My favorite albums of 2024
Why do I do this?
I’ve asked myself that question a lot while putting together this year’s favorite albums list.
The clearest answer, I think, is appreciation. Artists and their respective producers, record labels, studio mangers, etc., spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours meticulously crafting musical narratives to share with the world. The least I can do to show my appreciation for the hours upon hours I spent listening to those pieces of art is spend an afternoon writing about them.
This year’s list of my favorite such albums is, per usual, in no particular order, besides the last album — which holds its No. 10 spot as my particular favorite of 2024. What a year for music it was.
1.) The Pilgrim, Their God and The King of My Decrepit Mountain - Tapir!
This year’s list starts with its latest inclusion.
In the weeks I spent vacillating over which 10 records to include, I found myself with 9 surefire favorites and 1 spot constantly up in the air. (Please refer to the ‘Other Favorites’ section at the bottom for a host of other contenders.)
As I spent time listening back to old playlists and reading through my favorite albums shortlist (I use the term loosely), I thought I had it figured out — right up until the second weekend of January, when The Pilgrim, Their God and The King of My Decrepit Mountain (Heavenly Recordings), an album released almost exactly 12 months prior, burst forward again.
The album radiates warmth, a Springtime energy captured in its Windows background-esque cover art. Its often simplistic, folky songs are structured into three acts: Act 1 (The Pilgrim), Act 2 (Their God), and Act 3 (The King of My Decrepit Mountain). The names of those acts, and the album itself, conjure medieval images. One can picture a lone traveler set out on a sort of pilgrimage, recounting the places, people, things, and parts of themselves they discover along the way.
This theme is heard clearly on the record’s third song, “Swallow,” where Ike Gray, vocalist for the group, sings in first person, toward the end of the track, of discovering a swallow “with broken wings and a face that’s narrow” while walking home.
The swallow calls the character and “takes [them] over,” crying their name, backwards, before flying away “without words.”
“Now I know my name, and it no longer hurts,” sings Gray, the last line of the song.
That imagery, of coming into contact with some sort of natural, almost God-like thing — sometimes an animal, sometimes nature, sometimes the nether itself — that then unlocks a new internal understanding, fills the whole record. Sometimes that “God” can be as simple as “cheap after shave” or a “2,000-pound laptop” — “It’s your imagination that you’ve found.” (Lyrics from “My God,” a song from the album’s third act.)
A poetic, breathing exploration of the self with and against nature, which pulls themes from the Bible, folkloric myths, and Walt Whitman poems, The Pilgrim, Their God, and The King of My Decrepit Mountain is an excellent soundtrack for Spring, or for anytime you find yourself wondering just why there’s so much majesty in the natural world.
Favorite tracks: On A Grassy Knoll (We’ll Bow Together), Eidolon, My God
2.) Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace - Shabaka
I’ve known the artist Shabaka, full name Shabaka Hutchings, best for his work with a trio of London-based contemporary jazz fusion groups — The Comet Is Coming, Shabaka and the Ancestors, and Sons Of Kemet, the latter of which released one of my favorite jazz albums of all time in 2018’s Your Queen Is A Reptile.
But we’re not here to talk about any of Hutchings’ work with those groups (although we will revisit Sons Of Kemet later on this list). Rather, we’re here to appreciate the singular artist Shabaka and his second full-length solo record, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (Impulse! Records).
Shabaka is a multi-instrumentalist of primarily wind instruments. His saxophone and clarinet playing stand out on records from Sons Of Kemet, Shabaka and the Ancestors, and The Comet Is Coming. But Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, is all about Shabaka’s flute playing — and boy is it beautiful.
Whereas Hutchings boldly explores themes centered around 21st-century Afro-futurism through his work with Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, is a restrained and introspective meditation, always guided by Shabaka’s flute.
The flute flutters over a host of fantastic features spread throughout the nearly 47-minute record. Those features are in no way repetitive, however. The London-based flutist pulls together a diverse array of artists to contribute to Perceive Its Beauty, starting with Moses Sumney on the third track “Insecurities,” to Floating Points (who we’ll return to below) and Laraaji on “I’ll Do Whatever You Want,” to E L U C I D on “Body To Inhabit,” my favorite feature of the bunch, plus several others.
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace cemented its place amongst my favorite albums of 2024 as I listened through its 11 wonderfully composed, beautifully performed, and intricately expressed tracks while driving through the rolling hills of Western Kansas along a simple two-lane highway, just as the sun was setting, throwing golden hues over the forests and fields. It’s a musical experience I’ll never forget, one as simple but beautiful as the record that gave it life.
Favorite tracks: Insecurities (feat. Moses Sumney), Body To Inhabit (feat. E L U C I D), Living (feat. Eska)
3.) Charm - Clairo
There’s something very basic about Charm. Clairo’s voice doesn’t stun; in fact, it’s rather muted. Most of the instrumentals are relatively simplistic, jazzy, made up mostly of strings and keys, with drums pushed slightly forward in the mixes. The album doesn’t come with a whole lot of personality, in general.
Basic, in this case, is very, very good. Like a well-worn pair of suede pants or an heirloom brown velvet couch, when I put on Charm (Clairo Records LLC), I feel cozy, at home. Track by track, Charm invites the listener in and surrounds them with familiarity — easy, laid-back vocals, well-performed, sleek instrumentation, familiar lyrical themes.
Take Charm’s ninth song, “Echo,” for instance. A fusion of extended electric organ chords, vaguely distorted vocals that sound almost far away, a repetitive drum pattern driven by a ride cymbal, plucky guitar, subtle flute lines, and, toward the end, a brief, repeating bass solo pattern — its sound, I think, best expresses the warm, homey vibes of the record.
Its transition into “Glory of the Snow,” my favorite song on Charm, is fantastic, too, a high-pitched organ chord giving way to the plucky piano melody that makes up most of the song, Charm’s second-to-last track, inspired by the Alessi Brother’s 1976 hit “Seabird.”
“Terrapin,” a sultry blend of tinkling keys, subtle but persistent bass, and dynamic drums, is another standout, coming right before “Juna,” famous for its iconic synth melody that repeats several times throughout the song. While certainly simple, the more you listen, the more you discover intricate sounds tucked within Charm’s instrumentals, which layer like blankets over Clairo’s vocals.
Any album that feels like it would be best listened to on a turntable, possibly while lying gently on a felt rug, even more while sipping a glass of merlot, is excellent to me. Charm certainly exudes that vibe, and more.
Favorite tracks: Terrapin, Add Up My Love, Glory of the Snow
4.) Cascade - Floating Points
Sam Shepherd, the man behind Floating Points, is my favorite progressive electronica artist working right now. His 5-hour Boiler Room set, where Shepherd is constantly flicking through cases of records, blending together various genres into an effortless fusion as crowd members float in and out behind him, is one of my favorite performances of 2024. 2021’s Promises, performed with saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, is one of the albums of the decade, I think.
Cascade, Shepherd’s fifth studio album under Floating Points, is the London artist’s best standalone project to date.
It’s not hard to picture Shepherd performing Cascade (Pluto Records) as one extended set, much like his Boiler Room, most probably hosted in a low-ceilinged hall that seemingly goes on forever, the crowd a mass of bodies extending endlessly into the distance from the soundboard where Shepherd conducts.
Thankfully, Cascade is just as enjoyable a listen in a sweaty dance hall as it is sitting on the couch with a good pair of headphones, or working from a posh downtown café, or running — an activity I’ve particularly enjoyed doing while making my way through the album’s 9 tracks.
The standout, for me, is “Del Oro,” a roughly 6-minute pulsating blend of hypnotic bass, repetitive synths, driving hi-hats, and subtle vocal interjections. The track builds over a series of breaks, four distinct segments, each more expansive than the last, until all the sounds slowly drone away and you’re left asking, “Was that seriously only 6 minutes?”
Ocotillo, the longest track on Cascade at nearly 9 minutes, follows a different structure. Driven by the samplings of harpist Miriam Adefris, the tune plucks away slowly for roughly 4 minutes, building a retinue of sounds around the harp melody that guides the track’s introduction. A cacophony of somewhat disjointed electronics continue to build until around the 6-minute mark, where we get our first taste of real heaviness on the track, which transforms it into a drum-and-bass-like industrial fusion — a far cry from where the song started 8 minutes earlier.
