinking-thru the climate crisis, but it also has a timbre-oriented idea too. At some point recently, David Longstreth, the “band leader” or auteur, or howsoever you want to term it, made an orchestral work, which was previewed a little bit on 5 EPs, on the section devoted to songs sung by Kristin Slipp (best known, perhaps, for her role in the band Cuddle Magic). All of Song of the Earth features these orchestral pieces, or some portion thereof, and that is the band idea this time out. A fusion of the popular apparatus with the orchestral. 

But: one song on this album is absolutely up to the job of renewing your grief about the climate crisis, and that’s the song called “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One,” being the first paragraph, as noted, of a book by David Wallace-Wells, sung as is, without intervention, devoid of rhyme or meter, but really expertly set by David Longstreth. It happened when the album came out that people seemed to minimize the effect of this song, this album, in part because the immensity of Longstreth’s surfaces causes you to think only about experiment and conceptual brilliance, the sounds, when, in this case you really should be thinking about the opening of Wallace-Wells’s text, which is an instance of prose characterized by intense woe. There is no theme like the climate theme now. All other stories abut against. I know that there are ten other global crises, a veritable third world war of them, yes, this is true, but it seems we're going to destroy the human ecosystem first. And leave a gasping, ravening horde of Mad Maxes to fight over the cremains. That is our first purpose, it seems, and especially the hurtling forward is done by the autocrats of the world who don't give a shit, especially the master builder with the transient ischemic attack sag, who would use the last kilowatt hour of electricity in his ultimate hypertropical gilded palace to mill filigrees for his ballroom. This song trips the alarm in the most elegant way, so that you can’t look past the climate crisis, not in some PBS way, by pausing over the salamanders, but by saying, in effect, every argument to the contrary, with respect to the climate crisis, is delusional. Everything is climate crisis, alpha and omega.

Fiona Apple, “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home,)" (Epic/Clean Slate) 

This song is consonant with the song by Geese, below, in that both pieces are intensively organized around percussion. As with Fiona Apple’s last album, the truly great Fetch the Bolt Cutters, the Fiona Apple approach, recently, has been to bypass the piano as the centerpiece of the compositions and to move instead toward live percussion and bass (on the album the bass was often played by one of God’s greatest acoustic bass players, Sebastian Steinberg), and the same is true with this song "Pre-Trial.” But the song is more than just a musical composition, it's also a record of something that Fiona Apple has done in recent years. She has been a court-watcher, a person who bears witness to the grinding mechanisms of contemporary justice. In particular she watched (remotely) bail hearings in Prince George’s County, Maryland. I figure she lives in some art-related place like Los Angeles and perhaps she could have watched there, but she watched in Maryland. She started, as I understand it, in 2021, under Biden, and maybe this unassailably poignant and desolate anthem, with its slightly West African or Brazilian vibe, was begun then, but its intensity is brutally magnified in this the time of the brown-shirted thug squads. Each verse of this song is more devastating than the prior verse, with its catalogue of incremental injustice. With Apple’s glorious “Shameika,” the masterpiece from the last album, she was still observing through her own lens, her own biography, but on “Pre-Trial” the gaze is outward, toward the vast swamp of injustices that are America’s every single day. The results are profound. The results are evidence of an immense compositional maturity that was always there but which is now plain. She's among the great songwriters of her generation. Lastingly, the song asks: what is home now? 

James McMurtry, "Sons of the Second Sons,“ from The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (New West) 

James McMurtry is a great and thoughtful songwriter, with a great sense of how to use character and point of view owing to having been around a lot of stories as a kid, and, even more so he has flowered forth politically during challenging periods in American history, and this piece is evidence of same. But it's also more. McMurtry’s formulation—that America was founded (especially in the Sourh, perhaps) by a sort of loser class of lesser sons—is remarkable for its savagery and he delivers it with an offhandedness that recalls the especially inflammatory period of Johnny Cash. (His twelve-string sure sounds good, too.) He means to derive an origin of the MAGA zealots, dumb, bitter fuck-ups raised up by dumb, bitter fuck-ups, and it’s sophisticated and powerful except that he makes it all sound easy (even when he has to sing the word "genocide”), as in a swift schoolyard putdown. Maybe this is the best song he ever wrote? 

Sun Ra, “Retrospect—This World Is Not My Home,” from Hidden Fire (Strut Records) 

   Okay, let's go back to the question “What is home?"  

   It is relevant here as well!

