There's something about Haiti

In the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to attend the Haitian Creole Summer Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. For three weeks in July, I attended daily classes at the university where, under the guidance of eminent Haitian scholars like Marc Prou and Patrick Sylvain, I greatly improved my speaking, reading and writing abilities in the Haitian language. There were around thirty students total, divided into two groups: Beginner and Intermediate/Advanced. Nine of us were placed in the Intermediate/Advanced group. We were all there to learn Creole, but apart from that we didn’t have much else in common. The group consisted of four Bostonians and five academics who had travelled to Boston for the Institute. Among the Bostonians were a high school French teacher who had numerous Haitian students in his classes, a social worker and housing activist, a young university undergraduate student of Haitian descent, and a retired poet. The five academics were a Canadian gender studies professor at Concordia in Montreal, an American PhD student in ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania, a Polish PhD student of literature at Leeds in the United Kingdom, a Puerto Rican PhD student in anthropology at Cornell, and myself, at the time a master’s student in History at the University of Guelph.

Despite our diverse backgrounds, we built a fine little community in that class. We had a lovely time learning about Haiti’s language and culture and getting to know one another. In the final week we had a little party—a banbòch—and during the preparations we made an interesting discovery about our little group: out of the nine students, eight were vegetarians (in my case, admittedly, a lapsed vegetarian). This struck me as too odd to be coincidental. Here were eight strangers from different countries and different walks of life, united only by a desire to learn Haitian Creole, and all happened not to eat meat. What was the connection between a strong interest in Haiti and the decision to be a vegetarian?

People refrain from eating meat for all kinds of reasons: health, religious custom, concerns about the climate, or a respect for all sentient life. In many cases vegetarianism is based on an ethical conviction. Factory farming—the mass production and slaughter of creatures who feel pain—is seen as unjust and inexcusable. A decision to refrain from eating meat can be based on a consequentialist (hoping to elicit change in the system) or non-consequentialist (personally abstaining from activities considered morally wrong) standpoint, but in either case the individual has a keen interest in pursuing some form of moral justice.

An interest in Haiti, likewise, can stem from an active commitment to moral justice. Much of the country’s history is characterized by injustice and marginalization. In the colonial era, nine-tenths of the population was enslaved and endured every manner of inhumane treatment. In 1791, this enslaved population challenged the injustice of slavery by rising up in insurrection, ultimately ending slavery and colonialism on the island. This was an event of tremendous historical importance in the progression toward universal human rights and national self-determination. And what was their reward for this significant contribution to human progress? Centuries of abuse and neglect.

The great powers employed alternating policies of exploitation and isolation against this young nation that had dared to challenge notions of white dominance. France forced an exuberant indemnity on their former subjects, trapping them in a cycle of debt and dependency and permanently crippling their ability to develop industries and infrastructure. In the twentieth century, the United States meddled endlessly in Haiti’s internal affairs. The U.S. occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. Despite the stated intention of bringing order, prosperity and democracy to Haiti, the Occupation exacerbated divisions and reinforced non-democratic politics, all the while enriching American corporations. The United States sustained some of the country’s worst dictators (most notably the Duvaliers), and generally subordinated the Haitian peoples’ interests to their own economic and geo-political concerns. All this has contributed to the situation of extreme instability and poverty in Haiti. Meanwhile, the United States has continually treated refugees from the very situation they helped create as pariahs at home. Haitian immigrants to the United States (and elsewhere) have been turned away at the borders and marginalized in the cities. As I’m writing this, the Biden administration is sending thousands of Haitian migrants back to a country where gang violence and kidnappings have become a fact of daily life.

The nine of us in that Intermediate/Advanced Haitian Creole class were aware of this historical injustice—it was part of what had drawn us to Haiti. Most of us were learning the language specifically to work with Haitians in our communities who were clearly the victims of centuries-old injustices. Some were also engaged with these injustices on a more abstract level. If Haiti has been the victim of history, it has also been a victim of historiography. Despite the paramount importance of the Haitian revolutionaries’ attack on the foundations of slavery and colonialism, Haiti has been tragically underacknowledged in history books and history classes. (For a thorough analysis of the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History). Accounts of the mass slave uprising (and the self-governing Black Republic it ultimately created) threatened dominant views of European superiority and the economic basis of the lucrative transatlantic trade. So white historians hushed up the Haitian Revolution.

