When the leaves begin to fall and a man’s fancy turns to end-of-year listmaking, the rockist’s heart turns to that which it knows best: Digging out that one black artist who, with just one place on one’s list, can let all the other rockists know (because that is the only group of people who cares about these lists any more) THAT THIS GUY IS NOT RACIST! BECAUSE LOOK, I LIKE THIS OTHER GUY! And this year, Raphael Saadiq, that guy is you, dude! WXPN released David Dye‘s best-of for 2008 this morning — which is pretty much the high watermark for what every other white rock dude will do in the coming days — and Raphael, despite making an utterly awesome Sam Cooke and Delfonics-inspired record and not being Santogold, only just squeaked in at number ten. After all, there was only nine other places, and the whole fucking world would fall to shit if we couldn’t get Kings Of Leon/Fleet Foxes/The Hold Steady/Death Cab For Cutie in there. I mean, seriously, Smokey, this is not ‘Nam, there are rules. And while there may be some other black guys on some other white guys lists of course, we’re gonna hold you to this number ten thing because David Dye said so. Because we’re gonna let you in on some secret white people shit here: David is our leader.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 12:59 pm.