It seems to me there are two principle routes through which to understand the vast, astounding body of work by Sun Ra, arguably the very greatest musicians and composers of the twentieth century. Either, 1) Ra might be understood as a quintessential mythographer, whose self-propelled Afrofuturist narrative is an allegory with which to understand human psychology as anguish for which imagination is the only real treatment (especially imagination engaged in improvisation). Or: 2) he really IS from outer space. Obviously in a postmodern or post-Hegelian moment, both these things might also be true at once. However, whichever way causes you to gain entrance to the immensity of this work, you are liable, upon beholding, to see in it an act of liberation, which simultaneously protests the conditions as they are. Sun Ra’s output is a protest of significant and gigantic proportion. Hundreds of recordings, a nearly endless supply it seems, made over almost five decades, according to a theory and practice that continues, with the surviving Sun Ra Arkestra, if without Ra himself, to this day.  

Hidden Fire, originally released on Ra’s own El Saturn label, was the last album they self-released during Ra’s on-earth time. This is the reissue. It was recorded at the "Knit” in New York City, and it's a highly experimental album, like Ra’s mid-sixties records, which were also recorded in NYC. Most of it is exploratory and abstract and very satisfying. It is, in its liberation, of joy, by joy, into joy.  

But then there is this track at the beginning.  

Sun Ra had just four more years of performing left after this date, and yet he performs the opener, on which he delivers an excoriating prose poem—"You do right, they put you in jail, you do wrong and they put you in jail!“—with a mortal urgency and animation. In a way, if I could efficiently  transcribe this spoken word magnificence that is "Retrospect—This World Is Not My Home,” it would do all the protesting this column requires, “You say you are free, prove it to me!” but to do so is to lose the context of the recording and the show in which this prose poem was improvised. You just have to hear it.  

One grows used to understanding Sun Ra as allegorizing racial oppression in his interstellar travels, as if he is from Saturn, and this is logical and just with “Retrospect,” but in 2025 the refrain “This world is not my home,” feels more enormous, even, than might be contained by a label such as “art about racial oppression.” The lyric is premonitory and deals also with autocracy generally, and with the tendency of all the humans to submit to the yoke. You and I wake up every day, in 2025, feeling like this world is not our home, that there is no longer a home on this world there is simple: “… And then you die!” There is no more straightforward protest, no more compelling one, expanding outward through time and all the dimensions, all the nations and traditions, seeing at the center of all these, always, the African diaspora.

Brian Jackson, et al., “Winter in America,” from EP One (BBE Music) 

Brian Jackson was Gil Scott-Heron’s collaborator during that artist’s fertile period in the seventies and on this EP he updates a number of iconic songs from the collaboration with new partners, including the production team called Masters at Work. If you'rethinking it's sort of impossible to have a Gil Scott-Heron song without that voice, you are correct. But a more nuanced interpretation of this work by Brian Jackson might involve thinking about what these songs would mean if released now. It really is winter in America. Maybe one thing that is in play with this rerecording (Jackson has recently rerecorded other songs, too, from the classic period of his collaborations with Gil Scott-Heron) has to do with publishing rights, and/or record label control of the masters, or what have you. I don'tknow. But these motives, which we might file under possession of your own labor, are against the surveillance tech/media edifice now, and that is a welcome approach. This rerecording is consistent with the original, in the sense that it doesn't give it all away to the hip hop sound. It feels a little bit neo-soul, more than a little bit jazz, and the vocal, by one of Jackson’s many collaborators, while it cannot ever recapture that mix of frailty and tenacity that was Gil Scott-Heron, has a nice energy to it. It says what the songs says. And: if you like this, and you are interested in pre-rap jazz/r&b spoken word, there are also the recent rereleases and recongifurations of the Last Poets, for example, there are multiple remixes of “This is Madness” this year. Hard to know which releases of the Last Poets, these days, is least simulated, has most relationship to the original impulse of the Last Poets, but these ideas of credibility and ownership and genuineness are the way capitalism tries divide and conquer among the disaffiliated. “This is Madness” couldn’t be more timely, as ever, and I like best the remix here that is almost all percussion, and the poem, which is at the heart of the work, is undiminished by its refractory remixes. Pretty obvious, I suppose, how significant was the cross pollination between the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron back in the day, especially in how indomitable this music is, and remains.

Geese, "100 Horses,“ from Getting Killed (Partisan) 

This is a most important record of the year.  

While I am aware that Geese are considered a sort of "dad rock” band, I choose to pass by this reductive and sour-grapes-inflected analysis. My interest in this record is not reliant upon my being-a-father, nor would I say my being-a-father tonally affects my music listening now or in the past. The listening is ongoing. Listening is in order to facilitate the survival of life circumstances, not a reaction to them. 