Ocotillo, Cascade’s 6th track, exemplifies the electronic variety Shepherd displays on the record. While 57 minutes puts Cascade as one of the longest on this 10-album favorites list, the way Shepherd crafts each individual track and structures them into the broader album leaves no room for boredom or tediousness.
Rather, Cascade stands as an enthralling experience, whether it was the first time I put it on in my apartment or the dozenth time I listened to it out on a run.
5.) Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii
2024 was Doechii’s year — well, at least the second half of it.
In a year that saw brilliant releases from the likes of Vince Staples, Tyler, the Creator, ScHoolboy Q, and, of course, Kendrick Lamar, Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal (Top Dawg Entertainment), released in late August, stood out.
Alligator Bites Never Heal is a breakout 47-minute record of pure rap majesty. Blending South Florida boom-bap sounds (hear CATFISH and the remarkable single NISSAN ALTIMA) with sleek West Coast instrumentals (WAIT, BEVERLY HILLS, and SLIDE, the latter of which has one of the smoothest, most infectious beats I’ve ever heard), Doechii delivers impeccable performance after impeccable performance.
Sure, there are some tracks that are easier to gloss over than others (HIDE N SEEK and HUH!, for example). But Doechii’s charismatic delivery and personality pull the whole record together, tied around themes of womanhood, changing faces and places, and the pressures and pleasures of newfound fame.
I’ll be the first to admit I hadn’t heard anything of Doechii’s prior to checking out Alligator Bites Never Heal, even though I like to claim I was “early” in appreciating the L.A.-based artist. Now, after a phenomenal Tiny Desk Concert, appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and launch of a TV show, I’ll be eagerly anticipating what 2025 brings for one of the best artists I discovered in 2024.
Favorite tracks: CATFISH, DEATH ROLL, SLIDE
6.) Seed of a Seed - Haley Heynderickx
An album that came out pretty late in 2024, Oregon singer and songwriter Haley Heynderickx’s Seed of a Seed immediately captured my attention. It held it, too, for the two months between its release on November 1st and the turn of the year.
That’s largely because Seed of a Seed (Mama Bird Recording Co.) found me at the perfect time. I first listened to the record at nearly the same time as I began reading Braiding Sweetgrass. Written by ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, the novel explores “Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants,” per the description on the book’s cover. At the core of Braiding Sweetgrass is gratitude — learning to love, cherish, and give back to the land and all of its life, which Indigenous peoples have stewarded for hundreds upon hundreds of years, but which rampant exploration and expansion and the demands of capitalism have ravaged over and over again in recent centuries.
Like Braiding Sweetgrass, Seed of a Seed also explores gratitude, and other themes like family, love, and simplicity, but in a more intimate way. A cello solo and small chorus of strings punctuate the album’s title track, where Heynderickx sings of her parents, and their parents, and the lessons of life shared between generations.
“If I get lucky, maybe a simple life / If I get lucky, maybe some free time / If we don’t know better / If we don’t know, better / Well did my parents’ parents know better? / No, but they tried,” Heynderickx intones on the last chorus.
“Mouth of a Flower,” the next song, explores gratitude, in the form of taking and giving, directly. Different things — from ghosts, to a mussel underwater, to a mouth of a flower itself — “take, and they take, and they take,” Heynderickx sings, pulling in again themes of family and referring to the story of King Solomon, in which he gives his wife “all that she desired.”
Plants come to the forefront, as well, on the song “Redwoods (Anxious God),” where Heynderickx sings, to open the song, “My God, my ancient God / Well I couldn’t believe what the water had told me / That man and plant used to talk / Man, I’d do anything to hear the redwoods talk.”
Ultimately, I found that Seed of a Seed and Braiding Sweetgrass served as perfect complements to one another — the novel broader, tying society, science, and stories together to urge better care and understanding; the album narrower, sharing personal reflections on one’s connection to trees, long road trips, and home life to offer connection. Just as I’ll return to Braiding Sweetgrass again and again, I’ll regularly revisit Seed of a Seed, to hear anew the simple beauty of slowing down.
Favorite tracks: Seed of a Seed, Mouth of a Flower, Ayan’s Song
7.) Unusual Object - Josh Johnson
There should probably be more jazz on this list. If, in future years, I decide to write about 15 albums, or go crazy and expand to 20, then there certainly will be. But of all the new jazz releases I listened to in 2024, saxophonist Josh Johnson’s Unusual Object stood apart.
Based out of Los Angeles, Johnson has played with many of my other favorite musicians working right now — Jeff Parker, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Makaya McCraven, to name a few. He’s also music directed for Leon Bridges and played on records by Harry Styles, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and others. Needless to say, Johnson’s collaborations are expansive, but his solo projects, comparatively, are narrow.
His first solo project, 2020’s Freedom Exercise, was brilliant. 2024’s Unusual Object is quite different, more compositionally innovative, but just as excellent.
Johnson explains Unusual Object (Northern Spy Records) on his website as “a development and documentation of a more personal world of sound. What’s it like for me to create the context for my sound, to frame it myself?” It’s a near-40-minute “sparse work” (again stealing from the description on Johnson’s website) that’s centered wholly around the saxophone.
When I wrote “compositionally innovative” above, I’m in part referring to the record’s sparseness and in part to how Johnson manipulates his saxophone’s sound. Take “Marvis,” Unusual Object’s second track, for instance, where Johnson builds layers of saxophone sound around rather basic, repeating melodies, with small, improvisational interjections interspersed between. Bridges built by more elongated harmonies tie those repetitive sections together, and a subtle but persistent bass pulls the track along.
While “Marvis” is one of the fuller tracks on Unusual Objects, other moments on the album echo ambiance, like the peaceful “Deep Dark” or the bubbly “Local City of Industry.” “Quince,” the record’s fourth song and only one where Johnson invites a contributor to play the drum synth, is the one of the longest and most complex tracks, opening with a roughly 1-minute saxophone solo and then releasing into a series of single, beautifully elongated notes that then shoot upward into a glossier overarching harmony. On “Reddish,” Johnson strips everything back to give way for a 1:46 solo — just he and the listener.
The first time I heard “Quince,” I was left awestruck by just the sound of it. They were sounds unlike anything I had really heard before, all created by the saxophone. In that sense, it feels a bit weird to describe Unusual Object as a pure “jazz” album. Freedom Exercise certainly was, in the more traditional sense.
Unusual Object, though? It is just as Johnson himself described it, “a more personal world of sound,” a world that I immersed myself within over and over throughout 2024.
8.) I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU - JPEGMAFIA
When I think of artists making music right now who have the clearest voices, the clearest perception of who they are, where they exist within the broader spectrum of whatever genres or pseudo-genres they make music within, JPEGMAFIA seems to stand alone in the world of hip-hop.
Blending eccentric samples with industrial, harsh production and witty, almost corny lyricism, JPEGMAFIA has carved out his own space within contemporary hip-hop. His live shows, constant references to pop culture and political trends, and odd-ball fashion pull the whole image together.
So too does PEGGY’s productivity. Since 2018’s breakout album Veteran, he’s released seven albums, included 2023’s Danny Brown collab SCARING THE HOES, alongside an abundance of singles, remixes, and features. The prolific producer simply puts out music.
I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU is far and away my favorite JPEGMAFIA project. I, unlike a lot of friends, didn’t love SCARING THE HOES. LP! and All My Heroes Are Cornballs are my other two preferred PEGGY projects; I embarrassingly haven’t spent enough time with VETERAN to have a firm opinion on it.
But ILDMLFY (PEGGY) sounds unique from LP!, All My Heroes Are Cornballs, SCARING THE HOES, and other recent PEGGY albums. Many of its songs are longer and more fleshed out than the collections on other projects. “Exmilitary,” the longest track, opens with an almost circus-like blend of piano chords before, about 1:20 in, falling into the beat that carries the majority of the rest of the track. Denzel Curry features on “JPEGULTRA!,” another longer track where Denzel takes over the first verse in his typical boisterous, aggressive style. “Don’t Put Anything On the Bible,” ILDMLFY’s second-to-last song, features Buzzy Lee and a plucky guitar, what’s a sparser, more introspective cut.