Today, with 200 years of hindsight, history has justified the Haitian Revolution. On this side of the (apparent) global abolition of slavery, the colonization and decolonization of Africa, the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter, it seems that Toussaint Louverture was onto something. We owe so much to the revolutionaries for taking a stand against racism. And yet Haiti continues to suffer the consequences of being right at the wrong time.

So how can we possibly atone for two centuries of abuse and neglect? With an estimated 10,000 NGOs operating in the country, clearly people are trying. But with so many trying to “save Haiti” it seems like everything has been tried and nothing will work. The place is too far gone. But, in view of the historical and historiographical injustices outlined about, we have no right to stop trying. Fortunately, we have gone about it the wrong way so many times that at least we know what not to do. Don’t, like the occupiers of 1915-1934, step in and start bossing people around. Don’t assume that you, the all-knowing foreigner, are best placed to know what needs to change. Don’t, like USAID and leagues of other international donors in the Duvalier period, simply keep your distance, throw money at the situation and expect unelected officials to use it judiciously. In both situations we forgot about one thing: the Haitian people. Change needs to begin with them. They were right in 1791 when they challenged slavery. They were right in 1804 when they challenged imperialism. There’s a good chance they know what needs to be done today.

Ask them.

In order to ask them, you need to speak their language. Which brings us back to that classroom in 2015. I haven’t stayed in touch with all nine of my classmates. I’m not sure if, like me, they’ve let their vegetarianism lapse. But I am sure they’re still speaking Creole and still trying to learn about Haiti from Haitians so that, in some small way, they can contribute to undoing centuries-old injustices.

We made an album for our childhood selves

I’ve told it to hundreds of undergrads: The titles of short works (songs and articles) go in quotation marks, while the titles of longer works (books, films and albums) are written in italics. I’ve written lots of articles and songs, but I haven’t produced many things with titles in italics—an indie-rock album (2007), a master’s thesis (2016) and a few translated novels (2014, 2017 and 2019), and that’s about it. But next week there will be a new one. No, I haven’t finished my doctoral dissertation. Next week my rock band for children, The Relative Minors, is releasing our debut album Play Music (hey, italics!). It seems ridiculous to say it because it’s a rock n’ roll album for children, but I think this is the thing I’m most proud of. It is my most authentic artistic expression to date. It was a collaborative work, to be sure. My wife was the primary or secondary writer on most of the songs, and the band, guest musicians and recording engineer made critical contributions. But much of this album is derived from my taste in music, my sense of humour and my interests.

They say you only have a year or two to write your second album, but you have your whole life to write your first. That is definitely the case with Play Music. As noted, I made a record back in 2007, but I was the drummer and not much involved in the song writing. I’m still extremely proud of that album (which, by the way, you can still hear wherever you stream music: it’s called Hold Hope, Oh Withered Tree! by Battle Creek). But Play Music is different. My wife and I have been writing it over the course of our lives. The newest song, “Play Music” was written from scratch this past spring, but the other 10 tracks have been germinating since, by my best estimate, 2002.

In 2002 I was in eleventh grade. I was also in a pop-punk band called Impolitics. I couldn’t play an instrument, but I was good friends with a great bass player called Chad (who, incidentally, plays the bass on Play Music), and I weaseled my way into his band as the frontman. How hard could it be to sing in a punk band, right? I’d always been drawn to music, and in particular to the idea of playing in a band (thank you Marty McFly, Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan), but I never had the discipline to sit down and learn to play an instrument. Too busy watching movies (thank you Marty McFly et al.). But in 2002, now in an actual band and surrounded by musicians and instruments, I finally sat down and learned my way around the fretboard. I started bringing a ratty old acoustic guitar to school and Chad and I would jam under the stairs. Under those stairs I wrote one of my first chord progressions that stuck. A decade later my wife and I had started The Relative Minors. We turned the ten-year-old progression it into a song called “F-U-N (Spells Fun)” and recorded a demo. Seven years after that, in late 2019, we recorded it professionally and released it as a single. It is Track 9 on Play Music. The oldest song on the album.