I read voluminously about Geese, yes, and so I decided I should listen, fully believing that I would experience what I experienced with other bands that were meant to rehabilitate the subgenre of the “rock band,” e.g. Måneskin, e.g., or Greta Van Fleet, both of whom are pale and watery and feature superabundant synthetic fabrics. So: when everyone was talking about the new Geese album I decided to listen, and in particular I just started with the first song on Getting Killed, which you may know is called “Trinidad,” and this song, well, I unexpectedly immediately liked this song, which was this sort off-kilter groove that feels a bit like post-punk reggae of some peculiar variety, or like a funk/reggae combo, perhaps, complete with a trombone line, the verses then giving way to a clattering chorus in which Cameron Winter seems to scream, variously, the line “There’s a bug in my car." Okay, this turns out to be incorrect (though I am in good company in mishearing it as shown above), it's actually the even creepier "There’s a bomb in my car." And at one point the chorus is followed by a really amazing verse: "My son is in bed/My daughters are dead/My wife’s in the shed/My husband’s burning lead/The rest are force fed/Or else baked into bread.” The “bug” in the car, in my view, is a listening device, then, in a paranoid narrative, which is not substantively different from the paranoid narrative in which there is an incendiary device in the car. I kept thinking of Gene Hackman in The Conversation, while listening to this one. And once I rounded this corner, heading into the rest of the album, I was, well, very interested. There is also, of course, the unique qualities of Cameron Winter’s voice, his weird migrations from Elvis Presley to Tim Buckley to Iggy Pop. Like, how does he even know about Tim Buckley? But always with a sort of a gospel flavor, I think. The songs are really like experimental gospel songs.  

I might argue that every single song on Getting Killed is a protest song. They are songs of outrage or a phenomenology of outrage in a contemporary political setting. Phenomenology oscillates with an outward gaze, so that a song can be both personal, or perhaps first-personal, and then observational, the one and then the other. Yet one song has a surpassing wish to describe our times as a time of war, as the song says, “There is only dance music in times of war.” As with Geese in general, it’s hard to know what is commentary and what is meta-commentary, what is merely the language of improvisation, and what is, for example, a lenticular repetition of certain kinds of images (the horses appear in one of the other songs on the album), somewhat in the way that images recurred in the words of Jim Morrison, or in the career of Jim Morrison. In part, “100 Horses," to which I refer here, behaves exactly like a funk song, by which I mean what a great band sound in this band, it’s an actual band, it’s a bunch of people who’ve been playing since they were in high school for whom the groove is deep, and this bunch of people is mastering a certain kind of very intensive groove-making, and in this way the words are an effect of the music, are a further instrument in the ensemble. The music isn't just a backdrop for some heavy lyrical spew; the music reverse engineers the words. And yet when that lyrical matrix comes out from its horizon-line position and calls to you, grabs you by the lapels, it's talking about war, and about the phenomenology of being-in-war. Which is how the Northeastern cities have felt since October 7, 2023, e.g., Getting Killed, that is, often feels to me the way campus life felt in 2023, like a match could conflagrate the entire neighborhood, like there's a bomb in the car. Though in part we have matured from the conflagration of October 7 to, say, the fascist realities of 2025, we are still playing out these narratives of war, same story, different details. I think this is a very great song, "100 Horses," really unsettling, with a relentless groove, on the best overall album any band (and I’m specifically thinking of the role that a band plays, especially as this is different from an album of an MC, a rapper, singing over a bunch of machined tracks) has made in a long time. What a promising album, by such a promising band, from beginning to end, and what an exacting and perceptive observation is their observation of the political maelstrom of the present.

Fishbone, “Racist Piece of Shit,” single (Consigliere Records)

This came out at the very end of 2024, and unfortunately I didn’t hear it then. It’s also on a 2025 release Stockholm Syndrome (Available on Bandcamp! https://fishbone.bandcamp.com/album/stockholm-syndrome) An album chockful of protest music. But this is the best, most inflammatory gem therein. It’s striking and brave and very funny, with a totally infectious arrangement. That Fishbone has been a remarkably adept, chameleonic, totally relevant band for decades without ever getting the requisite respect seems obvious. You can apply that sentence to vast numbers of Black or primarily Black bands over the years, some of them on this list. Yes, Fishbone is great, is still great, and they’re reminding you here of an essential aspect of politics now, namely that a self-evident goal of the fascist hordes is an ethno-state, that old obscenity, but it gets insufficiently said, that an ethno-state is the goal, because saying so would cause one to lose access to the levers of power, etc. Fishbone still says it.

And: ska is still revolutionary music.