While JPEGMAFIA isn’t new to introspective lyrics, the end of ILDMLFY feels like PEGGY at his most introspective. The project starts with a bang, a series of high-energy cuts that weave heavy guitar riffs into bombastic arena bass like on “SIN MIEDO” or off-kilter industrial sounds like on “New Black History,” which includes a verse from Vince Staples. But while the beginning is heavy and hard, the end of ILDMLFY is lighter and softer.
The way PEGGY pulls those sensations together on the 41-minute project is brilliant; “either on or off the drugs,” the album’s 11th track and one of its best, acts as a perfect sort of segue to the introspective culmination.
And, in typical JPEGMAFIA fashion, the sounds don’t stop — a director’s cut of I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU is due out soon. Thank God. Thank PEGGY.
Favorite tracks: I’ll Be Right There, Exmilitary, either on or off the drugs
9.) Cutouts - The Smile
Let me start my thoughts on Cutouts with a caveat: Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood, two parts of Radiohead and now also The Smile, are weirdos. Yorke walked off stage in Australia in anger last year when faced with pro-Palestine chants from the audience. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame recently tore into Yorke over such a response. Radiohead, going back further, has come under scrutiny for continuing to play gigs in Israel after receiving backlash from fans. I’m well aware of all of this and loathe Yorke and Greenwood for it. Palestine should be free, and support for the Israeli state means support for genocide.
Notwithstanding Yorke and, largely by association, Greenwood’s abysmal contemporary geopolitical stances, the pair — alongside drummer Tom Skinner — have made some of excellent free-ranging, punchy, contemporary rock music in the past few years under The Smile. Of The Smile’s three full-length projects, Cutouts, released in early October, is my favorite.
That’s in large part thanks to Skinner’s playing. Skinner, a London-based drummer, was one of the founding members of Sons of Kemet (see the write up on Shabaka’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace above for more on Sons of Kemet) and has collaborated with numerous other artists, as well as producing his own solo work. His playing is deeply rhythmic, using space intentionally to create infectious patterns that carry entire tracks by themselves.
“Eyes & Mouth” may be the best example of that on Cutouts (Self Help Tapes LLP). The song opens with Skinner’s drums, a march-like snare pattern that never seems to fully settle in throughout the track’s roughly 4-minute run time. Yet, despite its refusal to fall into a typical repetitive pattern, Skinner’s blend of marching snare, riding cymbal, and specific hi-hat flourishes create an enveloping rhythmic soundscape that I could listen to over and over and over.
In contrast, Skinner relies on a steady, driving pattern on “No Words,” the album’s second-to-last track, which builds and kicks in in full about 1:15 into the song. The almost swing-y hi-hat pattern, syncopated bass, and constant snare punches have made the track one of my favorites to play on my little home electronic drum kit.
Stepping away from the drums for a moment, the instrumental stylings on Cutouts are at times dark and heavy, like on “No Words,” at times airy and sparse, like on “Tiptoe,” and at times bright and warm, like “Instant Psalm” — another great drum cut that highlights the way Skinner uses space to create beautiful rhythms.
In that sense, The Smile largely echoes Radiohead, a group that you can’t quite pin into one particular category of rock music and that offers a sweeping diversity of sounds and themes throughout projects that feel long but are in fact relatively short — Cutouts is just under 45 minutes and feels closer to what Radiohead sounds like on OK Computer or even 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool.
If you’re familiar with The Smile, you might ask, “Why is Cutouts on this list and not Wall of Eyes, which of course came out in the same year, albeit much earlier, Jacob?” In response, I’ll return to Skinner’s drumming.
While I do think many of the instrumental compositions on Wall of Eyes are better than those on Cutouts (notably “Teleharmonic” and “Bending Hectic”), Skinner’s playing on Cutouts, in combination with the depth and variety of Yorke and Greenwood’s own playing on the record, put it over the top.
Favorite tracks: Instant Psalm, No Words, Bodies Laughing
10.) #RICHAXXHAITIAN - Mach-Hommy
If this year’s albums list could have a theme, it’s sound. Think of the peaceful, reflective flute stylings of Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the thumping electronics of Cascade, the layers of saxophone on Unusual Object, the industrial, glitchy, sample-heavy instrumentals of I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, or the rhythmic, standout drumming on Cutouts.
It feels a bit strange to lump a lyrics-forward hip-hop project among those instrumental-forward albums, some of which are devoid of any substantive lyricism altogether. Such is the case, however, with Mach-Hommy’s #RICHAXXHAITIAN.
Released in mid-May, #RICHAXXHAITIAN (Mach-Hommy) dominated my summer listening — and much of my fall and winter listening, as well. That’s because Mach-Hommy, an artist I had only heard of but hadn’t delved into before, built 47 minutes of incredibly dense lyrical artistry and complex instrumentals into #RICHAXXHAITIAN.
One thing Mach-Hommy didn’t do, however, is make the actual lyrics on #RICHAXXHAITIAN easy to understand. The artist eschews record labels and traditional music publicization in favor of hyper-targeted, small-scale physical releases and opaque wider digital releases — opaque in the sense that Mach-Hommy seem to intentionally make his lyrics difficult to comprehend.
In fact, they aren’t found anywhere online. A Genius search won’t pull up any results. Fans are left largely in the dark, meaningful lyrical engagement only accessible through repeated listens.
Repeated listens I did, and I’m still left far short of being able to decipher many, many words throughout #RICHAXXHAITIAN. Most infamous for this lyrical opaqueness is Mach’s second verse on the title track, the album’s 12th song, an endless stream of words that flow together in a way that’s nearly impossible to make out in any detail.
That gets to the point about sound, and why I group #RICHAXXHAITIAN among those other albums on this list — on #RICHAXXHAITIAN, Mach-Hommy uses words less as lyrics to share stories or introspective poetics, and more as another instrumental layer in and of themselves. I may not know exactly what I’m saying when I stumble my way through Mach’s second verse on the title track, but its flow — its sound — layers over the underlying beat like a worn but well-crafted blanket.
Using words more for their sound than for their content doesn’t mean #RICHAXXHAITIAN is completely indecipherable, or that it’s devoid of lyrical substance. Take SUR LE PONT d’AVIGNON (Reparation #1), the album’s 7th track featuring Sam Gendel, a brilliant contemporary saxophonist, for instance. Its title translates to “On the bridge of Avignon” and is pulled from a 15th century French song about a dance performed on the titular bridge.
See, as the album’s title would suggest, much of Mach-Hommy’s lyrical content revolves around Haiti — its history as a French colony, its march toward freedom during the Haitian Revolution, and modern image as a country in constant turmoil.
Coming from a country surrounded but such history and strife directly influences Mach-Hommy’s artistic image, constantly masked, with a gravely, hard-to-understand voice, and lyrical content. On SUR LE PONT d’AVIGNON, Mach raps to open the track:
“I’m a warrior, ma, I’m not a killer / My emporium consortium been sliding with accordions all around the village / Shorties talking about the pillars / Vic-torious, in the auditorium according to all the volunteering / Warden off the spot, surveillance / Colder water hide and then scare em / Tomblerone for all my toyas, taught em how to share it / Mobile phones for all my lawyers, want a lot of hearings / Brought up on amoxicillin / Started from the top of the ceiling.”
The italicized parts in the above lyrics are bits that I, even after dozens of repetitions, couldn’t exactly decipher. Those are my best guesses.
That’s part of the beauty, though. Someone else who listens to that same verse may interpret those lines completely differently. The verse continues, too, with Mach incorporating French and Arabic into his lines. It becomes even more difficult to decipher as it continues.
You could spend countless hours going song-by-song, close listening to pull out individual words and extract deeper meanings from Mach’s lyrics. Even after what’s probably my 100th listen through #RICHAXXHAITIAN in writing this review I’m still discovering little turns of phrase, words that hadn’t appeared to me before but suddenly stand out now.
#RICHAXXHAITIAN, like Mach-Hommy himself, is shrouded in layers of complexity, intentionally indecipherable, openly opaque. Like any great work of art, what’s left unsaid — or, in this case, unclear — is what’s most important, and what keeps anyone interacting with the art wanting to come back.
