Rob Mentzer’s certified finest, 2022
Here are some things I enjoyed watching, reading and listening to this year, and some gripes about things I didn’t
MUSIC
Well, Renaissance is very obviously the album of the year. Sorry to all the other artists who had records out this year, many of which I’m sure they worked very hard on. It’s a tough break for them, but 2022 turned out to be a Beyoncé year, which means there was not a true contest for album of the year this year. It is Renaissance. What can you do.
I would say “Break My Soul” sounds pretty good on the radio but mainly Renaissance is an album-album, a captivating hourlong pastiche of house and disco and UK Garage.
Remember that whole thing with Lizzo and James Madison’s crystal flute? That was a real thing from this year. What happened was archaeologists uncovered James Madison’s crystal flute in a cave or something (I am fuzzy on the details of the flute) and in the space of milliseconds a) you learned that this object existed and b) Lizzo! Was playing it!
Anyway I like “About Damn Time” a lot, just a great disco song.
I named “Good Ones” by Charli XCX my favorite song of 2021 and I feel like perhaps I ought to branch out, but Crash is great, and I also recommend “New Shapes” and “Constant Repeat” and “Yuck.”
The Wet Leg album is a little too much Wet Leg for me but “Chaise Longue” and “Wet Dream” are the perfect amount.
As an NPR-listening rap fan, I am aware that I am supposed to love Kendrick Lamar, but secretly my actual opinion is that he is fine. Did anyone actually listen to all of Mr. Morale and the High-Steppers, like all the way through to the end? Be honest!
I assume Kanye West’s label G.O.O.D. Music is done and label president Pusha T is out of a day job. He is probably also out his most prolific producer. Good news: The Pharrell Williams collaborations on It’s Almost Dry are way better than the Kanye ones anyway. It seems like King Push will be able to exit the Kanye business, should he, for any reason, wish to exit the Kanye West business. I like “Neck and Wrist.”
I do not know why I follow the arbitrary rule that the singles list and the albums list should not include crossovers, but I do, so here they are:
Albums
Beyonce, Renaissance
Pusha T, It’s Almost Dry
Charli XCX, Crash
Taylor Swift, Midnights
Rosalía, Motomami
Jeezy, Snowfall
The Mountain Goats, Bleed Out
Singles
“Bad Habit,” Steve Lacy
“About Damn Time,” Lizzo
“Cash In Cash Out,” Pharrell Williams feat. 21 Savage and Tyler, the Creator
“Wet Dream,” Wet Leg
“Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” Harry Styles
“Hold Me Closer,” Britney Spears sampling Elton John
“Vegas,” Doja Cat
“Unholy,” Sam Smith and Kim Petras
“That’s Where I am,” Maggie Rogers
“As it Was,” Harry Styles
“It’s Corn,” Recess Therapy, Tariq & The Gregory Brothers
“Big Energy,” Latto
“C’mon Baby, Cry,” Orville Peck
“Don’t Say Nothin,” Saweetie
“Moscow Mule,” Bad Bunny
TV
I understand the ways in which The Rehearsal is kinda indefensible, but it is so funny that I guess I am going to defend it anyway. The show’s comic premise is that its central character, “Nathan Fielder,” played by Nathan Fielder, holds the self-evidently ridiculous view that it is possible to predict and prepare for every conceivable social interaction by modeling and practicing and flow-charting it. This premise confused New Yorker critic Richard Brody, but the show totally understands how preposterous its central conceit is and, yes, what a bad person “Nathan Fielder” the character is.
But of course the show is also a documentary about a bunch of aspiring actors and assorted weirdos who stumbled into this incredibly strange art (?) project, who are very frequently being filmed without quite understanding what they are participating in. It is candid-camera cringe comedy in the lineage of Da Ali G Show, and it is happy to mock some (not all!) of its participants and willing to go much further and to much darker places than you are imagining right now, I promise. I am also a bad person, but I loved it.
(Darker stuff aside, that show also had some amazing jokes that came in the form of actual, unscripted, genuine interactions. On a first date, the hippie-dippy Evangelical fundamentalist asks a hippie-dippy question about life and the universe: “What are you most afraid of?” The man sitting across from her furrows his brow, considers, answers, “Well, first off, eels.”)
Reservation Dogs’ first season was a straight masterpiece and its second season is, too.
I am one of the people who loved Andor, for the same reasons everyone else also loved it. I am sorry to report that Derry Girls did not really stick the landing in its final season, especially in its last few episodes. Its first two seasons remain some of the funniest TV ever and this year’s conclusion is very good.
I watched Severance and I genuinely found it to be one of the most unsettling things I have ever seen. I thought it was excellent in many ways and I kind of hated it.
I found The Bear exhausting and I did bail a couple of episodes in, which I acknowledge may have been an error.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was a damn delight, a throwback in the best way (episodic, lightly tongue in cheek but often earnest, a little silly).
I thought Rings of Power, which in our household is referred to as “Elf show,” was fun if uneven. We enjoyed Wednesday as family viewing. And last, I will shout out the miniseries We Own This City, by, as you know, the guys who made The Wire.
10 favorite TV shows:
The Rehearsal
Andor
Reservation Dogs
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Never Have I Ever
Rings of Power
Reacher
Our Flag Means Death
Abbot Elementary
Welcome to Wrexham
MOVIES
My weakest category, I didn’t see many and I’m not sure I fell in love with any of them. So I will start by saying that the actual best film of the year was the gesture-for-gesture portrayal by on TikTok by the.localhedgewitch of a decade-old YouTube rant about Bath and Body Works in Oshkosh. You do not actually need to understand any of those words to enjoy this series of videos, which only gets funnier the longer it goes on, which it does roughly forever.
I watched many of the Marvel products and they were enjoyable in a Marvelish way, but the only one I actually remember was Werewolf by Night, which had some panache.
I haven’t seen Nope or Confess, Fletch yet but they seem like the sort of thing I would like and I hope to watch them soon. I don’t know finally how much I loved The Northman but it was certainly the most bonkers movie I saw this year. Sincerely sorry, I did not care for Everything Everywhere All at Once, it was … too much.
Jerrod Carmichael’s comedy special Rothaniel is excellent. (Is a comedy special a movie or a TV show?)
I am a human being so of course I liked Top Gun: Maverick, huzzah for practical FX. Glass Onion was great. Probably the most fun I had watching a movie was the Adam Sandler-starring NBA movie Hustle.
BOOKS
I read some great books this year but very few of them came out this year. I enjoyed News of the Air by my friend Jill Stukenberg; it is quite a relief when your friend publishes a novel and it is actually good.
I did read several that came out last year. One of my favorites of these was The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller, which is a warm story about an extremely cold place. I enjoyed Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. I finished Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr and thought it was quite good at some things but somewhat unsatisfying in the end, a bit too controlled I think. I also felt this way about Doerr’s last novel, All the Light We Cannot See, which I also liked with reservations.
Another one I was mixed on was Stephen King’s 2022 novel Fairy Tale, which I guess I would not be among my top … 20? 30? … Stephen King novels.
Instead of reading new 2022 books, lately I have been reading some novels about the Civil War. I loved Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, hated Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, didn’t have strong feelings about The Red Badge of Courage.
Other non-new books: I liked Klara and the Sun a lot last year, so this year I went back and read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and my friends, it is darkly funny in addition to being quite sad.
A great intellectual history I read this year was The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand, which is very dense but which is at least more fun than its title suggests. A great history-history book I’ve recently started is War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914–1918 by Michael Kazin.
Happy New Year, friends.