Deerhoof, Noble and Godlike in Ruin (Joyful Noise)

I just really like everything about Deerhoof. To me, Deerhoof is sort of what music is supposed to sound like. For example the interplay between the guitars, the amazing bass stylings of Satomi, also her voice, of course, the tectonic drumming of Greg Sanier. The simple melodic footprint conjoined to the density of the rhythms. If you listen to Deerhoof a lot, you know that almost every record is different, and this one is noteworthy for its palpable feeling of being produced in a formerly democratic country. I will be honest and say that Greg’s long-term incendiary Instagram programming, so accurate, can sometimes be tiring, or, at least, his Oberlin-ish posts have sometimes challenged my limitless need for Deerhoof, but then, just as I am thinking this (that there are moments when trenchancy can just be not enough, not the way to pathos and compassion for all sentient beings, I come to listen to the new album, and especially the lyrics, which I think are mostly made by Satomi, are so human-scaled, so inspiring, that I am back in my condition of thinking that this is what music is supposed to be like. “Immigrant Songs,” the closer here, with its wry and withering critique of working for the rich people parties is just how a protest song is meant to be, and it does in fact convince me that the leaving-Spotify action by Deerhoof is absolutely justified. And note the Metal Machine Music freakout at the end. Maybe I am just not smart enough, sometimes, or maybe I just need musical thinking (which is a not-thinking, but rather a be(ing)) to understand the extra-musical thinking. Art leads to raised consciousness. And this is perhaps why I need protest songs in the first place.

Rob Halford, “You Must Believe in Spring,” from The Bad and the Beautiful (Columbia)

It’s not that there is an obvious protest element in Halford’s album length cover of the Tony Bennett/Bill Evans collaborations, not really, but because of the sheer improbability of this recording (and his, Halford’s, decision to use multiple a different eminent contemporary pianist on each track), there is an intense surprise, a sort of ischemic convulsion, to the beholding of this album. As a response to the widespread cultural mediocrity of the Theocratic-Feudalist Period, The Bad and the Beautiful is moving, plangent, nakedly vulnerable, and it seems to tremble, everywhere you listen, with a burden of allegories. Especially as a pivot with respect to “metal” or “heavy metal” or whatever you call those knucklehead forms, Halford’s album is conceptually gigantic and unexpectable. And it’s such a queer album, too, so counternarrative, so supportive of its community, by its very presence, so repellant of any attempts to suppress or disappear the queer populace, even as this dark opposition force seems to gather every day. Really, I like the whole album enormously, for example the title track, which is alleged to have been sung in the shower (without water on), owing to Halford’s systematically performing Tony Bennett in that environment while in the process of conceiving this brazen act of musicality. But: the song that really kills, that abrades the smooth surface of our Theocratic-Feudalist moment, is “You Must Believe in Spring,” which of course Evans recorded in multiple settings, and which Halford here performs with Brad Mehldau (despite Mehldau’s legendary resistance to being compared to Evans). I think, well, of course, that the “spring” referred to in the title is the Prague Spring (unless it is the Arab Spring), and that the song rehearses a response to authoritarianism, right from its outset, while asserting a kind of epistemological inquiry into the resilience nature of love, love as a human cultural essence. “You Must Believe in Spring” is a response to any dark turn of events, it’s true, it’s a way past, a way through, a triumph of survival, a triumph of the underdogs, and never was it quite as rich in its myriad overtones, in all those half-diminished chords, than it is here, when sung by an old heavy- metal guy who’s voice has little of the expressive power of Tony Bennett, but who, nonetheless, makes the song some kind of transcendent plaint, with his raggedy, worn out tenor, some perfect demonstration of the starting over that comes when the oppression (and self-suppression or self-oppression) is remediated. When the spring comes around again, this is the song I’ll be singing, just like this-as we drive toward the mid-terms.

Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, “Big Crime” (Reprise)

There’s a lot to say about Neil Young. A certain span that includes Tonight’s the Night, On the Beach, and Zuma, is as good as any “rock and roll music” ever was. The output has been less consistent in more recent years, going back more than a decade even. Greendale was telltale in terms of the sudden unreliability. Interesting sound, nicely ragged, but inert lyrically, and not such as to command repeated listens. More an album of implication than of substance. Arguably, the lyrics of Neil Young have been plainspeech for some time now. And, remember, this guy wrote “For the Turnstiles.” Not too many songs have lyrics as beautiful and elliptical as that song does. And: the political songs, Living With War, e.g., are not nuanced, they are not tooled for political complexity, and I say this while on the whole agreeing with the thrust of them (except on, say, “Let’s Roll”).

However: the Chrome Hearts backing band solves some problems for Neil Young. The relative youth of the players (in some cases) causes the songs to gallop ahead (a pun, in this context). Not since he made an album with Pearl Jam has he sounded so aggressive, in the totality. And even the quiet songs have some kind of swing that Crazy Horse could never muster.

