A few months ago, I published a list of my favorite horror novels.

But there’s a book I left off the list—because I found it distasteful and borderline offensive. At first I thought I’d just ignore it.

After a few days, I changed my mind. A book this creepy deserves to get a taste of its own medicine.

So I opted for a better plan—inspired by critic Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory of literary criticism.

What could be a more fitting “reader response” than to treat this story the same way its author does?

I share the results below in this essay from my archives (with some trepidation and apologies).

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A Reader Responds to ‘American Psycho’

by Ted Gioia

“In the procedures I would urge,” critic Stanley Fish writes, “the reader's activities are at the center of attention, where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning.”

READER ADVISORY: I should warn you that Fish writes about style, but doesn't have much style sense.

A photo I’ve found online shows him in a cheesy tan blazer with wide-notched lapels, poorly fitting around the shoulders, over a flimsy dirt-colored cotton T-shirt.

I would recommend an Ermenegildo Zegna two-buttoned jacket, light gray in a textured basketweave, and a Luigi Borrelli iceberg white cotton shirt—close spread collar preferred. Of course, Professor Fish might want to substitute a button-down on lecture days.

Yes, he’s a Fish out of water when it comes to clothing. But when our eminent professor situates meaning in the response of the reader, I say Damn straight!

And as I read through Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, I contemplated my own visceral response to this sanguinary text about a sadistic serial killer who is also a stylish New York investment banker.

I took time to gather the tools necessary for my “reader’s response.” These include:

• a DeWalt 14 ounce framing hammer,

• an assortment of mid-size nails,

• a Bernzomatic propane-fueled soldering torch lighter,

• a bottle of sulfuric acid at 88% strength,

• a pair of Fiskar orange-handled scissors, and

• a 20 ml bottle of White-Out.

I place these in readiness on my reading table. And I put on a pair of HexArmor 13-gauge palm-coated work gloves.

I am now ready to get to work on the text.

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Below I conclude my survey of the 100 best recordings of 2023 (all styles, all genres). For part one, click here.

This has been an exciting year of music discovery, and I’m happy to share the highlights below.

Happy listening!

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The 100 Best Recordings of 2023 (Part 2 of 2)

(In alphabetical order)

Lisel
Patterns for Auto-tuned Voices and Delay
Patterns for Auto-tuned Voices and Delay

Matterhorn Well
Sketches for Francis
Dark Drone Music Performed by Cello and Fender Rhodes Electric Piano

Brad Mehldau
Your Mother Should Know
Solo Jazz Piano Interpretations of Beatles Songs

Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975)
6 Hours of Archival Joni Mitchell From a Peak Period of Creativity

Jason Moran
From the Dancehall to the Battlefield
Evocations and Adaptations of African-American Music Pioneer James Reese Europe (1881-1919)

Willie Nelson
Bluegrass
Willie Nelson Reinterprets His Classic Songs in a Bluegrass Vein

Jalen Ngonda
Come Around and Love Me
Retro Soul with a Smokey Robinson Vibe

Novelty Island
Wallsend Weekend Television
Surreal Beatles-esque Pop

Of Tropique
Buster Goes West
Hardass Japanese Mood Music for Clarinet and Neo-Cumbia Rhythm Section

Víkingur Ólafsson
Bach: Goldberg Variations
New Recording of a Seminal Piano Work from 1741

Peter One
Come Back to Me
Nashville-Based African Folk Singer

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Extraordinary new music is still happening. It’s just harder to find.

Many of the most creative musicians today receive almost no coverage in the media. They get little airplay on radio. And you will almost never see them on TV.

My goal is to give visibility to this amazing music—and I try to operate without limitations or boundaries. I include all genres, all styles. I consistently cover a wider geographic range than other music critics. And I don’t worry about chasing trends or promoting superstar SEO-friendly names that might generate ‘clicks’ for me.

It’s all about the music, mates.

Today I’m sharing the first half of my best-of year list (in alphabetical order). Click here for part two.

The Honest Broker is a reader-supported guide to music, books, media & culture. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you want to support my work, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.

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Before launching on Substack, I released a top 100 list each year for more than a decade without any pay or sponsorship. From an economic standpoint, this made no sense. The project that took up most of my time every year generated no income for me.

But I did this because it needed to be done. And it needs to be done even more nowadays.

There’s so much noise in the culture, it’s almost impossible to hear the music.

I may not be the perfect guide. But if I have biases, they’re legit ones. I don’t care about sales or popularity, but I pay close attention to musicianship, creativity, and craft. I’m drawn to works of emotional depth and intelligence. I applaud a willingness to operate outside of stale formulas. Above all, I believe music should be enjoyed.

I assume that my readers share these values.

I know that many of you are skilled musicians yourselves. And even readers here who are non-musicians have big ears and discerning tastes. I create this list specifically for these people.

