I would say that I know a little bit about music, but there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. This isn’t the definitive guide… It’s just John’s Guide.
It’s been three years since I blogged about some of my favorite music from 2003. Judging from previous creative endeavors, the three-year mark is right around the time when I will start to question why I continue on, why I spend so much effort on a likely confusing and self-indulgent project that doesn’t make any money and isn’t exactly popular, and why I continue to hurl my ideas into the world when silence is—and this is especially true the older I get—maybe the most honorable option.
I’m not taking my own advice, because today I am blogging about music made in 2006. Thinking back to what I was listening to that year, it was a low point in my engagement with more traditional forms of punk, hardcore, and indie rock; I was ingesting a strange potpourri of styles, a lot of which were not made in 2006, some of which have only recently started to “make sense” to young people again. I’m not going to retroactively throw a bunch of stuff that I now love into the mix, so here it comes: a personal snapshot of music I liked in a year that was not a great year for me. I didn’t have internet access on my computer, so I would walk to the local university to book tours on Myspace and then try to get home with enough time to spare to eat a frozen pizza and watch an episode of American Idol.
Spank Rock (Feat. Amanda Blank) “Bump
By 2006, mainstream and backpack rap binaries had almost fully broken down. Gang Starr fans were now, at the very least, crunk curious; three years after The College Dropout, it wasn’t atypical to see an underground rap DJ spinning M.I.A. while wearing jeans with a modest leg opening. Into this context come Spank Rock and Amanda Blank, two Philly party kids with real hip-hop histories who came of age raging on the Hollertronix dancefloor at a Ukrainian cultural center in Northern Liberties. Maybe the only great Philly show I ever played was opening for Spank Rock at the Trocadero in the fall of 2006. Here comes a major neo-soul name drop: I remember Jill Scott was in the audience and enjoying herself during my set. It was a moment in time. I was dead convinced that both Naeem and Amanda were going to be pop stars, and though their influence is imprinted on the texture of late-2000s Top 40 radio, they never scaled those heights. There will always be “Bump,” which contains a reference to the alcoholic energy drink Sparks and has a guest verse good enough that it got Amanda Blank a record deal.
Speaking of crunk, within the Atlanta rap community, snap music was the minimalist answer to that style’s overload. It’s telling that even the King of Crunk himself, Lil Jon, got in on the fun with a little song called “Snap Yo Fingers.” If there must be a single snap tune to stand in for the genre at large, it is “Laffy Taffy,” maybe the “Sugar, Sugar” of Atlanta rap. Not much more than a snap and a dinky, almost chiptune-ish bassline provides the bed for one of the more expressive pop rap vocal performances of all time (RIP Shawty Lo). I remember playing it at an N+1 party and someone coming up and asking me if it was by The Blow.
Theusaisamonster “The Greatest Mystery”
In 2006, the freaked-out noise caravan was still jamming, and I was still down for the ride, but a coming swerve into darker forms of industrial—and all the baggage that comes with that—would provide a minor off-ramp for me, if I can continue on with this confused metaphor, as I found more excitement in abrasive, ecstatic forms of dance and rap. Though that scene started to feel more constricted, it still produced some of the best guitar-related music in the game, like this song by Theusaisamonster, a Great American Rock Band if there ever was one.
“Promise” is one of the most important ballads of the past century. It’s tied to a long history of soul music but still feels futuristic, all these years later. But there is a remix of the song, one that gives it a double-time electro-funk feel, a remix that really draws the “Minneapolis” out of it, that I found on some blog at some point in 2006 and I can’t find today—I don’t even know who the remixer is. The amount of mysterious MP3s that I no longer have access to is not insignificant.
Tiga “Far From Home (DFA Remix)”
The best remix DFA ever released is Yamantaka Eye’s take on “Endless Happiness” by Black Dice. The best remix DFA ever made is this re-rub of a Tiga song. The original cops a Spaceman 3 reference; the remix takes that format and—real music writer type shit forthcoming—blasts it into the cosmic disco ether before descending into a power drone more powerful than any LCD Soundsystem music made before or after it.
Clipse (Feat. Pharrell Williams) “Mr. Me Too”
The Neptunes chart dominance might’ve been waning by this point. Pharrell was still years away from making “Happy.” He did, however, manage to help make one of the more canonical rap albums of the last century. The most recent 15 years of rap music, with all its wild formal leaps, has had an interesting way of flattening anything that came before it. I remember certain Real Hip Hop Fans hating The Clipse, which is funny in retrospect, because next to Xaviorsobased or whatever, they just sound like Rakim.
Running adjacent to noise and punk but existing on its own demented track were a grip of acts who took the dinky palettes of video game music and General MIDI and used them as a container for, and here I’m going to try to step into the mood of the moment, total sonic violence. I’ve spoken about this before, but it bears repeating: picture American Apparel short shorts and harsh screaming over bitcrushed MIDI blast beats and you might start to have an idea of where the underground karaoke-core scene was at back then. Compared to some of the more brutal groups of the time—shout out to the Chicago duo Carpet of Sexy—Austin’s Best Fwends were essentially a pop punk band, making “Skate or Live” their “All the Small Things.”
I would say that bloghouse, however you want to define it, peaked in 2007. But “Waters of Nazareth” was the warning shot. What’s striking about the track versus a lot of similar music that would exist on its heels is just how damaged it sounds. I have memories of DJs playing “Waters of Nazareth” next to more sonically developed electro tracks. In that mix, it sounds only a couple clicks away from Aphex Twin.
Kelis (Feat. Too $hort) “Bossy”
Too $hort had a pretty good 2006. 16 records deep into his discography, he scored one of the biggest hits of his career that year with the eternal “Blow The Whistle,” a song that still enjoys regular play on “rap oldies” radio stations and the TikTok streams of working DJs who broadcast live from their local sports bar. His verse on this Kelis classic is just as good. Everyone is in good form here, including the producer Bangladesh, warming up for the year to follow, when he would go on to produce a song you might have heard of: “A Milli” by Lil Wayne.
Keeping things in the Bay Area with a track that inspired my dumbass friends and I to “ghost ride” a mini-van on a vacant street somewhere in suburban Milwaukee. It is possible that I have wasted my life.
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