The pop-punk band didn’t last long, but it stoked my taste for the jam space, the recording studio and the stage. Over the next few years I learned to play the drums, and played in about a dozen short-lived punk, rock and experimental bands with Chad and various friends from school and church. In 2003, my last year of high school, we started a ska band called Pretty Big Plunger. This was where I really started writing music and lyrics. It probably wasn’t very good, but it was the start of something. We had a trumpet and a trombone player, and the format helped me start thinking about composition and orchestration. Summer of 2004 I went to a cottage with some of the band members, and I remember sitting in my car with a guitar and writing a ska song with a harmonized lead guitar riff intro. I wrote a verse progression, a pre-chorus and a chorus progression. The band never played it. It sat unplayed for about eight years, until 2012 when we reworked it, added a bridge and wrote some lyrics about a dinosaur rock band. We recorded it professionally in the summer of 2020. It is called “Stone Age Rock Star” and it’s Track 5 on Play Music.

Pretty Big Plunger broke up and then Chad and I formed a “progressive ska” band called Lincoln’s Revenge. We had a brass section, a piano and synth, heavy guitar parts and songs in wild key signatures. I was the main songwriter for Lincoln’s Revenge. By this point I was twenty and starting to consider myself a better songwriter than I probably was, and I tended to try to micromanage the rest of the group. I was trying to do too much with too little experience. It was unsustainable. It didn’t last. Lincoln’s Revenge broke up after about a year. The guitar player, Seth, then formed his own group called Battle Creek. It was essentially the same band, but Seth was the main songwriter and he operated on a more collaborative model. It was also a completely different genre; we started off as a folk-rock band but quickly turned to guitar-driven indie rock. Seth was (and still is) a far superior songwriter, and I benefitted greatly from collaborating with him. In this more laid-back atmosphere, I found the time to experiment and improve my chops on various instruments. I mocked up some guitar parts that the band didn’t use, but they ended up on Play Music: the main riff in “Why Spy?” (Track 5) and the “Withou U” acoustic guitar progression (Track 11). Also in Lincoln’s Revenge and Battle Creek were Chad—who, as noted, played the bass on Play Music—and Andy who now sings and plays trumpet in The Relative Minors. Seth, for his part, wrote and rapped a verse on “Stone Age Rock Star.”

When we recorded our ambitious album Hold Hope in 2007 Seth had his sister Kiersten lay down backing vocals on a few of the songs. She was a great singer and a great woman. I fell in love. Kier and I started dating in spring of 2007. While I was playing in Battle Creek, I was also working on a solo album inspired by Sufjan Stevens’s “50 states project.” I was going to write a song about every day of the year, exploring and connecting important events that happened on that particular date. The song about 1 September, for example, tied the outbreak of World War II (1 September 1939) to the death of the last passenger pigeon (1 September 1914) and the abrupt end of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope (1 September 1980). I wanted to write a song about 4 August that would deal with Mozart’s marriage to Constanze Weber (4 August 1782) among other things. Kier was over, and we started working on it together. It was the first thing we cowrote. It was the beginning of a collaboration that greatly improved my own abilities as a songwriter. Like her brother, Kier is a way better songwriter than me. She can bang out six hits in an afternoon. The “Days of the Year” project fizzled out, but our relationship lasted. Ultimately, the chord progression and piano riff from the Mozart song made their way into our song “Walrus”— Track 6 on Play Music. You can actually still hear a very brief musical reference to Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 on the guitars about 18 seconds into “Walrus.”

Battle Creek recorded its magnum opus in 2007, toured the East Coast the following spring and then broke up in fall of 2008 when I gave up the dream and went to college for broadcasting. That fall also marked the birth of my first niece, Eden (take note: this will be important later). Kier and I got married in spring of 2009. I finished college and started a video production company with Andy. Kier went to Teacher’s College and became a teacher. In 2011, I started studying History at the University of Guelph. I had a lot going on, but, musically, I was in limbo. I continued collaborating occasionally with Seth, Andy and Kiersten, playing the odd acoustic show and now and then recording some of Seth’s brilliant folk tracks. The four of us also started writing a stage musical in this period, but it never materialized.

