Favorite Album of 2004

The intarwebs seem to be choked with all this "best of 2004" bullshit lately, so I figured I'd throw my own two pennies into the fountain and name my favorite album of 2004.

For a while, I'd been away from the music scene - most of the "popular" stuff was shitty, and there wasn't a whole lot going on in the rock world, especially after 1998. Rap-metal is a watered-down, apolitical, corporate excuse for teenaged rebellion, so System of a Down and Limp Dickzit just weren't doing it for me.

But slowly, music has begun to swing in another direction, a more mellow and original sound, and Seattle seems to be at the crux of a lot of it. This year I pestered people in my office to let me listen to their tunes, and I met Seth, who turned me on to other stuff. So I've encountered the Shins, Elliot Smith, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Grandaddy, and that's without going through my iPod. I loved the Garden State soundtrack, and that was close to being my favorite album of the year, but I would have to say that even better is "A Night at the Hip Hoptera" by The Kleptones.

I was introduced to mash-up music inadvertantly in college, when Mr. Stick turned me on to the Evolution Control Committee via NPR (no, really). The seed lay dormant until this year, when Seth directed my attention to A Night at the Hip Hopera. The entire album is Queen songs mashed with hip-hip tunes - a term that DJs use when then sample bits of songs, speech, or sound effects with other songs, speeches, or sound effects to create a new tune, or a mash-up song.

There's a legal question here, though, and one that the Kleptones tackle head-on in Night - in fact, the entire album is more or less about it - when does an artist's work cease becoming an artist's work, and when can another artist claim originality for using old stuff in a creative manner? They don't really discuss the artistic angle, but the legal angle, as the recording industry, already reeling from MP3 downloading, has also tried to crack down on DJs doing mash-ups, and a lot of their songs have subtle (and not-so-subtle) jabs at this.

But the argument is much older than mash-up music; was TS Eliot being creative when he used quotes, overheard conversations, and literary allusions to create The Waste Land, or was he just stealing other people's work and making it his own? The design of the poem, like a mash-up, intends to create certain feelings based on the person's associations to whatever the poet/artist is sampling. It's something I studied in college, and continue to enjoy thinking about.

But Night is much more than this: it's great to listen to at work, on the road, when you're cleaning, whenever - the creation of the album was so seamless and clean that it's a pleasure to hear the songs flowing together, which a lot of mash-up artists cannot accomplish. So huzzah to them for that.

Also cool is that you can download it for free (requires BitTorrent), and they encourage you to do this.

So for my favorite album of 2004, check out A Night at the Hip-Hoptera. You will not be disappointed.