“Big Crime,” as with many recent Young sounds like a first run through, and the words are barely sketched in, but there’s still something there. Something somber and agitated. Something edgy. Maybe it’s just that Neil Young is willing to poke the bear, and as a naturalized American he has something at stake, where this poking-the-bear is concerned. I’m glad this song is here, in the authoritarian present, and I hope he starts playing a ten-minute noise solo in the middle, because that will make it even better.

And that reminds me that if you see that fan-made thing called “Arc 2012,” by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, of which there are two parts now, composed of (or edited together from) long noise spirals that have occurred at the end of a song called “Walk Like a Giant,” in 2012, that recording/mash-up/chop job feels more like the horror out the window than the recent songs, of Neil Young. It’s just a big assault on the tenderer sensibilities, perhaps even more of an assault than Neil himself would care to undertake these days. Someone should peel the vocals off of “Big Crime” and set this vocal track to a bit of “Arc 2012.”

Chris Brokaw, “Ohio,” self-released (https://chrisbrokaw.bandcamp.com/)

And that further reminds me. The true burn-it-all-down Neil Young-related song of 2025 is the remake of “Ohio,” by a Boston supergroup, featuring Chris Brokaw of Codeine (and many other bands), as musical director, and many other relevant punk and indy stalwarts. The other players are Peter Prescott (Mission of Burma) on drums, Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses) guitar and harmony vox, Maeve Malloy, from Main Era on sampler and percussion, Roger Clark Miller from Birdsongs of the Mesozoic on french horn, and then, incredibly, I mean, come on, Jonathan Richman on lead vocals. How did Brokaw manage to pull this off? If you’re like me you have made a list of events that would have to happen before Jonathan Richman would sing on a rock song, especially on one by somebody else, and that list would include world peace, JD Vance shutting the fuck up, an enlargement of the M&Ms pack without any subsequent movement in the price of the container, the cloning of the dodo bird from an available feather, implantation of fetus in an emu, an AOC/Mamdani presidential ticket nominated by a major party, three feet of snow in the Northeast, a New York Mets pennant run, and so on. Somehow Brokaw caused Richman to come out of rock and roll retirement (and note that he released a great album this year, see below), and went out west himself to engineer the vocal recording. The result is crutal and great. The secret weapon of “Ohio,” besides the riff, was always David Crosby at the end, and there is an out chorus, of some two minutes in length with general vocal madness, and a vocal part that is rumored to be Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band, who I personally know because he dated my housemate in senior year of college. Good guy. Anyway, this song has lost none of its capacity to incite, and Brokaw’s recording, which retains an indie vibe, is just as un-slick as it always was. And: Brokaw’s recent album Ghost Ship, which I think just came out, is a lovely mournful thing, too. One of his very best.

Led Zeppelin, “Kick Out the Jams,” Live EP (Swan Song)

This is best known from the Knebworth souncheck bootleg, “As Above So Below,” and coveted for the wildness of the song selection and because Robert Plant plays guitar on it. Indeed, the (pristine, but tinny) recording is in the absence of the maestro, who was, well, who knows? The three remaining members for some reason attempted this piece in the absence of Jimmy Page. Where did that electric guitar come from? It could not have been the sunburst Les Paul, right? Did John Paul Jones have an extra one around just in case? In any event, though it is our supposition that Mr. Plant is a fan of blues, fifties rock and roll, and psychedelia, it appears that he knows proto-punk too. Because he knows all of verse one, or some semblance thereof.

The question one asks of Led Zeppelin is: what is Led Zeppelin for? If you get doctrinaire about the politics of individual members you may not find outspoken political articulations coming from the maestro (though he did name one band after a jokey sobriquet for the royal family), and perhaps at the end of the day this is on the list of difficulties preventing further collaboration. Thus, the other three, at soundcheck, playing one of the ultimate revolutionary inflammations, for 1.5 verses, tells us something, answers the question in part, a question that Plant has been answering in part, with his attention to Ancient Americana. The blues form was a liberation, a getting over, and “Kick Out the Jams,” seems to be consistent with this idea of the blues. Though it is also true that in some fundamental way Led Zeppelin was a wannabe soul band, this self-evident in the stiff but funky drumming of John Bonham, which here makes the original sound a tiny bit more like James Brown.

That when the maestro appears they run through “Sick Again” again, is a clear evocation that patriarchal control has, alas, resumed. But for a brief moment all is uprising, revolutionary change, the flinging off of the bondage of capital, and that’s no doubt why they chose to release it alongside the live EP. The brief verse and a half, plus bass solo, indicates what Led Zeppelin might have been for, if, instead of pursuing Aleister Crowley’s occult visions, they had simply pursued liberation. As it was in the blues.

Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the USA,” Nebraska ‘82

Everything about the Nebraska time is great, and hearing this song stripped down to nothing brings its crie de couer to the surface. No more stately arena rock, no more big drum rolls, just that desolate rockabilly vibe of Nebraska. That record has had such immense influence that it’s not difficult to forget how bizarre and minimal it sounded at the time. Much more like Suicide (the band) than it was like The Byrds or The Rolling Stones or the Shirelles, or whoever else are the routine influences that we associate with Bruce Springsteen.

Kronos Quartet, “Hard Rain (Drone)”

This is my favorite recording of the year, and maybe the single best Bob Dylan cover I’ve ever heard (the close runner up being Tom Verlaine’s recording of “Cold Irons Bound”). It’s almost too intense to listen to. There’s nowhere in the original lyric in which it appears obvious that the song is about climate destruction and global fascism, but that’s what it sounds like now. Today. There’s a more conventional version of this Kronos version, wherein they sing, sure, of course, it’s a song, and there’s even some drumming, but that version is for the people who can’t take this one. This one shadows forth with all the grief and mercy pulsating in our everyday right now. It boils the chord sequence down, sort of the way the piano part on “Murder Most Foul” boils down the Dylan accompaniment to nothing. An obvious place of origin would be the drones of the Velvet Underground, but there’s also a whiff of Indian classical music ugh. Boiling down. The voices are heaped up like in the early tape phase pieces of Steve Reich, where “it’s hard” is repeated until it’s so hard that there’s no evident way out, but where it seems, still, understated. The gorgeousness is all in the truth of the song, not in the excessive comeliness way that gorgeousness usually happens. If my feeling about protest now is that its virtue comes in not looking away; if my feeling of intense despondency is that there are people who think that the engagement of Taylor Swift is anything but a distraction from fascism, then this song is manifestly a protest, if for no other reason than it feels the requisite grief and sorrow. Other things affected me this way, this year, but none as much as this.

Cardiacs, “Ellen in the Close and Play,” rerelease from 1990 (Alphabetical Business Concern)

A song alleged to be an allegory about the rule of Margaret Thatcher, with its incendiary verse “Ellen in the close and play is an eschatology/And the spiders on fire on the label in the middle/By the burning Thames/Won’t wait an extra minute for me/See you on … the Malvinas,” is a leftover from the sessions for their album, Heaven Born and Ever Bright, now released for the modern era, the era of Nigel Farage, and like many things having to do with the Cardiacs, it waited stealthily for its impact, for its non-chronological moment, and then it exploded like an incendiary device.

Let me say now how I wrote these notes. I made this list all year, every time I heard something good this year, I wrote a note to that effect. And it was only in some incremental way that I came upon my theme, which is to say the theme of the necessity of protest.

But then, and here I expatiate in order to lay bare the humanist portion of the essay here in the middle, thinking that most people will happen past it, not knowing that humanism was buried in the middle, but then a person I most loved on earth became very ill, having been merely unwell for some time, and then the very ill moved toward the not-living-very-much-longer, and so on. This person, this most beloved person, lived in New York City, whereas I live near the Muddy River, in the greater Boston area, MA, and so the providing support caused any number of these 4-5 hour drives, some portion of them being drives that were alone, as I did not wish to cause my family to suffer the intense disruption I was suffering, and some of these alone drives were undertaken at night, so that, for example, I was driving 4-5 hours alone at night on some godforsaken artery like interstate 91, or interstate 90, when what I was doing was trying to find music that assuredly would keep me awake. It happened that not long before I had been looking for a kind of music that most people do not like as much as I do, namely folk-inflected music of an orchestral character, preferably involving string quartet or chamber orchestra, which also has some murky, spiritual aspect to it, through which you can hear the shining of centuries of ancient music. A sort of preliminary example of this music, for me, was the Penguin Café Orchestra. An album like Broadcasting from Home, by the Penguin Café Orchestra has been a bit of a life changer for me. At various points in my life it has made it possible to keep trudging along. Anyway, often I try to find other things that might be sort of like the Penguin Café Orchestra, only to find that there is sort of nothing else like them. However, not long before the mortal illness of my beloved friend I did chance, via algorithm, upon this band that shares some terrain with the Penguin Café Orchestra, namely the North Sea Radio Orchestra. This is an English band that perhaps few in the United States of American are terribly familiar with. They had, at first blush, an item in their discography that would have made me pay attention, viz., they released an entire album of covers of Robert Wyatt. Have I already said in this venue that “Shipbuilding” is one of the great songs ever written? This is the perfect time to say it. How is it that this song is so perfect? I just don’t know. Sometimes God just comes down and blasts the inspiration at someone, and they are capable. As Aquinas says, it is a donum intellectus. The music is great, but Elvis Costello made it better than just a beautiful jazz song. Anyway, there are so many great versions of this song, but one that I think is especially sublime is the Orchestre National de Jazz recording with Yael Naim singing the vocal. Somehow there should be something clarinet-like about that lead, dry, Chet Bakerish, and Yael Naim has the quality, as Robert Wyatt has the quality. But even more there is the arrangement, on the orchestral version, that is so full of feeling, gentle, and then enormous, swelling as the tide swells up, like a sort of a sneaker wave sneaking up. Anyway, the North Sea Radio Orchestra owes something to the immensity of the Orchestrea National de Jazz, finding quiet in the incipience of war, the scaling up of war, which is what the song is about. A main feature of the NSRO, additionally, as with the French recording, is the oscillation of men and women in the lead vocalist’s position.

