A "Best Of 2009" Ramblin' Preamble

As I was putting together my annual semi-obsessive "Best of 2009" list, I came to the "Best Reissues" section, and it was the easiest section to complete. That is, until I thought about what my choices really meant.

Many years ago, I was told that there would be a magic age ("37," I think) in which one would almost exclusively look backwards for musical joy instead of the present and future, where the latest reissue of some rare joint from decades past would be more rewarding than the newest Pitchfork anointed blog buzz band. After this year, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m finally at that magic age, albeit two years late. I’m wondering this for two major reasons: (a) my favorite albums this year don’t break any new musical ground, even as they relentlessly entertained me, & (b) the reissued catalogs from The Beatles and Kraftwerk have provided the templates for a majority of the musical mutations for almost a half-century. [BTW, my third favorite reissue was a two-CD set compiling the best of Sweet, which I wrote about months ago.]

Consider, if you will, two specific albums, one of each from each box set. First up for examination is Revolver, the second album from 1966 released by The Beatles. It’s hard to say that the basic template for "rock and roll" has expanded much since Revolver, which certainly has my vote for the high point in the vast expanse of Beatles output. It's the one-stop shop for nearly everything: the horn-spiked rocker (“Got To Get You Into My Life”), the Stones slagger (“And Your Bird Can Sing,” possibly in reference to Marianne Faithful, the buxom Brit beauty who made the Jagger/Richards ditty “As Tears Go By” famous), the catchy George Harrison nugget (the “Batman”-nicking wry vitriol of “Taxman”), and the best Ringo-led sing-along (the instantly timeless "Yellow Submarine") that outdoes anything Pet Sounds ever mustered.

But I always return to two jaw-dropping stylistic stunners, the juggernauts that deftly illustrated their peerless status: “Eleanor Rigby,” featuring a string quartet and none of the Beatles actually playing their instruments ("The Beatles" as an entity instead of a performing unit, which was quite an advance) and the experimental musique concrète toe dip into the psychedelic unconscious of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” featuring some funky-ass Ringo drumming alongside backwards guitars and Eastern philosophy. It’s no wonder that Revolver helped push Brian Wilson off the mental precipice trying to compete; there’s not much since ’66 in the domain of guitar-based rock and roll that wasn’t mastered on Revolver. (Well, maybe heavy metal, but “Helter Skelter” two years later pretty much set that codpiece alight for the first time.)

Fast-forward fifteen years later to the prime Reagan/Thatcher year of 1981: John Lennon was dead, Paul McCartney had unleashed "Ebony And Ivory" on an unsuspecting world, and George and Ringo remained quiet wallflowers. '81 saw Kraftwerk issuing their conceptual opus Computer World well before computers had a foothold in daily life, much less their current ubiquity. If Revolver was the apotheosis of guitar-based rock and roll that fell more on the side of art (adult Apollonian listening) than commerce (adolescent Dionysian ass-shaking), Computer World succinctly posited the obsolescence of guitar-based rock and roll in favor of the synthesizer and drum machine, the new technological currency of the booty-moving coin of the pop music realm.

If The Beatles did almost everything at one point or another in their career (ambient, metal, power pop, emo) – as the box set proves beyond a doubt more than argues, a moot point if there ever was one – Kraftwerk finished the job by distancing pop music from emotion (lyrical currency) and guitars (musical currency) while forevermore connecting technology with the art of dance, stripping away human interaction to transactional utility one Teutonically funky beat at a time. Thematically consistent and musically innovative from Autobahn ['74] to Radio-Activity ['75] to Trans-Europe Express ['77] to The Man-Machine ['78], it was Computer World that provided the most danceable form of their cultural communique and critique, examining social isolation and autistic-spectrum interactions between "human nature" and "the future."

And did I mention you could dance to it? "Numbers" was a funky variant on the traditional "count-off" in pop music, "It's More Fun To Compute" made a floor-filling argument for staying digitally interfaced, and the title track percolates and hums with currency, sounding as fresh almost thirty years later as it did to the ears of numerous kids on either side of the Atlantic. The beat of "Numbers" is so imposing, a Bo Diddley beat set to the pulse of a new millennium that fueled "Planet Rock" from Afrika Bambaataa and countless others, that Kraftwerk never quite recovered from that plateau. But the box set (titled The Catalogue in English and Der Katalog in German) is beyond persuasive in the placement of Kraftwerk at the right hand of only The Beatles in the scope of influence in pop and rock & roll. And once you have the twin pillars of Kraftwerk and The Beatles in place, how can anything else compare?