The Best List 2008: Music

Blender February 20 2008

By Andrew Beaujon, Tom Conlon, Jon Coplon, Victoria De Silverio, Ryan Dombal, Josh Eells, Russ Heller, Craig Marks, Jody Rosen, Rob Tannenbaum and Mark Yarm

Best Music

Best Writer-Producer You’ve Never Heard of
Ryan Tedder
Quick, turn on the radio—chances are, there’s a Ryan Tedder song playing right now. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter-producer has been dominating airwaves for months: “Apologize,” the debut single by his band OneRepublic, recently broke a record for U.S. Top 40 airplay, and “Bleeding Love,” which he cowrote and produced for British singer Leona Lewis, topped the U.K. charts for seven weeks straight. He’s also helped pen hits for Jennifer Lopez (“Do It Well”), Natasha Bedingfield (“Love Like This”) and Blake Lewis (“Break Anotha”).

Tedder grew up in Oklahoma in a family of Pentecostal missionaries. “If the church doors were open, we were there,” he says. Secular music was strictly off-limits: When he wanted to listen to, say, his Naughty by Nature tape, he had to convince his mom it was Christian rap. (“I told her ‘O.P.P.’ stood for Other People’s Prayers.”) Tedder’s biggest hits still sound like exquisitely Pro Tooled hymns, borne aloft by organs, strings and themes of sacrifice and loss. “A great melody lasts forever,” he says. “Ten years from now you’re still going to be hearing ‘With or Without You’ or ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.’ You’re not gonna be hearing Soulja Boy. I want my songs to be timeless.”

Best Reason Not to Hate Christian Rock
David Crowder Band
Recently, the David Crowder Band toured nightclubs to celebrate the release of its new album, Remedy. That’s remarkable only because Crowder makes “worship music,” a syrupy alternative for people who think Christian rock is too edgy. But by incorporating influences from electronica to jam bands, the Waco, Texas, group has done more than just drag tight-assed Evangelicals into bars; they’ve helped bridge the gap between Evangelicals and secular culture. Along the way, Crowder has sold more than a million records and recorded with Ted Nugent, who says he was “moved” by the band. Was Crowder concerned about loosing the author of “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” on the Christian-rock world? He was, says Nugent, “and my response was, ‘Who the hell do you think made the wang dang, you dumb screw? I’m celebrating God’s greatest works!’”

Best Doll for Under $300
The Ghostface Killah Doll
Tiny silk robe? Check. Tiny Wallabees? Check. Bona-fide 14-karat–gold eagle wristband and dinner-plate medallion? Double check! This nine-inch-tall toy, created by 4Cast Limited, is nothing if not faithful to its namesake: It even raps! Produced in an ultra-limited run, the doll sports a dorks-only price tag of $299. But while that may sound steep compared to most action figures, let’s see Tickle Me Elmo rhyme “shot up in ’em deadly venom.”

Best Confession From a Recent Tell-All
Ronnie Wood’s Ronnie
“With the drug scene happening all around them, our children couldn’t help but notice. [Wood’s son] Jamie used to come downstairs in the morning, and if there were joint ends in an ashtray, he’d nick them … Once Jamie noticed someone on the sofa, thought the man looked familiar and stared until he recognized Christopher Reeve, who was out of his brain. He came running back to us, crying, ‘You destroyed Superman!’”

Best Cult Genius You’ve Never Heard Of
Father Yod
His earthly name was James Baker. He came from Cincinnati to L.A. after World War II, and he went way native, picking up Eastern mysticism and gathering a group of far-seeing, freethinking, sexually daring young people who called him Father Yod and then, by the early ’70s, YaHoWha. Together the master, his 14 “spiritual wives” and his followers ran the Source, a popular Hollywood health-food restaurant frequented by John Lennon and Bob Dylan. They lived in a mansion and helped to psychedelicize the Sunset Strip scene.

Soon thereafter, drug-damaged singer Sky Saxon, once the leader of the grungy Strip band the Seeds, fell in with the YaHoWha family, and they added guitars to the Tantric sex. With Yod as
their frontman, the band—named the YaHoWha 13—recorded dozens of homemade albums of lysergic free-form chaos coveted today by collectors and the freak-folk legions they inspired. Devendra Banhart says Saxon gave him a secret family name as a teenager. Becky Stark of the indie folk-rock quartet Lavender Diamond is a fan; rumor has it the beatific mega-mogul Rick Rubin is as well. The singer for the Oakland, California, metal band Saviours even has a YaHoWha 13 tattoo on his leg.

Yod perished in 1975, in a manner befitting that decade: He went hang gliding off Oahu. He had never tried the sport before but felt his instincts would hold him up. The winds changed
direction and he plunged to his death. His Family, however, lives on; members recently regrouped and played on the West Coast, and their tale of sects, drugs and rock & roll is chronicled in a fab new book called The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWha 13 and the Source Family. According to Paz Lenchantin, the bassist for L.A. psych-weirdos the Entrance Band, the Family “are very special beings, and it comes out in their music.” What is their message? “Words make our path stronger in unison.” Say Wha?

Best Song to Karaoke
“Livin’ on a Prayer”
By Moby, whose upcoming CD, Last Night, can be sung along to at finer karaoke bars everywhere.

