He rearranges his patchwork of ’80s and ’90s R&B influences to stitch together a sound of his own, as esoteric as it is soulful.
From the pitch-shifted rap on the “Intro” to the slippery synth solo at the end of “Cryptid,” Brown’s debut album, Contact, is both erotic and deeply eccentric-a unique stylistic pairing that’s been in tragically short supply since Prince’s death last April. Macįew artists have been as successful at channeling Prince’s ineffable weirdness as Harriet Brown. And it obviously helped when the people making that art were in the position to feel the affects of the oppression that the Trump years threaten. The best albums of 2017, meanwhile, were made by artists ready to lay the groundwork for a counter-cultural movement, a push back against our political quagmire, forged in collaboration, experimentation, internationalism, and polemical intent. Other artists, like the embattled Kanye West, seemed to recognize that this wasn’t their moment, and sat out the year almost entirely. These shifting genre and cultural dynamics didn’t play to everyone’s strengths: Country superstar Brad Paisley, whose 2009 album American Saturday Night improbably captured the optimism of the early Obama era better than any other recording of the time, fumbled his latest opportunity to address the present political moment, instead carping about “selfies” and the shame of regretting sex the morning after on Love and War. Kendrick also collaborated with U2, for his album and for theirs, a gesture that represented the kind of genre border crossing that was commonplace in a year backdropped by Trump’s repeated efforts to wall us off from the rest of the world.
Because while it’s been hard to define 2017 as anything but the first year of the Trump presidency, the last 12 months have brought a surge of progressivism and social awareness-and the volatile political climate has made those expressions of awareness more raw and visceral.ījörk turned her pastoral-sounding Utopia into a subtweet against abusive men, Vince Staples strived to push his boom-bap rap further into territories of experimental electronica, and Kendrick Lamar backed off the heady, groove-heavy sound of his Tipping Point opus To Pimp a Butterfly for the balled-fist immediacy, and musical accessibility, of Damn. In a year that saw the rise of the alt-right and the floodgates opening in Hollywood for sexual harassment and assault claims, that matters. No less than eight of our top 10 albums of 2017 were made by black artists or women.
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