As Tamara Palmer recently pointed out, there were many criminally overlooked albums in 2008. TV on the Radio's Dear Science wasn't one of them. Earning the top spot on lists released by Spin, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, MTV, Entertainment Weekly, and Pitchfork, the band also dominated the cultural landscape with frenetic appearances on Leno and Letterman. Despite many naysayers' past claims that they "don't get" TV on the Radio, the band seems to have outgrown the stigma brought by membership in the explosively trendy, hater-baiting Williamsburg scene of the early 2000s that included other such unfairly maligned bands as Liars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I've never really understood this; I mean, sure founder member/producer Dave Sitek's production can be chilly, but it's always balanced by passionate vocals from Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, as well as those oft-neglected rock and roll standbys: bass, guitar, and drums. Digging deeper, the lyrics thrill the brain's most basic linguistic receptors with delectable word-sounds while simultaneously giving more thoughtful brain-parts something substantive to chew on.

This has all been true since their full-length debut, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes (2004). So why are they just getting their accolades now? You've probably read a lot about how the band has changed. As prefaced by Return to Cookie Mountain (2006), Dear Science moves towards a more pop sound while retaining all that makes the band unique. Much like SuicideGirls redefines beauty with hot naked weirdos, TVOTR has presented pop music in a more nuanced, but equally pleasing package. Many fine writers have described these changes in detail. What interests me more at this point is how we ourselves have changed. A generation of young impressionables have grown up along with this band, whether or not they were active fans.

In terms of understanding how great music grows together with a generation, this was one of my first experiences with the phenomenon. It started in 2002 with Ok Calculator, a TVOTR demo not very many people heard. Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, which hit the streets two years later, got the music world buzzing, but TVOTR didn't break through to the mainstream until their major label debut in 2006, and in the two years since, have grown near and dear to pretty much every rock nerd and young urbanite. "Wolf Like Me," their first widely successful single (it was in a videogame and featured on Dennis Leary's Rescue Me TV show), still makes bars full of awkward twenty-somethings do the Snoopy dance each time it plays. It's virtually inescapable, but unlike most pop hits, does not make you want to claw your eardrums out upon the hundredth listen. It also makes people reflect back on 2006, which, although it wasn't that long ago, already seems like a much different time in the world. Where were you the first time you saw it performed? Many Americans were watching Letterman:



I was at Brooklyn's McCarren Pool on a grey summer day, having my heart ripped out by my college boyfriend for the third and final time. Through the rain and the tears, I heard some fucking good music.

Unlike the one-trick emos of my youth, this band reflected the animalistic heft of my emotions without turning it into silly melodrama. On stage were five fully-grown men, reasonably dressed, making music as pathos-laden as it was well-crafted. Of course, I didn't think in those terms at the time; I was too busy seeking shelter and trying to stop my unsightly sobs from ruining my face and scaring everyone around me. But looking back, it was kind of a special moment: I realized you can grow up (and out of a certain ne'er-do-well) without losing the stuff that makes you recognizable to yourself. This seems pretty obvious, but I don't think I really "got it" until then.

I don't know if anyone else got downsized out of someone's life that day, but I'm guessing at least a few of you have listened to TVOTR in the aftermath of a dumping, and know what I'm talking about. Two years later, our word-of-mouth networks and love for the band have solidified, and when Dear Science came along, we were listening.

Then there is the fact that Dear Science says a lot of what Americans, not just young Americans, but all of us, are feeling right now better than we could articulate it for ourselves. It's almost as if TVOTR vocalists Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe had a mental checklist of our current hopes and fears when they were writing the lyrics. Ambivalence about technology? Frustration with modern liberalism? Tentative hope for the future despite all signs pointing to just how fucked we are? Check, check, and check. Like any American with a brain and a pulse, these guys are thinking a lot about these issues, obsessively researching them on the internet ("When [Kyp] was writing his songs for the album, I think he was Googling a lot of things," Tunde told The Brooklyn Rail) and dreaming fitfully of the Apocalypse. And like any good rock band, they've made an album about what they're currently feeling, which is, not by accident, what a lot of us are feeling: uncomfortable malaise brought on by the suspicion that generations worth of "progress" has brought us no closer to peace and understanding than we were back in the Stone Age.

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Or, as Tunde says in the soulfully critical rager "DLZ":

At the same time, the single "Golden Age," which claims, "There's a golden age comin' round," indulges our most optimistic impulses. We are a nation tired -- fucking exhausted -- of believing we're doomed by factors beyond our control. A lot of otherwise smart, skeptical people are uncharacteristically giddy about the election of Barack Obama because really, what do we have to lose? We could continue down the same crappy path, or we could take a chance on someone who has promised to get shit done in ways that do not involve killing, torturing, or otherwise denying human beings their basic rights (and he'll be even cooler when he stands up for gay people). Although he doesn't go as far as Tunde in comdenming liberal complacency, he has at least payed lip service to the idea.

And that's another itch this album scratches: it goes where Barack Obama can't. The good thing about being an artist, and not a politician, is that you can explore sentiments like "God damn America!" without fear of career-ending reprisals. In fact, it's an artist's job to do that. We are right to be cynical, and, at the same time, we're right to be hopeful. Dear Science expresses our many shades of honest ambivalence the way no serious politician could. It doesn't just dominate the music landscape of 2008; it is 2008. Top it all off with a heartening song about awesome sex in which no one gets exploited and the female orgasm is celebrated with jingle bells and a full marching band, and there you have it: our collective subconscious in convenient mp3 form. And that's something not even the old fusties at Rolling Stone can deny.