The Top 30 Albums of 2009: # 23

Fuck Buttons
Tarot Sport

Fuck Buttons--ah, what a horrible name. That's a horrible name for a band. A gleeful wallow in stupidity, that name. I'd look it up to see what it means, but that would be what the man wants me to do, and jings if I'll do what the man expects. My hope is that its a play on Butt Fuckings, because I think I like the sound of the term "Buttfucking" better than just about anything else, except for the word "mug", which reminds me of blankets and coffee. One of the best songs I've ever heard, and by best I mean by anybody ever, was that Kool Keith song "Make Up Your Mind". Over the course of the song, Keith repeats the phrase "Make up your mind, who you want to pump the butt" something like 60 times, and while I know that he's saying "pump" and not "fuck", I always hear it in my brain as "fuck". And when you're hearing that, or making yourself hear that, it stops being a song and starts sounding like he's carved the words into something else, that he's uprooted their very meaning and turned it into an alternate language, the same way that Wittgenstein would do that thing were he'd argue that an apple wasn't actually an apple, it was a thing we had no name for, and if we could make ourselves reach a point where an apple wasn't an apple--not a denial of the term by force, but an actual disengagement from the process of using the word--we'd be able to see the language game from....actually, I stopped paying attention to the rest of the Wittgenstein stuff, but I do remember that the guy made sure he was always at the front when the soldiers under his command had to do something dangerous. The way they always write about that part of his life, they always make it sound like Wittgenstein was this real courageous guy, that he was rejecting his upper class privilege and showing the men he commanded he was as willing to die as they were. That part of his life comes up, over and over again, no matter who it is writing the book, and they always give it the same interpretation, but after I'd read it a few times...I don't know. I want to believe it's true, that the guy was just that serious about equality and all, but it seemed that it could have been just as possible that he was actually just suicidal, what with being a repressed homosexual manic depressive who also happened to hate himself. There's an architecture coffee table of the house he lived in after the war, and while it's not worth buying, it's worth taking a look at the fixtures and hardware he designed for his ugly fucking house. They're all really depressing looking, and I remember seeing them for the first time and being surprised, because--shit, how in the hell does one design a depressing door handle? I've met some really smart motherfuckers, and I used to work for a guy who made millions of dollars off random bullshit he made up in his head, but I bet none of those people could make a door handle that makes the people who see pictures of it start thinking about the meaninglessness of life, and how they should probably just hurry up and make a baby so that someone will care about them, because they're just going to get old and become more stupid and ugly than they already are.

The album doesn't have any lyrics, by the way. It's electronic music made by two guys, most of the songs are kind of long, and most of the stuff I've read about it refers to it as being an example of drone music. I looked up what that meant, because I thought that was incorrect. This is what it said on wikipedia:

Drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics.

That's what I thought drone music sounded like too, which is weird, because Tarot Sport doesn't sound like that at all. It sounds like late 90's hardcore trance music made by Godspeed You Black Emperor!, and the only way to call it minimalist is to focus on the fact that the two guys who made it probably didn't need a lot of equipment. They made it with computers and toys. It's one of those albums that you have to listen to a bunch of times before you finally admit that it doesn't mean anything, that it's just forceful and fast, and sometimes it uses big crescendos so that it can have a emotional seeming-finale. It's not soundtrack-y the way Sigur Ros and Massive Attack songs are, and it isn't one of those Coldplay songs that people listen to so they can feel like their life is a sexy movie about them having sex, but it does have a certain cinematic quality when you're listening to it by yourself. It makes you feel like you're doing something important, even though you aren't.

When I told Marty that it was one of my favorite albums that came out this year, he said he didn't care about it at all and then he made a face, it's the face he makes when he realizes you haven't put a lot of thought into what you're saying, and that pisses him off a lot more then when you squeeze his knees or make fun of him for not liking Wendy Wasserstein. He wanted to know why it should be on the list, and why it should be above other albums or below other albums, and I just made something up that I can't remember right now. That's pretty much what I do, I just talk until the other person gets so tired of listening that they just give up and decide it isn't worth it. That's why this album is on the list. It was a nice soundtrack for thinking about my favorite subject in the world, which is me.

-Tucker Stone, 2009