Mach blends lyrical complexity, words as expressions of sounds, with palatable beats produced by a host of excellent producers, from Conductor Williams to Chris Keys to, on the title track, KAYTRANADA, all with some absolutely incredible features — Black Thought’s verse on COPY COLD is absolutely brilliant, but you wouldn’t expect anything less from one of the best lyricists of all time.
The project is not just my favorite hip-hop record of 2024, but my favorite album, and favorite work of art, from last year, period.
Favorite tracks: SUR LE PONT d’AVIGNON (Reparation #1), COPY COLD, LON LON
Other Favorites
Wall of Eyes - The Smile
Imaginal Disk - Magdalena Bay
empathogen - WILLOW
Method Actor - Nilüfer Yanya
The Room - Fabiano do Nascimento, Sam Gendel
Romance - Fontaines D.C.
Absolute Elsewhere - Blood Incantation
You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To - Knocked Loose
Great Doubt - Astrid Sonne
BRAT - Charli XCX
Endlessness - Nala Sinephro
13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips - Xiu Xiu
Dark Times - Vince Staples
My favorite albums of 2023
I know. I’m late. 2023 was a weird year. Please give me some grace. // At least I didn’t cheat, again, in this list; there are only 10 albums below, as it should be. // I picked out my top three albums from 2023 a while ago, but narrowing the rest of the list down to just 10 records was a challenge. // As always, my top album is listed last. The other two of my top three come just before. The rest of the list is in no particular order. // I don’t have anything else remarkable to say. I’m late enough as it is — let’s just get into it. // Here are my 10 favorite albums from 2023.
1.) Lahai - Sampha
Let’s start this year’s this list in a dream.
That’s how I listen to Lahai (Young Records), the second full-length album from London-based musician Sampha. Maybe it’s because the first lyrics you hear on the 41-minute record are “Wake up…”, which come right before a disjointed voice cuts in, sharply, introducing a theme that’ll permeate throughout the rest of the album — time.
The first song, Stereo Colour Cloud (Shaman’s Dream), does also have “dream” in its title. The track ends by returning to that theme, with the same stark voice from the beginning returning to almost chant: “Time flies, life issues. / Back forward, I miss you.” The womanly voice chanting those words floats in-and-out with a male voice, almost like two people talking together but over one another.
Stereo Colour Cloud sets the tone, thematically and instrumentally, for the rest of Lahai. Intricate drum patterns cut through instrumentals built largely around the human voice, with Sampha’s own always leading the way. You’ll constantly hear subdued voices cut in at different parts of the record, like disembodied vocalists drifting through a dream, joined by full choruses that dominate certain parts of songs.
Sampha’s production layers all those different voices brilliantly throughout Lahai. Piano, of course, features prominently as well, most notably on the moody third song Dancing Circles.
There are some pop-leaning songs on Lahai, like the fourth track Suspended and the standout of the bunch (in my opinion) Only. Those are joined by more introspective tunes, heard mostly toward the end of the album, like the fully instrumental Wave Therapy and What If You Hypnotise Me?, featuring French-Martiniquan singer Léa Sen. The last song, Rose Tint, calls back to the sounds on the record’s intro.
Sampha is a singular songwriter and producer, and his dreamy Lahai is a standout work.
Favorite tracks: Suspended, Jonathan L. Seagull, Only
2.) 3D Country - Geese
I live in New Mexico. Does everyone know that? Well, now we all do.
New Mexico is a starkly Western state, known for its varied and rugged landscapes and singular laidback culture (Land of Mañana, yeah?). But advanced, world-changing technologies, most notably the atomic bomb, have put the state on the national map. It’s an interesting contrast, to say the least.
Geese, the Brooklyn-based rock band, plays on that contrast in 3D Country (Partisan Records), an album that attracted me in 2023 thanks in large part, I think, to my time spent living in the Land of Enchantment (another fun nickname, no?).
3D Country starts with a bang. We’re immediately introduced to the fantastical vocals of lead singer Cameron Winter. If you’re familiar with country singer-songwriter Orville Peck, Winter’s singing doesn’t sound too dissimilar — sort of like Peck turned up to 11.
Winter’s singing carries the album. That’s not surprising given how distinct it is. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve heard anything like it. Impassioned, cathartic, theatrical — I think the latter is the best way to describe the sound. The vocals let Winter play a character throughout 3D Country, a sort of lost, histrionic soul (think, maybe, Billy Crystal in the movie City Slickers), caught up in his own misconceptions and false idols. (Religion/idolatry is one theme on the record; alienation/love another.)
But just because Winter’s singing is the most prominent sonic feature on 3D Country doesn’t mean the prog-rock instrumentals don’t also kick ass. Third track Cowboy Nudes is possibly the most interesting one on 3D Country, given the punctuated groove that kicks off the song, the chaotic breakdown in the middle and return to the groove — this time with a cowbell! — to end. Undoer and Mysterious Love are other sonic standouts.
The record features some brilliant lyricism, as well. Take this line from Cowbody Nudes — “Honey, kick off your pants / We’re living in the future” — or this one from Tomorrow’s Crusades — “Even now, I remember, I can recall / Never can my hands forget her, taking it all / Teeth a-parted, eyes bianca, eating the world from her giant paws / Lightning struck your evil hunger, mother-of-pearl grow big and tall” — as two examples.
I love over-the-top, theatrical records. (See Spelling’s The Turning Wheel from 2021 or Jens Lekman’s The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom from 2022 as examples) 3D Country is just that. I’ll use the phrase again — this record kicks ass.
Favorite tracks: 3D Country, Mysterious Love, Tomorrow’s Crusades
3.) Dogsbody - Model/Actriz
Let’s stick in the rock-esque genre for our next record, Dogsbody, the first full-length album by another Brooklyn-based group, Model/Actriz.
As soon as I listened to Dogsbody (True Panther Records), I knew it’d find a place on this list. Released in late February, Dogsbody is another theatrical record, this time with a clearer through-line.
Iin its near 40-minute run time, Dogsbody is a dramatic sonic exploration of an anarchic night out. It’s intense, almost suffocating at times, evoking a mass of throbbing sweat-drenched bodies stuffed into a dark room that’s pulsating with energy. (OK, calm down Jacob. Christ.)
The transition from Crossing Guard, the album’s third track, into Slate, is maybe my favorite of the year. Crossing Guard builds and builds and builds — that sense of suffocation — before releasing into a chiming, repetitive drum and guitar pattern that carries Slate throughout its three-minute-and- 23-second run time.
Divers, the fifth track, and the two final songs, Sleepless and Sun In, are the only respites we get from the pulsating energy that starts about one minute into the album. They’re welcome respites, too; the intensity of Dogsbody might be too much without.
Speaking of the record’s last song, Sun In is one of my favorite closers of 2023. There’s a grating, almost blade-like guitar sound amongst a series of twinkling bells, high-up in the air. Vocalist Cole Haden then comes in, after a deep breath, almost speaking: “The city put itself together / Today I went so far across it / Passing through the places we went / I followed them to the river’s edge”; it ends with Haden speaking, again, repeatedly: “So bright with the sun in my eyes.”
The super calm, hangover-like Sun In sharply contrasts the rest of Dogsbody, what is an intense, “bacchanalian” (please look that up), lustful album. “Pulsating,” again, might be the best way to describe it. It’s a really engrossing listen that pulls you in to a heavy, HEAVY night out.
4.) The Omnichord Real Book - Meshell Ndegeocello
Unlike Dogsbody, which I immediately knew would be a favorite, Meshell Ndegeocello’s The Omnichord Real Book took some growing on me. And, hey, that’s OK.
Ndegeocello’s Blue Note Records debut, The Omnichord Real Book is — by some distance — the longest album on my list at just under one hour and 15 minutes. Maybe that’s why it took me comparably longer to digest.
It’s also the most sonically unique record on here. It’s definitely jazzy and features a number of my favorite contemporary jazz artists — Jeff Parker, Josh Johnson, Brandee Younger, to name a few. But it incorporates spoken word, soul, bits of R&B and funk, orchestral arrangements. Jazz is one of the most categorically flexible genres, and The Omnichord Real Book is a true testament to that.