So let’s plunge in. I need to publish my annual guide in two installments (because otherwise it crashes the email servers). Today I’m covering 50 albums, from A to K in my alphabetical listing.

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First, three albums I wanted to include, but couldn’t.

Before launching into the list, let me mention some recordings that I wanted to include, but couldn’t for nit-picking chronology reasons.

These include the following:

• Chinese Football’s Win and Lose was released on the last day of 2022, and thus missed the cutoff for the 2023 list by a few hours. But it deserves to be heard, so here’s a link.

• I previously featured Fred Hersch and Esperanza Spalding’s live album at the Village Vanguard on my best-of-year list for 2020, when the recording was sold for a brief period as a fundraiser for the Jazz Foundation of America (a worthy charity). The album disappeared soon after (to my disappointment) but was released commercially this year. It would show up on my 2023 best-of-year list, if I hadn’t already honored it previously.

• I planned to include Howard Hersh’s Angels and Watermarks on this list, but I learned that the recent self-released album from the composer was a reissue of a 2014 recording. Here, too, I had to remove it from consideration for 2023. But it’s the most exciting genre-crossing piano concerto I heard this year, so I want you to have a chance to listen too. You can find it at this link.

Now let’s proceed on to the top 100 for 2023.

The 100 Best Recordings of 2023
(Part 1 of 2)

In alphabetical order:

Aberdeen
Held Together
Indie Rock Brass Band from Brooklyn

Christopher Adler
Landscape Traces: New Music for Khaen, Vol. 2
New Music for Khaen (Mouth Organ from Northeast Thailand and Laos)

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer & Shahzad Ismaily
Love in Exile
Urdu Vocalist Collaborates with Jazz Pianist and Pakistani Multi-instrumentalist

Ambrose Akinmusire
Beauty is Enough
Unaccompanied Trumpet Melodies

Blick Bassy
Mádibá
Soulful Electropop Sung in the Baasa Language of Cameroon

Jean-Paul Bataille
Les Cailloux: Weissenborn Studies, Vol. 1
Melancholy Lap Steel Guitar Music for a Puppet Show

Betty Benedeadly & Brand Guess
At the Institute of Mentalphysics
Cinematic Psychedelic Folk Instrumentals

Debashish Bhattacharya
The Sound of the Soul
Hindustani Slide Guitar

Jonathan Bockelmann
Childish Mind
Solo Acoustic Guitar Vignettes

The Bombadils
Dear Friend
Contemporary Folk from Nova Scotia

boygenius
The Record
Boy Band Without the Boys

Chris Brain
Steady Away
Moody Nick Drake-ish Singer-Songwriter from Leeds

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Here are the final 50 titles in my survey of the best albums of 2022 (all styles, all genres). For part 1, click here.

I hope this survey makes the case for the vibrancy and creativity of the current music scene. I encourage you to take a chance on some of the unfamiliar names here. You will be generously rewarded for your time and attention.

If you click on each album title, you will get a taste of the music.

Happy listening!

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The 100 Best Recordings of 2022 (Part 2 of 2)

In alphabetical order

The Manakooras
Jungle of Steel
Dangerous Mood Music for Listening from the Safety of Your Living Room

Szymon Mika
Attempts
Solo Guitar from Krakow

Youn Sun Nah
Waking World
Art Pop with Jazz Flavoring

North Mississippi Allstars
Set Sail
Mississippi Hill Country Blues & Roots

Jodie Nicholson
Live at the Old Church Studio
One Singer, One Piano, One Room in Northumberland

Omodaka
ZENTSUU: Collected Works 2001-2019
Merging of Traditional Japanese Music, Vintage Chiptune Video Soundtracks, Stale Classics, Funk, & Varied Electronica

Rebeca Omordia
African Pianism
Contemporary African Classical Music for Piano

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Amazing music is happening right now.

Record labels and streaming platforms have little interest in launching new artists in the year 2022, but musicians are still doing mind-blowing work. The recordings below should convince you of that.

But you might not know this, because the businesses and institutions dominating our musical culture have grown nostalgic, obsessing over the past instead of creating the future. In recent months, music companies and investment firms have spent more than $5 billion in buying up the rights to old songs.

They won’t invest even a fraction of that amount in developing new talent—that’s the exact opposite of how the business once worked. You would need to go back to medieval times to find a musical culture so fixated on the past.

I see myself as working counter to the trend. I know many of you feel the same way. But we are swimming upstream. And lately it seems more like a downward deluge than a stream.

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I spend more time listening to new music than on anything else I do each year. I devote hours every day to this project. In fact, I’ve heard more new music during the last 12 months than during any year of my life. (That’s all the more peculiar because my background is as a music historian—if anyone has an excuse for looking backward, it’s me.)

Sometimes people ask me why I do this. But I believe this is the most important thing I’m doing right now. And that’s because so much of the best new music is hidden away on self-released projects and small indie label releases. Without trustworthy guides, you could miss almost all of it.