But it wasn’t until summer 2011 that Kier and I had the idea for The Relative Minors. Our niece was now almost three (I told you it was important) and we thought she would get a kick out of a bunch of funny songs written by her cool aunt and uncle. We recorded a demo CD for her for her birthday. The CD had 9 tracks including a song called “Animal Orchestra” (sung by Andy and accompanied by a bunch of syncopated animal sounds), a weird cover of “Who Stole the Cookies?” and three original songs that ended up on Play Music (“Sandwich,” “Pet” and “Grown Up”).

The Relative Minors met a surprisingly positive response in our hometown of Hespeler (Cambridge). We were asked to play at music festivals, birthday parties, Halloween parties, Christmas parties, libraries, churches, summer camps and even a pre-school graduation. This was a new demographic we’d never encountered as “regular” musicians. They were clamouring for children’s music, and apparently we knew how to make it. We immediately started working on a second demo CD, which we finished six months later. This one had eleven tracks including the aforementioned “Walrus,” “Stone Age Rock Star,” “Without U” and “Why Spy?” which were all made partly out of recycled parts. We also wrote a few songs from scratch, one of which was “Kings of Swing,” (now Track 9 on Play Music). We continued paying children’s concerts and having a great time, often backed up by Andy on bass and Seth on drums. In 2013 we wrote a few more songs, including “Library,” (Track 10 on Play Music).

So, there you have it. Apart from the title track, we wrote basically this entire album between 2002 and 2013—between seven and eighteen years ago. It has evolved and improved much, but a lot of the bones have been kicking around for a decade and longer. 

In 2015 I started my Master’s degree and our son JJ was born. His brother Wes followed in 2017 shortly after I started my PhD. Having young children and being a grad students is not particularly conducive to artistic creativity. The Relative Minors took an extended hiatus. But by the end of 2018, when our own kids were getting to be old enough to appreciate it, we decided it was time to reboot. JJ supported the idea. He’s a huge fan of the old demos, and sometimes still prefers them to the professionally recorded versions. We assembled a band from among our immensely talented friends and relatives and started rehearsing. We made our first professional recording of “Sandwich” in the spring of 2019 with the brilliant Zach Gerber at Skytrack Studios here in Cambridge (Seth and Chad had previously recorded a heavy post-punk album with Zach—which, I believe, included a song or two recycled from Battle Creek). We followed “Sandwich” with a music video. You remember I said that Andy and I started a video production company? Well, now he’s a full-time videographer and the brains behind our videos. We recorded six other singles in 2019-2020 and then laid down four additional tracks in summer 2020.

Eleven tracks. Eighteen years in the making. Play Music.

As I said, I’m extremely proud of this album. It’s been following me around for half my life, asking to be let loose. Seventeen-year-old Matt in the punk band would think it’s weird to be so fond of an album made for children, but 35-year-old Matt knows better. Seven-year-old Matt, for his part, would have loved it. I think seven-year-old Kiersten would have liked it too. We made this album for our childhood selves. We didn’t skimp on the production or the composition because it was “just for kids anyway.” Musically, we would have worked no less hard on a “regular” album. Lyrically, it is clearly intended for children—with songs about dinosaurs and sandwiches—but we didn’t underestimate the intelligence or the sense of humour of our young audience. Or their taste. There are no overriding moral messages on this album and there are no educational songs. There’s nothing wrong with songs with a message or educational songs; our friends in other kindie bands have great songs with important messages (Ginalina’s “Save the Mighty River” is a personal favourite). JJ learned the alphabet from Parry Gripp’s awesome songs from StoryBots. It’s good stuff. It’s just that, seven-year-old Matt didn’t listen to music for its moral messages or educational value. He listened to Weird Al and They Might Be Giants. Funny. Clever. Musically interesting. That’s Play Music.

As I think I’ve made clear, this album wouldn’t have happened without all the people that have made me into the musician I am today. And so, for my part, I want to dedicate Play Music to my parents, who saw my interest in music and encouraged it, to Chad, who took a chance on me, and to Seth, Andy and Kiersten. Also to Eden, because it wouldn’t have happened without her. And it wouldn’t have happened without JJ and Wes. I hope five-year-old JJ and three-year-old Wes like it as much as I do.