When I say this album took me a while to digest, it’s in part because of its sonic range, in part because of its length, and in part because jazz — or jazz-encompassing — records always take me a while to wrap my arms around. That’s often what makes reaching a point of understanding with certain jazz-like albums so rewarding.
Once you dig into it, you find The Omnichord Real Book has some excellent nuggets. What it lacks in one clear thematic throughline, it more than makes up for with countless bits of instrumental flourishes or sage lyrical wisdom. Noticeable themes that do emerge throughout the record are Afrofuturism (i.e. Virgo, The 5th Dimension), sex and love (i.e. Good Good), and growth and learning (i.e. ASR, Towers).
It’s no surprise The Omnichord Real Book took home the Grammy award for Best Alternative Jazz Album. It’s more than deserving, a record equally enticing when listened directly through or on shuffle.
Favorite tracks: Clear Water (feat. Deantoni Parks, Jeff Parker, Sanford Biggers), ASR (feat. Jeff Parker), Virgo (feat. Brandee Younger, Julius Rodriguez)
5.) O Monolith - Squid
Squid. Squid!
Squid finally gets its moment on one of my favorite albums lists. That’s not because I’m not a big, big fan of previous Squid albums. Bright Green Field is excellent. Narrator, the choice cut off Bright Green Field, found its way onto my Spotify Wrapped in 2021. I’ve listened to — and thoroughly enjoyed — a lot of Squid.
But O Monolith (Warp Records) pushes the Brighton-based band into a new level for me. In my favorite albums of 2021 list, when writing about Black Country, New Roads’ For the first time, I grouped Squid alongside the aforementioned BC,NR and Black Midi — all post prog rock-sounding outfits from the U.K. with distinct but overlapping sounds. That association is fine, for what it’s worth, but with BC,NR on a seeming hiatus and with Black Midi reaching for a more avant-garde style with recent releases, Squid have stepped squarely into an art rock sound that O Monolith captures excellently.
How do I define art rock? I don’t know. Most of my definitions are either borrowed directly from someone or from somewhere, or constructed from an amalgamation of different sources. Some of the albums Rate Your Music groups into the genre include Radiohead’s OK Computer, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, and Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Another is King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, the 1969 record I think most resembles O Monolith.
Enough definitions by way of comparison. O Monolith, of course, stands distinct among its rock counterparts. It’s built around a clear theme: A theatrical descent into Hell, or into some sort of visceral nightmare. Driven at times by lead singer and drummer Ollie Judge’s punctuating rhythms and vocals, the record ebbs and flows. It reaches in more sonic directions than Bright Green Field, but doesn’t lose itself down one path. It comes back together, centered around a punk, almost funk rock sound.
The crescendos throughout several songs on O Monolith (most notably Siphon Song and The Blades) give the album some absolute moments. I don’t have a better word to describe it. Just moments. Seriously, the transition from Siphon Song into Undergrowth is one of the best musical moments of the year for me. So too is the entire musical journey on which The Blades takes the listener.
I could go on about O Monolith. I’m really glad it exists. And maybe there’s a more apt genre description for Squid, per the artist’s Spotify page: Anxiety rock. (No wonder I love this album so much, right?!)
Favorite tracks: Siphon Song, Undergrowth, The Blades
6.) Javelin - Sufjan Stevens
What to write about Javelin?
Sufjan Stevens, an artist I’ve long loved and admired, released the 42-minute album shortly after undergoing treatment for Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a type of autoimmune disorder that caused Stevens to have to learn how to walk again, according to the artist.
And then, shortly after Javelin’s release, Stevens wrote that the album is dedicated to his late partner Evans Richardson, who Stevens said passed away in April 2023.
“He was an absolute gem of a person, full of life, love, laughter, curiosity, integrity, and joy. He was one of those rare and beautiful ones you find only once in a lifetime—precious, impeccable, and absolutely exceptional in every way,” Stevens wrote about Richardson.
Listening to Javelin (Asthmatic Kitty Records) with that context grants the record a sort of grandiosity. It’s a triumph, a moving exploration of what it means to love and what it means to lose — two themes Stevens certainly isn’t new to — over the course of 10 excellent songs.
Songs that don’t, in any way, wallow. They’re full of warmth and purpose, intricately composed with layers of light orchestral strings, plucky guitar and piano melodies, Stevens’ characteristic light and airy vocals, and an accentuating chorus of voices.
No single song better shows these layers of composition than Everything That Rises, Javelin’s fourth track. It starts with a very basic, very plucky guitar before Stevens starts singing: “Can you lift me up to a higher place? Forget everything that was before.” After a few more lines we hear the song’s chorus, which repeats three more times. Immediately after the first chorus ends, the orchestral strings join in. Then, in the second verse, the vocal chorus, a piano, and more extended strings join to create a more filled-out sound. But the third chorus pulls everything back. We return to just Stevens and a guitar, playing the song’s simple melody. Then, for the last one-and-a-half minutes or so, we hear a quirky mix of instrumentation and vocals, somewhat disjointed but pulled together by a repeating line — “Everything rises.”
Most of the songs follow a similar pattern — a simple opening, slowly building with added layers. Everything That Rises is the album’s second longest track at just under five minutes. The longest is Shit Talk, eight-and-a-half minutes, another standout composition on the record.
Javelin is Sufjan Stevens’ first full-length solo project since 2020. It’s shrouded in pain and loss, but always bright, almost buoyant, in its musical compositions and thematic explorations. It’s an invigorating listen that reminds me why I love and admire the songwriter so much.
Favorite tracks: Will Anybody Ever Love Me?, Everything That Rises, Shit Talk
7.) Alchemy - Disclosure
Music has the ability to rip you back to very specific moments in your life. When I hear certain songs I’m immediately transported to time spent biking through Chicago (see: Vince Staples by Vince Staples review from 2021), sitting on a beach by Lake Michigan (see: Lianne La Havas’ self-titled review from 2020), or driving on a two-lane highway through southwestern Kansas (sorry, no previous review here. the album that comes to mind with this setting, though, is Rachel Baiman’s Common Nation Of Sorrow).
Alchemy by Disclosure (Apollo Records) does the same thing for me, but with flying in particular. I traveled a decent bit last summer, a total of eight flights going between Albuquerque and Chicago and then Albuquerque and San Francisco. Alchemy, which was released on July 14, was my go-to takeoff soundtrack. I’ll always remember listening to Simply Won’t Do, the album’s second song, while watching the ground slowly peel farther and farther away, the aircraft accelerating faster and faster upward as the pulsating drum and bass thumped in my earbuds.
Alchemy’s third track, Higher Than Ever Before, does sort of hit the whole “flying” theme right on the head. So too does the brief interlude at the end of Looking For Love, the album’s first song, where you can hear a fictional flight attendant say, “Alchemy Airlines flight 369 is now ready to depart from gate 49 to Los Angeles,” before the sampled sound of an aircraft taking off transitions the song into the next. More justification for Alchemy being a great in-flight record.
But that doesn’t mean Disclosure’s standout electronic album is only good for those fifteen-odd minutes you’re soaring up to cruise altitude. The record is full of high-energy, scintillating tracks that flow together for a solid 37-minutes of listening time. The build up and drop after the third chorus of Go The Distance, for example, is brilliant. Alchemy’s last song, Talk On The Phone, is an absolute earworm, a feel-good sendoff to the album. Sun Showers, one of Alchemy’s few instrumental-only tracks, is full of spirit.
Alchemy is a wonderful listen for whatever space you find yourself in, really. But, I do heartily, heartily recommend, the next time you find yourself ready for takeoff, putting on the record and embracing the moment, forreal.
Favorite tracks: Looking For Love, Simply Won’t Do, Go The Distance
8.) I Killed Your Dog - L’Rain
In a late August interview with Pitchfork, the interviewer, Clover Hope, rightfully asks Taja Cheek — the name of the artist behind L’Rain — about the album title.
“It’s immediately jarring,” Hope says, rhetorically.