The organizing entity in the case of the NSRO is this fellow called Craig Fortnam, and as with other things I like, that I suddenly encounter in some kind of donum intellectus, I very immediately went online and learned all I could about Craig Fortnam. It is not that the web is stretched to capacity with information about Craig Fortnam-he plays nylon string guitar a lot, he writes all the string arrangements for his works, he likes folk music, he dislikes playing in dingy bars-but it did occasion one relevant factoid, namely that when he was younger, he was in and around the scene that produced the cultish, obscure, and very interesting British band called Cardiacs. Once you listen to, for example, one of my favorite albums of the year, the new album by the NSRO, entitled Special Powers, you will see how improbable it is that Craig Fortnam was highly partisan with respect to Cardiacs. The two musical groups are in some ways diametrically opposed. NRSO is quiet, is an unfolding, with Fortnam’s reedy, uninflected, British postpunk voice, and then there are many women singing, whereas Cardiacs are fucking loud, and every four bars there is a new idea, and almost every song has gang vocals. Listening to Cardiacs is like being bludgeoned by every British band from 1980-1989 at once, all of them playing at once. But the facts are the facts. I think Fortnam wrote some string parts for Cardiacs, and at least four people who played in Cardiacs have played in the NSRO.

It was in one of the drives I have described above, coming from being by the death bed, all at night, far from my family, with all the sights and sounds of loss and death upon me, that I first played Sing to God, by Cardiacs. I can only imagine that there is not one person in my family who would listen to this album with me, not one of them could go there. An immediately apparent feature of this recording was: I was not going to fall asleep. I must have played it for circa four hours. Now, some people, especially who are among the cult of extreme partisans of the Cardiacs, believe that Sing to God, which was somewhat reviled by the British press at time of release, is the greatest album ever made. And it is sort of true that when you are listening to it for four hours alone in the dark, after having sat with someone while they were dying, then it does have some monumental quality to it. It’s like driving straight at the windmill with your lance. And then it’s perhaps like tangling your lance in the windmill and going up and around. And then plunging to earth. The more you listen to Sing to God, the more, as in Erhard Seminars Training, that the privation with respect to regular life occasions a profound change in who you are and how you are.

Tim Smith was the writer and singer of most of Sing to God, and it is impossible to speak of Cardiacs without noting that he was still impossibly young when in 2008 he had a heart attack and a stroke and soon thereafter was paralyzed and unable to speak. (Nevertheless, they finished the album he was in the middle of, after his death, and it was released this year. It’s called LSD, and it sounds exactly like Cardiacs and is amazing. An album of the year!) So when you think about Sing to God, you have to think about someone singing to God while they still could. And, you know, like every British band ever, they have to protest that of course they don’t think they’re singing to God at all, and that it’s just a name, there’s no God in the songs, and of course I beg to differ; especially if you listen to this album for four hours straight alone, in a car, at night, it seems wholeheartedly like language is for praising God, or, at least, like songwriting is. Additionally, the lyrics are completely impenetrable, as far as I can tell, though I reserve the right to spend the next two decades, or however much time I have left, trying to figure them out anyway. But I know that they are singing to God, whatever that is.

Of course, it is somewhat hard to believe that “Ellen in the Close and Play” is really about Margaret Thatcher, and/or about the Falklands War from some retrospective angle. Somewhat out of character, although look, the NRSO, which is consists of numerous members of Cardiacs, did in fact record a cover of “Shipbuilding” by Robert Wyatt. One of the greatest songs ever written.

And now my friend is no longer living.

Neko Case, “Little Gears,” from Neon Grey Midnight Green (Anti-)

This is an important album of the year too, the catch basin in which this song “Little Gears” appears. The truth is that every Neko Case album now has some of the best lyrics happening on earth entrapped somewhere in it. You’re just going along listening to the album, and there’s a line, and the shadow across the planet passes away, and you see things as they are (“I’ve become a solar system since I found you”). It’s even more interesting on this album, because it’s a curious, overstuffed record, with string arrangements everywhere (really gorgeous string arrangements), and, furthermore, the thing that everyone thinks they have loved about Neko Case, that gigantic brassy voice, feels, just the tiniest bit, to have become grainier, less classically perfect in the show tune way of things, and she undersings a little bit, as a result. This is no diminishment. On the contrary. The whole is somehow gentler, in terms of the sound. Sort of like a Jimmy Webb album in a way, or like a Leonard Cohen album, though for me all the associations are literary. I note, e.g., that Neko Case has said in public recently that she likes Angela Carter. Again and again I hear this on the album. She sounds something like Angela Carter, if Angela Carter were a singer now.

