Pop music is always chasing after the unusual – all hail novelty! Let us praise uniqueness! – but this year was dynamic enough on that front to qualify it decisively as the Year of the Weird.
In the stratosphere near the top of the charts, Miley Cyrus teamed up with the psychedelic rock band Flaming Lips for Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, a rambling, shambling album that nobody would have expected and that gave Cyrus more colour and sass to add to her already phantasmagorical travelling stage show.
Taylor Swift continued to dominate with singles from her stylistic swerve 1989, but, more surprisingly, songs from that album came in for a radical remake by Ryan Adams, whose full-length covers tribute transformed Swift's strutting pop into doleful folk and rock.
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Lower down – though not much lower, considering the ramped-up levelling of the mainstream and the underground – Grimes made a big move with Art Angels, a manic electronic pop album that positioned her as a mindful auteur and an ambassador for signal-scrambling exhibitionism at its extremes.
Joanna Newsom returned with her harp and otherworldly voice on Divers, an album that unfurls layers and layers of songwriting complexity and breathtaking musical beauty. She's certainly one of few lyricists cerebral enough to make sensible use of words like "Ozymandian" and "inasmuch". But another of her ilk – Dan Bejar of the shapeshifting rock band Destroyer – made more headway with Poison Season, an album that veers from the string-swept spirit of theatrical old standards to rousing street anthems reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reed, and back again.
There was a lot of good music in 2015, and in enough different and easily accessible forms to make the whole enterprise all the more exciting for the prospects it holds for the future. It is easy to mourn the loss of a pop culture that we can all rally around and at least somewhat collectively understand, but the blurring of borders makes for more exhilarating aural travelling too.
Likewise, the dwindling of recorded music as a pillar of industry, with record sales continuing to dip, has been accompanied by music reasserting its function as a social phenomenon to be performed and processed and contemplated live, in the flesh (often with flashing lights).
History has come increasingly alive, too. In America, a mass celebration was staged this year around the brief but momentous final tour of the Grateful Dead, replete with the old-style sentiment “Fare Thee Well”. Respect was registered and tribute was paid to a band and a cultural ecology very much from a distant past.
A months-long happening in New York turned lots of attention to an obscure project from another time whose influence can still be measured: Dream House, a large room-size installation for sound and light by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Jung Hee Choi. With his minimalist compositions drawing on multicultural scales and electronic means of production dating back to the 1950s, Young set off a charge that led to the Velvet Underground, Philip Glass and so much more – a legacy commemorated wondrously around Young’s 80th birthday by the Dia Art Foundation.
Art and music communed actively this year. There was a significant (if poorly executed and widely panned) retrospective devoted to Björk at the gleaming Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a similar survey of the fantastical career of David Bowie travelled to museums in Paris and Australia.
Art figured also in the work of young electronic-music creators for whom the notion of video and other multimedia modes prove central to what their "music" comprises. Arca, who added new styles and sounds to the arsenal of Björk's 2015 album Vulnicura, made expansive and ambitious forays of his own into video and even avant-garde fashion. For the latter, he created a soundtrack used in a high-minded runway spectacle staged in Italy by the fashion brand Hood by Air. For the rest of us, he also uploaded it to Soundcloud, where its 16 minutes of bizarre sounds and beats can be streamed or downloaded for free.
It’s a new era and the scene is fertile for more in the way of invention and adventure. FKA twigs, the mercurial English R&B star, put together a sensational stage show this year with its own premise and special title: Congregata. It involved her prowling the stage as she does, with her wild and ingenious choreography, in the company of a dozen other dancers doing moves that were out of this world. They came from different underground dance scenes in different countries, and they mixed intense physical artistry with a spirit of dropping all preconceptions and just having fun. It was a wonder to watch – and served to transmit a lasting and valuable lesson, too.
Andy Battaglia is a New York-based writer and regular contributor to The Review.