“I mean, it’s horrible, it’s horrible,” Cheek laughs in response. “But it also evokes so many things that I’m thinking about all at once. Like, is it empowerment? Is it like, you wronged me and I’m going to wrong you? Do I feel sorry about it? Do I not feel sorry about it? Am I evil? Am I not? Was it a mistake? We’ll see if people respond to it. Even if they don’t, I don’t want to be in a precious space as an artist.” (I’d recommend reading the full interview for more on that latter sentiment here.)
I Killed Your Dog (Mexican Summer), L’Rain’s third full length album, asks all of those questions and more in a 35-minute look into the confusing emotions that come with relationships, of any kind, whether it’s with an intimate partner or a school friend.
Musically, the album is guided by a sort of airy funk groove on most of the tracks, a soundscape that envelops, punctuated by harrowing synths and punchy drums. I find myself bobbing my head along to the groove on songs like Uncertainty Principle and 5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG), for example.
While an exploration of relationships and the feelings they illicit ties I Killed Your Dog together thematically, each track on the record explores that theme in a unique way. Take Pet Rock, the album’s third song, for instance. Hope, in the story on their interview with Cheek, writes that it sounds like a “skewed Strokes song.” That’s spot on. “You know I’m invisible,” Cheek sings to open the song. “Cut the bullshit and make me into something else.”
“Like a dead girl with shades on / Propped up by captors / I’m fine,” Cheek sings, later on. “I’ve got no one to talk to / It’s all my fault, I know.”
The next song, I Hate My Best Friends, plays like an angsty, overly dramatic teenager, with Cheek crooning, “I hate my best friends / ’Cause they want to fix me / I cannot be fixed, you see / ’Cause I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Then we head straight into the title track, I Killed Your Dog’s fifth song, and an immediate, much more serious tone. It’s an eerie, almost gut wrenching composition, sparse in its instrumentation, with Cheek repeating over and over “I killed your dog,” greeted with a horrific chuckle after she sings “It made me happy.” Then, at the end of the song, we hear Cheek sing, “I am your dog,” before returning to say “I killed your dog” twice more.
Those are only three choice songs from the total of 13 on the album, not counting the three interlude tracks that are all less than thirty seconds. You get a glimpse, just from those three, into the sonic and thematic territory I Killed Your Dog covers.
It’s not an easy listen. But it is an enthralling, introspective, at times scary, at others exhilarating (not necessarily mutually exclusive, I know) listen. For everything I Killed Your Dog packs into 35 minutes, it’s surprising the record didn’t land as my favorite this year. It was really close. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — a pair of pure hip-hop records just edged it out. And I mean just edged it out.
Favorite tracks: I Killed Your Dog, Uncertainty Principle, New Year’s UnResolution
9.) Burning Desire - MIKE
I slept on MIKE for a while. That wasn’t 100% intentional. I had listened to plenty of tracks either featuring the New York City rapper or by the New York City rapper featuring other people. Lossless, a The Alchemist-produced track with MIKE from 2021’s This Thing Of Ours 2, comes to mind.
But Burning Desire was the first full-length album by MIKE I listened through, intentionally. I had heard great things about his 2021 album Disco!, and even better things about his 2022 record Beware of the Monkey. It took until mid-November of last year until I finally made myself check out MIKE for real.
I’ve quickly come to realize that, besides this list’s tenth and final artist, there’s no other rapper producing music right who’s as prolific as MIKE.
He fosters a completely unique and distinct sound on Burning Desire (10k). The whole album, including MIKE’s vocals and the sample-heavy, oftentimes stuttering beats, sounds muffled, almost like it’s playing from the inside of a car you’re standing a few feet away from. But the songs retain their sonic quality, making that unique sound seem wholeheartedly intentional. Of course it is.
I’d be lying, though, if I said MIKE’s lyrics were always perfectly clear and easy to understand. They’re not. It takes, or at least it took for me, several listens through each song to pick out and appreciate what MIKE is saying. Does that make Burning Desire better? It certainly gives the listener more incentive to listen again.
And that’s partially what happened with me. I was struck at first by the unique sound described above. That made me want to come back. And then each time I did come back, I picked out more and more tidbits of lyricism, little turns of phrase I hadn’t noticed before. That’s the wonderful thing about most hip-hop records, especially those as dense as MIKE’s 50-minute-long Burning Desire.
I’ll pick out one example, because there are countless throughout the record. Below is the majority of the title track’s 30-second-odd verse.
“My Mama told me ‘bout this curse, how I was not above it / I honor her with every word and never swap the subject / Bottles clinking on the curb, think I’m out of budget / Naavin got me with the purse, think I gotta buzz him / The silent grieving never work why I reside to puffin’ / Just so I could be your person when I’m out in public / Someonе remind me that therе’s purpose in this life of wanting / All that whining be a burden or a sign we flunking / Ain’t been so hard to see my verdict was to die with nothin’ / Seen the worse from this service of my guideless loving / When we was huddled in this church where most had lied and fronted / All this time that I spent searching was the diamond cutting / Used to coddle up at Vernon like I’m dodging summons.”
If we had more time it’d be a fun exercise to dissect all the different rhyme patterns throughout just these eight lines, about half the song in its entirety. Suffice it to say, Burning Desire is packed full of similar rhymes, lyrics that twist together to spin tales of life in New York, family, friends — you name it, really.
The album even features Earl Sweatshirt. Need I say more?
Favorite tracks: plz don’t cut my wings - feat. Earl Sweatshirt, Burning Desire, Mussel Beach feat. El Cousteau and Niontay
10.) Maps - billy woods & Kenny Segal
Let me echo a sentiment from last year’s year end list here: billy woods is remarkable.
Aethiopes, one of two albums woods released in 2022, made its way on to that year’s list, although not near the top. woods released another two albums in 2023, and the first of those, Maps (Backwoodz Studioz), a collaboration with producer Kenny Segal, is my favorite record released last year.
billy woods has an almost uncanny ability to paint vivid scenes through his lyricism. I referenced that writing about Aethiopes last year, and Maps accentuates the point even clearer. Thematically, Maps, as the album’s name implies, is about travel and the psychology of an artist on the road. That theme is played out through the scenes woods paints throughout the record. Two in particular come to mind.
The first is on the song Soundcheck, the album’s third, which features Quelle Chris.
“I will not be at soundcheck / I will not be in the green room if it’s too lit / Could be at the local greasy spoon or Szechuan establishment / Courtyard by Marriott bathroom, blowing marijuana through the vents / Shower on, weed sauna, I will not be at soundcheck / But I might check in to keep ‘em honest.”
Another is on FaceTime, a track later on in the album that features Samuel T. Herring, lead singer of pop group Future Islands. (I’ll write the verse in full, it’s that good.)
“Three oboes, one clarinet / Black rainbows, the night wept / The room smelled like Marrakesh / Dubstep drift in the window, I sit at the desk / It’s a party outside, some half, some overdressed / They was goin’ off during Playboi Carti’s set / Now they in the halls, partyin’, checkin’ they phones / Bass shake the walls, I’m smokin’ alone in a cardigan / Thinkin’ of home / The cannabis single origin, waffle cone / Went back down to the bar again, wig blown / Afterparty packed like Parliament / Ass cheeks and cheekbones, lips slightly parted / Butter wouldn’t melt so I gave her margarine / I’m lookin’ like the help or someone who just wandered in / The vibe is animal pelts, chunky rings, clunky shoes, lots of ink / Dudes who order everybody’s drink / Really I’m just waiting for my phone to ping / I’m thinkin’ ‘bout you when I’m supposed to be thinkin’ ‘bout other things / I don’t go to sleep, I tread water ‘til I sink.”
The whole verse is a story. Especially that last line. The last couple of lines, really, which tie the whole story together. Put a bow on it, if you will.
billy woods is a masterful lyricist. Maps explores a clear theme that woods is able to enunciate excellently. It is, in my opinion, woods’ best project, and it’s the album I listened to the most in 2023. woods’ lyrics, Kenny Segal’s instrumentals, the story, the allure of the whole thing — there’s no doubt that Maps is my favorite record of 2023.
