Hey City Zen!

Was I busy in 2018! Still another great year for music! I am sure I missed really great stuff, but here is the best City Zen of the year. I thought of this list without seeing anybody else's best-of lists, so I am sure some great stuff is missing, but this is what made my radar. I may update it if something great gets released before the end of the year. Top 25 Albums, Top 99 Tracks, Top 31 Remixes/Edits (from E-Trash's DJ sets), Box Sets, and Live albums. The top tracks and remixes are assembled in a Spotify List as well. Update (January 15, 2019): I did not add Teymori's EP earlier because it is not a full album, but it has more great tracks than most albums these days. So I added a special best EP mention. Update (February 9, 2019): Added Tom Misch's Geography to best albums. Not sure how I missed this gem in 2018...

Top 27 Albums + 1 EP of 2018

There are definitely 5 albums that stood above for innovation, heart of just fun and which I listened the most to (alphabetically):

David Byrne - American Utopia
Chromeo - Head over Heels
Corine - Un air de fête
Rhye - Blood
Tracey Thorn - Record

The other 20 alphabetically:


Top 99 Tracks of 2018

Top 31 Remixes and Edits of 2018

Labels: #2018, #BestOf, #Music

Thinking about Bret Stephen's comparison of Trump and Warren, it is obvious that there are so many differences between Trump's and Warren's views of a rigged system based on fact---and no, the left was never unified against truth, from Popper to Paglia. Despite Stephen's rhetorical sleight of hand about Warren's own success in a rigged system, fact-based statistics show the US lags far behind Europe in class mobility, mortality rates for the poor, access to higher-education, imprisonment of minorities and the poor, etc, etc. But the most important aspect in all of this is that Warren's view is coherent with the views of a majority of Americans (see the polls), whereas the views of Trump and the GOP are only supported by a minority. Nothing screams more loudly about how rigged the US political system is than the fact that every branch of power in past couple of years (until January) has been controlled by a party that represents a minority of Americans. In France this would lead to revolution, but here conservatives like Mr. Stephens want to obfuscate this fundamental undemocratic truth with calls of more "optimism." We will be optimist when majority rule is again the state of the nation. Until then, we must do all we can to unrig the system.

Labels: #MajorityRule, #politics

I have always been (deeply and seriously) patriotic for several places and ways of living---Portugal, USA, Portuguese-speaking World, English-speaking World, even patriotic for Disco and Punk---but I have never been a nationalist for anything. Indeed, I have always been fiercely anti-nationalist in the ways so eloquently expressed by George Orwell (whom I only consider marginally second to Graham Greene and Fernando Pessoa):



The recent excellent (doubleplusgood) article by Kanishk Tharoor is a fantastic piece on nationalism in film from a similar viewpoint, but emphasizing the historical errors that the nationalist lens imposes when we look back at pre-nationalist human experience:



Ultimately, Orwell's 1984 was about the end of history, when historical facts are easily re-written to adapt to the present circumstances. Fake news are not a modern invention. Doubleplusungood. Which allows me to plug in also one of my favorite songs (and albums) from the Eurythmics' 1984 soundtrack.

Labels: #1984, #Eurythmics, #Film, #MontyPython, #Nationalism, #NationalismIsEvil, #Orwell, #Patriotism