Polarizing a pandemic, and the problem with memes

A global pandemic shouldn't be political. But somehow it is. If mitigating a biological catastrophe can turn into a partisan issue, we're doomed. The trouble in the United States is that every issue, every event, every idea automatically fractures into two distinct camps. Neither side can think clearly about anything because they're so fixated on what the other side thinks. If they can't find common ground in the midst of a deadly pandemic, there is literally no possibility of productive debate.

The two-party system is partly to blame. Canadian politicians can certainly be as bull-headed as their American counterparts, but our multi-party system means that we are better equipped to avoid thinking about issues in strict binaries. Our politicians have no choice but to think of things from multiple perspectives. The ruling Liberal minority needs to find common ground with at least one of the other four parties in Parliament in order to accomplish anything. As a result, our political discourses are necessarily dynamic. Legislators can't get away with being unwaveringly dogmatic. They can't just sit around and wait for the next election when they might possibly have a few more seats.

Not so in the States. But the U.S. political system is not the only reason for the polarization in American society. Social media plays a big part. News and information are, of course, subject to the same fracturing into two camps that characterizes life and thought in general. When news and information came through TV, newspapers and radio, impartiality may have been an option. But now that we get most of our news and information through algorithmically predetermined online sources, it becomes more and more difficult for any source to take a balanced view. Everybody has to work harder and harder to counter the bad information you're getting from the other guys. Both sides end up prioritizing spin over truth.

But it's not even biased news that I think is the biggest problem. I think one of the biggest culprits is the general tone of online culture and, in particular, memes. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good meme as much as the next guy. But think about it. What is the purpose and effect of sharing a political meme? They are literally designed to exaggerate a point of view by mercilessly mocking the other side. Hardly conducive to productive debate—just look at the comments.

These are the first two memes that came up when I Googled "political memes." Think about what goes on in your head when you look at each of these images. Do you feel like one is right and one is wrong? Does one make you chuckle and one make you angry? Does either make you feel enlightened, or like you've better understood some point of view?

Chances are one of these memes made you mad and seemed false and the other made you chuckle and seemed true. Most people will find this to be true, but they will disagree on which is false/cruel and which is true/hilarious. This, I think, is problematic.

This is the process: I find or create a meme that cleverly ridicules some politician or point of view. I share it on social media. My friends, most of whom roughly share my political sensibilities, like and share it. With almost no effort, I've proven how witty and brilliant I am. Everybody slaps me on the back and says "great job." We all have a good laugh. 

That's usually as far as it goes. I have made absolutely no impact on the discourse, except to entrench the views of my own side. 

If, however, the meme breaks out of my own little echo chamber and actually makes it to the people whose point of view I'm mocking, it certainly doesn't convince them that I'm right. It actually does the opposite. If anything, it makes them defensive and ultimately more committed to their own point of view. They don't think "Maybe I'm wrong." They think "You're wrong." Worse still, they think "You're wrong, and you clearly hate me, so I hate you too." In short, malicious memes do the exact opposite of what they pretend to do.

Most people are shackled to the notion that they can't possibly be wrong. When a person is committed to an idea, no evidence will make them change their mind. This isn't new to our polarized online world. As old Ben Franklin said way back in 1787, "Most Men indeed as well as most Sects in Religion, think themselves in Possession of all Truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far Error." One would think and hope that our unprecedented access to virtually all of human knowledge would make us better able to weigh information and find the truth, but the exact opposite is true.

If we simply want to prove how witty and enlightened we are, then by all means we should keep hurling angry memes and sarcastic tweets into the void. But if we actually want to fix the world, we need to stop casually scandalizing one another and relearn out how to find common ground. We need leaders who can unite the people, a herculean task in a society that is so reflexively and maliciously partisan. We  have a head-start with our multi-party system, and we should all work to protect and preserve it as essential to a dynamic political culture. But as long as we keep mainly expressing our politics through online sarcasm, we're going to be stuck in the kind of world where people attend mass political rallies in the middle of a global pandemic to prove a bad point.

Accounting For Taste; or, The Top 10 of the Bottom 100 of the Top 500 Albums of All Time!