And without exciting new music, our entire culture starts to stagnate.

That doesn’t have to happen. The new music scene is glorious, and creative, and exciting. We would all benefit it if the musicians doing this expansive and visionary work were better known. But I don’t want to make this seem like just an advocacy project—listening to this music is also uplifting and fun. If it wasn’t, lists of this sort would have no lasting value.

The end result (below) is a survey of creative new music without genre or stylistic restrictions—encompassing the entire United States, and more than 40 other countries.

By the way, this is just the first installment—the first 50 titles, in alphabetical order, of my 100 favorites of the year. The rest of the list will come your way soon.

Happy listening!

The 100 Best Recordings of 2022 (Part 1 of 2)

In alphabetical order:

Noël Akchoté                      
Philippe Verdelot—Il Primo Libro De Madrigali a Quattro Voci (1533)
Renaissance Madrigals Played on Steel String Guitar by a Jazz Musician

Alabê KetuJazz
Kan
Ritualistic Afro-Brazilian Candomblé Music for Saxophone and Drums

Melissa Aldana
12 Stars
Jazz Saxophony with Fender Rhodes Atmospherics

Matt Andersen
House to House
Canadian Folk & Roots Singer-Songwriter with a Huge Voice

Rich Aucoin
Synthetic Season 1
Insistent Instrumentals Played on Vintage Synthesizers

Bala Desejo
Sim Sim Sim
Danceable Brazilian Pop

Jon Balke
Hafla
Eleventh Century Andalusian Texts Set to Electronica and Jazz Accompaniment

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Below is the second installment of my “100 Best Recordings of 2021”—a special feature for paid subscribers to The Honest Broker. (You can find part one here.)

As I mentioned in the previous installment, this is always my biggest project of the year, literally starting on January 1 and continuing until early December. I listened to more than one thousand…

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Below are my 100 favorite recordings of 2021 (part 1 of 2)—a special feature for paid subscribers to The Honest Broker. As always, my annual list knows no boundaries, encompassing all styles and genres.

Because of the length of the list, I have to share it in two installments. The first 50 recordings are featured below, with a link for each, so you can s…

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John Luther Adams & the JACK Quartet  
Lines Made by Walking         
Contemporary Landscape Music for String Quartet

Tunde Adebimpe        
A Warm Weather Ghost         
Soulful Synthpop Meets Classical Music

The Altogether            
Silo      
Artisan …

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Imagine a disjunctive moment of historic importance—at a stroke of a clock, present and future are irreparably torn from the anchor of the past. In the aftermath, cultures clash and supernatural powers are unleashed. A warp is opened in the space-time continuum. Laws of physics are changed, and real-life alchemy can create gold on demand. A magical baby…

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John Luther Adams   
Become Desert          
Ecological Orchestral Soundscapes

Laurie Anderson / Tenzin Choegyal / Jesse Paris Smith
Songs from the Bardo           
Musical and Textual Evocation of 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Areni Agbabian     …

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Dominique Fils-Aimé            
Nameless        
Contemporary Soul/R&B Influenced by Billie Holiday, Etta James, Nina Simone

Marisa Anderson       
Cloud Corner
Serene Folk Guitar Instrumentals from Portland

Mark Applebaum      
Speed Dating
Exper…

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John Luther Adams    
Canticles of the Holy Wind    
Contemporary Choral Music

Teddy Afro    
Ethiopia    
Illegal Ethiopian Dance Music

Arca    
Arca    
Fragile, …

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1        
Kamasi Washington        
The Epic        
Post-Coltrane Jazz/R&B


2        
Ibeyi        
Ibeyi        
Introspective Afro-Cuban Soul Music


3        
Daniel Bachman        
River        
American Primitive Guitar


4        
Laura Cannell       

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1
The Garden Of Love: Songs Of William Blake    
Americana / Britannia Fusion

2    
Arianna Savall / Petter Udland Johansen   
Hirundo Maris   
Classical-World-Ea…

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The 100 Best Albums of 2011

1    William Elliott Whitmore   Field Songs   Americana / Roots Music                
2     Tinariwen   Tassili   World music
3     Fred Hersch   Alone at the Vanguard   Jazz
4     Bon Iver   Bon Iver…

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If you’re a writer, there’s a distinction far more exalted than winning a Nobel Prize. That happens when your name gets turned into an adjective. By this measure, Orwell and Kafka reign supreme—bequeathing us the terms Orwellian and Kafkaesque. Does any living author have a chance at matching such semantic renown?

In a better world, we wouldn’t need such…

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Reviewed by Ted Gioia

Lark is 17 years old, studying secretarial skills in Winfield, West Virginia in the late 1950s. Her mother is gone, her father is a question mark, and the only home she knows is her aunt’s ramshackle house off a gravel alley in a downscale part of town. Her constant companion is her disabled younger half-brother, Termite, an orphan …

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