“Little Gears,” though is some different thing, even on this record of unpredictable and eruptive songs. My argument is that it, too, this song, is about climate. It’s a noticing of the natural world. It’s a song of reverence for the littler things-it says this frankly. But it’s bigger than that, it’s bigger-scaled. It’s a seeing in the small the biggest of things, and this reminds me that with the aforementioned death in my family, there was a day when I with the beloved friend discussed a rather thorny passage in the work of a well-known theologian, which was perhaps judgmental and hard to parse, until it got to the line “eternity is present in a leaf,” and here we marveled over the line, and we marveled further over the process of the work, unto this sentence. And we were hanging around waiting for some people from my friend’s parish to bring him communion, and when these people came, they brought a leaf from outdoors, a gingko leaf, so ironic, because the gingko is so frowned upon, though the shape of that leaf is a wonder, and in this case it was a wonder, because we had just been saying that “eternity was present in a leaf.” So not only eternity, but time itself, is present in a leaf, and events from the future can influence events in the past, and this is how I know that my beloved friend influences the composition of these lines.

In any event, similarly composed lines in “Little Gears,” which, remember, are about a spider, are:

born yesterday with

the gears of an atomic

clock, written in stars

Okay, I jammed a few thing things around to get the lyrics to be a haiku, but you won’t mind, right? Here’s another one from later on, addressed directly to the spider:

please stay on earth with

me I’ll try not to explain

everything away

Remember, the climate crisis is at the center of all the crises, and the fascist tendency is one way that the lowly humans try to ignore the climate crisis. And, remember, all eternity is present in a gingko leaf.

Mavis Staples, Sad and Beautiful World (Anti-)

I am an extreme partisan in the matter of one recent Mavis Staples recording, namely her cover of “Holy Ghost,” by Low, which appeared on an earlier album. It’s an even better song, now, because it calls forth Mimi Parker from the afterlife. The song, now, at this moment in history, does what it describes, it makes the holy ghost present, in this case, an iteration thereof, Mimi Parker herself. I heard the Mavis Staples version first, and as with everything Mavis Staples touches, there is so much grace in her ability to inhabit the lyrics that it’s like music itself is a thing that is being restored to its full luster. When Staples gets to the line, “I don’t know much but I can tell that something is wrong,” you realize what a sharp turn the song takes at that point. The holy ghost, on the song, is the co-sufferer, and the paradox is that Mimi Parker, the writer of the lyric, is the co-sufferer. Mavis Staples, with her regular twists and turns, her spooky inhabitation, is somehow more Mimi Parker, now, at this moment in history, than Mimi Parker is.

However: that song was released in 2013. And now there is this new album, Sad and Beautiful World. It does something similar, which is depicts Mavis Staples as a first-rate curator of songs, across all the varieties of song, and the best of interpreters. The new album, just like on One True Vine, from 2013, unites Staples with great songs. And there are least three showstoppers on the record, “Chicago,” by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan; “Satisfied Mind,” that old folk/blues/country classic also covered by one-time Mavis Staples suitor Robert Zimmerman; and then the title song, which is by Mark Linkous, a.k.a. Sparklehorse. As with the “Holy Ghost,” the slow tempo gives this song a funereal intensity. But Staples finds in a very simple melody space for a lot of gospel passing notes, and, as usual, she really incarnates the voice. The results are gorgeous. If you are like me, you are feeling like this is true, these days, that this is all sad and beautiful, and likewise some really important possibility in this sad and beautiful, a used-to-be feeling, namely compassion, is all but absent now. The recognition of this, the singing it aloud, is, I think, the ultimate in protest music. I think most of the songs I really love-“Shipbuilding” is a really good example-are about seeing the lives of others, and recognizing the sharing of the human essence, with all the other struggling humans going past. There’s a restoration of compassion, an accepting of compassion, that goes with all the really good songs, a perfecting of it. Mavis Staples always accomplishes this as a singer, and it is part of her legacy, going all the way back to the civil rights time (which is why national treasure is such a good way to talk about her), but it’s also true here that part of what’s excellent is the seeing with such clarity the songs of others. Because she makes it look easy somehow you could get used to thinking that this clarity is just part of being a singer. But it’s not easy.