Taste is a strange animal.*

Why do we like what we like? How do we choose what to wear, what to eat, or what to listen to in 'an age of endless choice,' to borrow a phrase from Tom Vanderbilt.† Ever since the internet busted onto the scene in all its vulgar glory, it has become increasingly possible to purchase any item or watch virtually any film or TV show at any time. Music is a perfect example. With unlimited choices at our fingertips, the soundtracks to our lives are no longer limited by what happens to be on the radio, or by an assortment of LPs collected with great effort and devotion. How do you decide? Do you make playlists and then remain perpetually shackled to the same tried and tested tunes? Do you let those Swedish algorithmicists at Spotify do the work for you? Do you come back to the same artists again and again? Or are you always on the hunt for something new?

When we discover a new song or artist, how do we decided if we like it or not? There are countless artists that I love that no one I know can get into. And there are bands that I can't stand that all of my friends are crazy about.

We sometimes tell ourselves that when we enjoy a certain artist or album or song, our enjoyment is based on an entirely objective assessment. We sometimes insist that our tastes are “correct,” that the music we like is “good” music, plain and simple—that we are somehow the arbiter of taste. But, in my experience, it is totally evident that my taste in music has emerged haphazard and has taken many turns over the years. I'll like a band in one stage of life and not in another. I'll enjoy a song one day and get sick of it the next. Clearly there's more going on than objective assessment.

Enter taste.

Personally, my taste in music has clearly developed in seemingly arbitrary ways over the last 30-odd years. It has built upon happy associations from my childhood. I've been a fan of They Might Be Giants since they appeared on Tiny Toons in 1991. In 1995 I was into Weird Al (like any 10-year-old boy), a fact that surely influenced my discovery of a number of bands that he parodied, a number of which I still love today.° My taste has grown in concert with the modest musical skills and principles I have acquired (the learned ability to appreciate virtuosity and clever chord progressions). It has undoubtedly been positively influenced by the tastes of people I respect; I’ll give an album a chance if someone I love loves it. I happily married into an affinity for Paul Simon; my wife got ELO. Conversely, I can’t deny that my taste in music has probably been negatively affected by the tastes of people I have disliked for totally unrelated reasons. I'm thinking of that classmate in grade seven who vandalized my student planner with all kinds of Sugar Ray lyrics. He just wanted to fly.

In high school, and the five years or so that followed, I played in various rock bands. I was exposed to music constantly and my taste, accordingly, was challenged and developed. Then I went to college and got married, and my exposure to music plateaued somewhat. I still listened to a lot of music, but I found that I was going back to the same albums, year after year. Now, I'm back in a band and thinking a lot more about music and taste. As a result, I've embarked on a fairly straightforward attempt to expand my exposure and enrich my palate. 

Allow me to explain.

Over the last few months I’ve been listening through Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the "500 Greatest Album’s of All Time." Such a list is, of course, absurd since the true value of any art is almost entirely subject to the tastes of individuals. In an effort to account for this subjectivity Rolling Stone asked 273 musicians, critics and industry figures for ranked lists of the 50 greatest albums of all time. The resulting list can be considered a) a balanced compilation based on the knowledge and expertise of well-informed individuals, or b) a totally useless representation of 273 people’s individual tastes.

In any case, I’ve been listening through it. Starting from the worst of the best, at times it was a bit of a slog. I started with #500 (Outkast, Aquamini) and I’ve just finished #401 (Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Californication). As I listened to these 100 albums—not especially attentively, mind you, as I was usually doing school work at the time—I made a note of my general impression of each, giving them a grade out of 10. Having now listened to 100 albums, I thought it might be worth highlighting some favourites. Five albums received 10/10 so they went straight onto the Top 10 list.ˆ 21 albums received 8 or 9 out of 10, so, with great difficulty, I narrowed them down to my five favourites. My list includes some albums that I already loved previously and many new discoveries. The genres range from bossa nova to hip-hop, and the 10 albums were released over a span of more than 50 years.

Once again, this may be nothing more than yet another arbitrary list based on the tastes of an individual. There is certainly no guarantee you will like any of these albums. Given the arbitrariness of taste, I could just as well have made a list of my bottom 10; then, if you and I happen to derive pleasure from exactly the opposite things in music, you might discover some things you’ll like on such a list. But I for one think these 10 albums are wonderful, each in its own way. And, I should add, I think my taste in music is, if not mainstream, at least somewhat ordinary and certainly not obscure. So if you see anything on the list that you like, maybe we derive pleasure from some of the same things in music. In which case, maybe you’ll like some of the others. 