Favorite tracks: Soundcheck, Babylon By Bus, FaceTime
Honorable Mentions
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? - McKinley Dixon
Shook - Algiers
Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) - Yves Tumor
After the Magic - Parannoul
Raven - Kelela
Sundial - Noname
STRUGGLER - Genesis Owusu
Powders - Eartheater
Ooh Rap I Ya - George Clanton
Heavy Heavy - Young Fathers
The Beggar - Swans
Space Heavy - King Krule
Ways of Knowing - Navy Blue
SCARING THE HOES - JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown
Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) - jaime branch
Black Classical Music - Yussef Dayes
Volcano - Jungle
I appreciate everyone’s patience this year. Hopefully you find a record or two, or at least a song or two, you really vibe with above. Regardless, thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in 2024!
On Oppenheimer, the “American Prometheus”
“Prometheus stole fire and gave it to men. But when Zeus learned of it, he ordered Hephaestus to nail his body to Mount Caucasus. On it Prometheus was nailed and kept bound for many years. Every day an eagle swooped on him and devoured the lobes of his liver, which grew by night.”
Every work of nonfiction is an argument. Even the most mundane of scientific textbooks make a case that the knowledge they hold within is worth memorializing for generations of students to come.
Works of historical nonfiction carry their arguments more openly than others. When you delve into and unpack the history of something — whether it’s a specific time period, a singular event or one important person — you have to make a case to look at whatever it is in some way versus another.
Not every fact of a person’s life or of a series of monumental events can be published; not every nuanced perspective can be elucidated. These arguments come as much from omission as they do from what’s actually written.
The argument put forth in “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and Christopher Nolan’s three-hour long movie based upon it, make a uniquely compelling case that the man, J. Robert, Oppie, whatever you want to call him, is in the echelon of the most important figures in American and, when condensed to the 20th century, world history. The way that case is made, and what it leaves out, is worth a bit of exploration.
The argument, and how it was made
At it’s most basic, “American Prometheus” is a chronological exploration of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It traces Oppie’s life from childhood in New York City to studies in England and Germany to professorship in California to the building, structure and science of Los Alamos to Trinity to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Washington, D.C. to a cramped hearing room to Princeton to the beaches of St. John, the small Caribbean island outside of which his ashes would be spread.
But the novel is much more than that, of course. In telling the story of Oppenheimer’s life, it argues for J. Robert as one of the defining characters — if not in some ways the defining character — of his generation of science. His rise to scientific prominence came at the tail end of Albert Einstein’s crusade through the field of theoretical physics, a time when the discipline was reformulating itself around a new foundation. Oppie played a defining role in that reformulation, Bird and Sherwin argue, despite never earning a Nobel Prize for his efforts.
His escapades outgrew science, however, and catapulted Oppenheimer from renowned professor who built the University of California-Berkeley’s theoretical physics program to an influential government and military actor — a line that Oppie towed to various degrees of success, the two authors explain. In the end it was American capitalist and militarist forces that J. Robert would bang his head and his heart against, to little to no avail. His presumptuousness would be his downfall, the scientific transgressor swept under in the 1950s wave of McCarthyism and general Soviet paranoia.
That such a targeted offensive — or “assault,” as Bird and Sherwin write — would find Oppenheimer as its target makes enough of a case in and of itself to justify placing Oppie at the center of mid-20th century geopolitics. Lewis Strauss, the shoe salesman turned Atomic Energy Commission Chairman, lead that “assault.”
“Lewis Strauss had prevailed. The nuclear secrecy regime would remain in place and nuclear weapons would be built in dizzying numbers. Oppenheimer had once thought Strauss merely an annoyance, a man not likely to ‘obstruct things.’ Now, with a Republican administration in control of Washington, Strauss was in the driver’s seat, and his right foot was pressing his political accelerator to the floor.” — AP, 470
The whole argument makes sense and is somewhat hard to disagree with. Of course the man who led America’s effort to create the most powerful weapon ever used in combat — so powerful it hasn’t been used again since — who then thrust himself into the geopolitics surrounding the proliferation of future weapons of mass destruction and the relations between science and government should be counted among the most influential in that defining century of world history. Nuclear deterrence and all of its complexities entangle countries around the world to this day; a pair of the most significant wars in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning part of the 21st might not have been fought if it weren’t for that infamous test in southern New Mexico.
But how do Bird and Sherwin succeed so resoundingly in making such a convincing argument?
For one, the pair built a trove of knowledge on the life of not only Oppenheimer but the people who surrounded him. Pages 601–684 of the novel consist of hundreds of notes detailing the plentitude of facts and attributions that construct the 591-page narrative. A 14-and-a-half-page bibliography follows. It’s abundantly clear the depth of knowledge and factual detail Bird and Sherwin unravel, from first-hand testimony through interviews to scores of both public and private documents. “American Prometheus” is a meticulously researched masterclass in character profile.
Such depth of knowledge allows Bird and Sherwin to write with a certain authority that might not feel as earned if the pair’s foundation of research wasn’t as solid. There are many examples of facts expressed loosely as opinions, especially in the latter half of the narrative surrounding that infamous security hearing.
Take, for example, this sentence, one page after the quote referenced earlier — “While Oppenheimer enjoyed a leisurely trip to Brazil, Strauss spent the summer of 1953 feverishly preparing to finally put an end to his influence.” (AP, 471) The use of the adjectives “leisurely” and “feverishly” here point to Bird and Sherwin’s authoritativeness. A lesser researched history would of course know Oppie traveled to Brazil around the same time Strauss’s security hearing plan kicked into motion. But the two authors’ depth of knowledge allows them to paint a more eloquent picture of this stage in the Oppenheimer-Strauss battle — a picture of Oppie relaxing in South America while Strauss and his confidants pore over troves of documents in cramped D.C. offices.
Because of this authority, Bird and Sherwin’s narrative — again, especially in the latter half — reads almost as theater. The authors weave together the tight political dance between Oppenheimer and Strauss, sprinkling in its supporting characters to add depth and detail while always focusing on the nuclear scientist’s personal reflections on his somewhat helpless fall from political grace.
It’s no wonder a movie director would find that central tension between Oppenheimer and Strauss the core narrative to build a cinematic adaptation around.
Speaking of the movie …
Christopher Nolan pins his 180-minute long film to Oppenheimer’s 1954 security hearing. The film extracts the most remarkable parts of Bird and Sherwin’s theatrical retelling of the history and crafts its narrative around them.
How Nolan does that is interesting. Instead of following the novel’s chronological narrative, the movie jumps between events at the security hearing and moments in Oppenheimer’s life. I think that was a smart decision. It gives viewers something to latch on to, outside of the character of Oppenheimer himself. It heightens the drama. It makes for some of the film’s best moments that wouldn’t carry anywhere near the weight they do if it weren’t for the security hearing playing such a central role. (Think Kitty’s testimony, or the meme of Cillian Murphy’s wide-open eyes as he’s grilled by Roger Robb, the man who led the hearing against Oppenheimer)
For the sake of not making this section a full film review, I’ll add only briefly that I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and believe my viewing experience (in IMAX, mind you) was heightened by having read “American Prometheus” beforehand. Knowing all of the beats the movie would hit made it go by faster; I can see how it might have dragged without that prior knowledge.
When you do take a historical narrative from a book and turn it into a film, there are some moments that are undoubtedly going to feel a bit goofy and decisions that feel strange. The most notable one that jumped out to me is the scene where Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh, made Oppenheimer read from the Bagavad Gita while in bed together. A strange choice, not because of the sexual aspect of it but because of the decision to deliver that moment in that way — which I guess can’t really be separated from the sexual aspect of the scene. Anyway.
Other decisions Nolan got more correct. The way the movie ended, for one, I thought was brilliant — an ambiguous, foreboding encapsulation of the new, destructive world Oppenheimer had helped create and would subsequently fail to deter.
Overall, I think Oppenheimer the movie follows the argument laid out in “American Prometheus” to a tee, and heightens the authoritative theater pulled forth by Bird and Sherwin. In that sense I think the film did its job, even though some of the choices it made left ample room for criticism and conversation.
What was omitted?
If historical arguments are made as much from omission as they are from what’s told, “American Prometheus” is again a case example.
The novel leaves out any serious details of combat in World War Two, on either front. (In fact, it offers more detail about combat in the Spanish Civil War than it does the Second World War) That’s aside from top Washington officials’ discussions regarding whether to use nuclear weapons in combat or not, in which the classic “Japan wouldn’t have surrendered and the U.S. would have lost upwards of one million troops through an invasion of the mainland” is referenced.