“I’m not a very good singer, so I tend to go for the rousing group song. Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ is the most fun—everyone knows every word of it, and the moment it comes on, the room feels like a 7-Eleven parking lot in 1988. You just can’t go wrong with an ’80s metal song.”

Best Worst Guitarist
St. Sanders
Santeri Ojala has been playing guitar well for 15 years—and playing terribly for 10 months. Ojala,
a 32-year-old Finnish artist, is the mastermind behind the YouTube-based Shreds series. Under the moniker St. Sanders, he takes videos of venerated guitar gods, re-dubs the sound with his own mangled, comically underwhelming playing, adds in some conspicuously fake audience applause and uploads the results (standouts include “Eddie Van Halen Shreds,” “Iron Maiden Shreds” and “Carlos Santana Shreds”). The videos pay hilarious homage to fret-tickling pomposity and deflate it at the same time.

Ojala stresses that he isn’t just making fun—he’s a fan. “It started when I was watching a Steve Vai video with the sound off,” he tells Blender. “I grabbed my guitar and played what Steve looked like he was playing, only poorly.” As a poor player, though, Ojala is downright virtuosic, precisely synching missed notes and garbled arpeggios (and the occasional Europe riff) with the movements onscreen. “Everyone makes fun of drummers, but nobody mocks guitarists,” he explains. “I figured it was time.”

Best Radio Show
The Loon in the Afternoon
Vomiting on your boss isn’t a good move. But last fall, at a concert, Mojo Nixon tossed down a quadruple gin and tonic, which soon volcano’d up and onto an executive from Sirius Satellite Radio, where Nixon works. The boss didn’t mind, Nixon says—his vomit was a warm burst of authenticity: “I’m selling chaos, anarchy. You don’t know what the motherfucker is gonna say next.”

Satellite radio promised deliverance from the 100-year decline of terrestrial radio. Too bad most shows are as dull as CB radio. One great exception is Nixon’s The Loon in the Afternoon, on the Outlaw Country channel, weekdays from 4 to 8 p.m. EST. “In my opinion, there’s only three kinds of songs,” Nixon says. “Drinkin’ songs, fuckin’ songs and killin’ songs. The music we play has a baaaad attitude.”

Nixon (his birth certificate reads Neill Kirby McMillan Jr.) takes an unhinged delight in crazy-eyed music, expertly mixing eras (from Marshall Tucker Band to Big & Rich to Johnny Cash) and exhumes the forgotten. He also plays Mojo Nixon songs. In the ’80s, he recorded outrageous novelty tracks, attacking Michael J. Fox or the antidrug movement—“Elvis Is Everywhere,” “Don Henley Must Die.” “The one I’m most proud of is ‘Tie My Pecker to My Leg,’” he crows. “It kind of gets stuck in your head. Virgins will be vacuuming, singing, ‘Gonna tie my pecker to my leg, to my leg.’”

So what qualifies this filthy, 50-year-old father as a radio host? “Well,” he says, “I’m completely full of crap.” He laughs like a ’73 Buick LeSabre that won’t turn over. “I don’t have a lot of talent, but I’m entertaining. And I love this music.”

Best Lawyer to Call When You Get Pinched
Gerald Shargel
By Irv Gotti, CEO of record label The Inc and a free man, thanks to Shargel, who won acquittals in 2005 for Irv and his brother on federal money-laundering charges.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a hip-hop guy, a Mafia guy or some corporate guy, Gerry is the best lawyer in the world. He had the courtroom in the palm of his hand; he had the jury members and the judge laughing, and he tore the government’s witnesses apart. It was like Johnnie Cochran at the O.J. trial. He’s a wizard with the law, and he’s such a likable person. After we were acquitted, some rich friends of mine took us out on their yacht to celebrate, and Shargel is there, drinking with all of my guys from the hood! Shargel’s with the hood guys, drinking, smoking, laughing and joking. They loved him. Yo, they loved him!”

Best Video Game for Heshers
Brütal Legend
If Tenacious D designed a video game, it would look like the awesome and ridiculous brawler Brütal Legend, due out later this year. In fact, the D’s Jack Black voices our hero, a roadie who gets transported to a Nordic fantasy world—courtesy of a belt buckle “forged from the steel flesh of the fire beast”—where he must smite legions of demons and other foes with his trusty battle ax and a guitar capable of (literally) face-melting solos. And the game’s got metal cred to spare: Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and Ronnie James Dio provide additional voices, and Priest, Dio, Zakk Wylde, Black Sabbath, Kiss and Wolfmother soundtrack the mayhem.

Best Music-Awards Show
The CMA awards
Forget the Grammys and the VMAs; the hottest music-awards show is the Country Music Association’s annual shindig, an ideal mix of teary acceptance speeches, eye-popping fashion don’ts and ass-whuppin’ live playing. Old-fashioned entertainment values trump all at the CMAs—check YouTube for 2007’s Vocal Duo of the Year, Sugarland, flooring the crowd with a shiver-inducing acoustic version of their hit “Stay.” Tune in early for the red-carpet arrivals—a pageant of suitcase-size Stetsons, rhinestone-studded evening gowns and enough snakeskin to reupholster all 4,000 seats of the Grand Ole Opry.

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