So, for whatever it's worth, here it is:

Matt's Top 10 of the Bottom 100 

of the Top 500 Albums of All Time:

10. MGMT, Oracular Spectacular (2007) (#494 on Rolling Stone list)

It's hard to believe that a couple of midwesterners studying music in Connecticut got together and concocted an album like this. Somehow these guys managed it. It's an extremely ambitious debut album. It's at once poppy and depressing. And somehow wonderful.

9. Stan Getz and João Gilberto Featuring Antonio Carlos Jobim,  Getz/Gilberto (1964) (RS #447)

This is considered one of the great bossa nova records. It is a collaboration by the American jazz sax player Stan Getz and the late Brazilian bossa nova guitarist João Gilberto. It did much to popularize the genre around the world. This one of those records you  put on when you want to feel like you're living in a foreign film.

7. George Harrison, All Things Must Pass (1970) (RS #433)

This massive album was recorded over a six month span starting immediately after the Beatles officially broke up in April 1970. It sounds a bit like a Beatles album containing only George tracks, and was actually made up of the deluge of songs that George had written but not found a place for on Beatles records. You really get the sense that he was revelling a liberation from Paul and John's tall shadows. The record features one of the greatest post-Beatles tunes "My Sweet Lord" (copyright controversies aside), and a plethora of other awesome numbers.

8. My Morning Jacket, Z (2005) (RS #457)

For some reason this was one of the few albums on the list that wasn't on Spotify. I had to go looking for it, and I'm glad I tracked it down. Some of the best 21st-century psychedelic synth-pop I've heard.

6. EPMD, Strictly Business (1988) (RS #453)

I admit I'm a novice when it comes to hip-hop lore, so I won't speak to the significance of this record for the development of East Coast hip-hop. Nonetheless, this record rules. It's super fun and groovy.

5. The Police, Outlandos D’Amour (1978) (RS #428)

The Police are one of my favourite bands and Stewart Copeland is one of my favourite drummers. This is a sample of their initial reggae/punk rock phase. For a debut album, it's phenomenal with enduring hits like "Roxanne," "Can't Stand Losing You," and "So Lonely," as well as more aggressive gems like "Next To You" and "Truth Hist Everybody."

War, The World is a Ghetto (1972) (RS #444)

Who knew that there was so much more to War than "Low Rider" and "Why Can't We Be Friend." This is a fantastic funk record, which incorporates jazz and soul elements, and clearly anticipates certain hip-hop sensibilities with it rhythms, tones and lyrical content.

Richard and Linda Thompson, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (1974) (RS #471)

This is a fantastic and far too short record. It is a classic of British folk-rock with rich instrumentation and renaissance overtones. It was recorded by members of the legendary group Fairport Convention. The title track alone is worth the listen, but the whole thing is beautiful in all its bleakness.

2. Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend (2008) (RS #430)

What can I say? I'm a sucker for baroque pop (if you'll excuse the vampire pun). This record is killer. Plus the lead singer Ezra Koenig is Quincy Jones's son-in-common-law, so how can you lose? 

1. Wings, Band on the Run (1973) (RS #418)

At the risk of exposing the deeply Beatles-centric nature of my taste in music, I admit that this has long been one of my favourite albums of all time. The title track and "Jet" are timeless. The story behind "Picasso's Last Words" is hilarious. And I can never stay near a piano for long without mashing out the part from "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five." Perfection.

So there you have it. I'm sure the albums I chose say a lot about my taste. It would be interesting and informative to see which 10 albums you would pick from the same list. Stay tuned for the Top 10 of the next 100 albums in... let's say... six months or so...

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* Incidentally, "Strange Animal" by Gowan is one of the places where my wife's and my taste diverge most markedly. I'll leave it to the reader to guess which one of us loves it and which hates it.

† Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice (Toronto: Knopf, 2016).

° My early, not to say foundational, affinity for They Might Be Giants and Weird Al meant that my ears were accustomed to the accordion from an early age. I didn't have to wait for The Decemberists to help me overcome an aversion to the instrument, as is surely the case for some.

ˆ Full disclosure: There were two Police albums that received 10 out of 10. I'm a huge Police fan. But for the sake of variety I only included one on the final list. Synchronicity is great but Outlandos is better.