That omission seems due to the fact Oppenheimer, at the time the two bombs were used, was far removed from that decision making process. He learned of the bombings via a radio broadcast while at Los Alamos. He was also far removed from combat. The story of Oppie and the bomb has little to do with the story of the invasion of Normandy, the Luftwaffe, Soviet counter-offensives, etc.
Closer to home, “American Prometheus” also leaves out much discussion of settling Los Alamos or the effects on New Mexicans from the Trinity Test. Indigenous Pueblo people of New Mexico and their involvement and prolonged disturbance caused by the Manhattan Project are left out of both the book and the movie entirely. There is an overt reference when President Truman asks Oppenheimer what he thinks should be done with Los Alamos.
“Give it back to the Indians,” Oppie responds.
The book, in explaining Oppenheimer’s first encounter with New Mexico as a teen and subsequent return trips to the Land of Enchantment, alongside his “Perro Caliente” vacation home in the state, stinks a bit of settler sentimentality. Oppie, and the two authors therefore, treat New Mexico as tourists might, glossing over the people that had called that land home for centuries.
There are stories of other folks who had settled in New Mexico, including the ones at the dude ranch where Oppenheimer stayed when first visiting the state and where he learned to ride horses (what would become somewhat of a motif throughout the book). But displaced Indigenous people don’t find a place in the story.
Nor, as mentioned, do those permanently affected by the dropping of the first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, near what is today White Sands Missile Range, in south central New Mexico. The effects of the bomb’s radiation on those people — the “Downwinders” — and their future generations are well documented, but up until now the various inhabitants of the area have received little recognition and even less compensation for those unintended damages.
I’d highly recommend reading a piece published in Searchlight New Mexico, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization in the state, in early August — The Terrible Emptiness of “Oppenheimer” — that details the New Mexicans the book and the movie leave out. It’s a moving encapsulation of people and history missed.
I’d also recommend an L.A. Times film column that offers a slightly alternative perspective to the Searchlight piece. It’s well-argued and delves into another major omission from the film — in not depicting combat from World War Two, the movie, and the book likewise, offer no visual or written details of the heinous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or their terrifying aftermath.
History is stories, not facts. What historical works choose — and choose not to — say offer distinct arguments into how those stories should be told. “American Prometheus,” the encompassing novel by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer film, offer two examples of how to craft an argument and a drama out of history, as well as important discussions of how and why that argument should be told.
A Pitchfork Music Festival 2022 retrospective, almost one year later
Pitchfork Music Festival 2023, the three-day event that’s set to bring over 50,000 people to Chicago’s Grant Park this year, is two weeks away.
I secured my tickets to the festival several months ago, and my anticipation has been slowly building ever since. Now, with about 14 days until Baltimore artist Nourished By Time kicks off the first set of the festival at 1 p.m. on Friday, July 21, I thought it’d be a good time to look back.
Last year’s Pitchfork Music Festival was my first, and it was the singular best music experience of my life. Whether it was the lineup packed full of well-known artists (to me at least), the rainy but cool weather, the friends I spent the festival with or just the simple novelty of it all, the experience is — to be a bit cliché — forever engrained in my memory.
So, in anticipation of Pitchfork Music Festival 2023 and in belated appreciation of Pitchfork Music Festival 2022, here’s a brief retrospective on last year’s event, in the form of a ranking (booooo) of my 10 favorite sets from P’fork ’22. I saw more than 30 artists’ sets over the course of those three days, making this list a bit tough to narrow down — although the No. 1 spot was, unlike the weather, pretty clear.
Pictures included.
No. 10: Noname
This feels very harsh. Let me explain.
As you can see from the photo above, we were quite far away from the stage during Noname’s set. That, for one, definitely detracted from the musical experience. Only really being able to see Noname via the big screen wasn’t ideal.
And the reason we were so far back also pulls away from the experience a bit. Earl Sweatshirt was the next artist to perform that day, on the Green stage, just across from the Red stage seen here. We snagged a spot at the back of Noname’s set to be able to find a great spot for Earl’s set. In fact, we even dipped early from Noname’s to grab that spot.
Long story short, Earl was late coming out, and his set was disappointing (see Notable Exemptions below).
But even though I didn’t get to see all of Noname’s performance, what I did see was tremendous. She enthralled. Her live voice was so unique — very soft but powerful, commanding.
If we were closer and could have seen the full set, there’s a good chance Noname would have been a lot higher on this somewhat arbitrary ranking.
No. 9: Jeff Parker & the New Breed
Somewhat surprisingly, I had heard of and listened to quite a bit of music from each of last year’s opening artists. I was able to convince my friends to get up earlier to be there by 1 p.m. for each of those sets, and none of them disappointed (see further down this list for another).
Jeff Parker & the New Breed was Saturday’s opener. The Los Angeles-based jazz guitarist and his band released one of my favorite jazz albums in the past few years, the charming “Suite for Max Brown,” in 2020. He followed that up in 2021 with a stripped down, deeply intimate, almost ambient album, called “Forfolks.”
Parker is, of course, a tremendous guitarist. He plays with a sort of easy feeling, laced with technical intricacy sprinkled about his playing like little crescendos of detail. His band was solid, even funny at times when individual members would pull up a microphone for a few words. He also brought out his daughter, Ruby (who you can see with the violin and green pants in the center of the stage), to sing on the song “Build a Nest.”
Thankfully the rain dissipated in time for Jeff Parker & the New Breed to go on. It was a wonderful beginning to what would prove to be my favorite day of P’Fork ’22.
No. 8: L’Rain
Sometimes, I realized, excellent sets can be defined by the performance of one song.
Such was the case with L’Rain, an artist I hadn’t heard much of before the P’fork ’22 announced its lineup but who I quickly fell in love with for, really, one song from her 2021 album, “Fatigue.” The whole album is great, interspersed with little spoken word interludes. But the song “Find It” — the second on the record — is what pulled me in.
So when I recognized the first bass notes and stuttered drum pattern that introduced the song’s slow-building first part, I got really excited. And the performance didn’t disappoint. L’Rain and her band played an extended version of the song, which slowly built and built over the course of around 10 minutes, full of swelling horns and rampant percussion.
The set was made cooler, too, because L’Rain was an artist I had only really discovered because of and for Pitchfork Music Festival. Seeing her there, in person, with distinct memories of listening to “Find It” while strutting my way home from work down Nicollet Avenue in Downtown Minneapolis earlier that summer, filled my little heart full up.
No. 7: The Roots
Surprisingly, there’s only one closer on this list, and that’s The Roots, who closed out Sunday and wrapped up the whole festival.
The Roots are, of course, and simply put, legendary. There isn’t a ton that needs to be said about the jazz/funk/hip-hop collective. Questlove was enigmatic on the drums. Black Thought led the crowd through the whole performance, never missing a beat while incessantly firing off his potent and pointed lyrics.
And the set’s highlight, pictured above, is when The Roots brought out comedian and writer Hannibal Buress for a few songs. Hannibal’s in the red to the left. Black Thought’s in the center, with the hat on.
The two had an infectious chemistry. Their combined energy propelled the set forward. While the two other closing acts — The National on Friday and Mitski on Saturday — did little to pull a tired crowd through the last set of a marathon day of music, The Roots, and Black Thought especially, seemed keenly aware of needing to keep the energy up.
It never dipped throughout the group’s hour-and-a-half-long set. In fact, it picked up, to the point where the final notes felt like a jarring end to a performance that really could have gone on forever.
No.6: Spelling
Tia Cabral, the Oakland-based artist better known as Spelling, is very, deeply, profoundly cool.
My history with Spelling and the artist’s 2021 album “The Turning Wheel” is somewhat unique, fueled by my past love-hate relationship with one music critic, Anthony Fantano. Once I did get past my distaste, at that time, for the man’s reviews and gave in to his infectious praise for the record, I — like with L’Rain’s “Fatigue” — fell in love.
But this time it wasn’t just one song. The whole album enthralls. I wrote about it in my favorite albums of 2021 review, and I’ll pull a line for that to describe it here: “The Turning Wheel feels like a luscious, grandiose escape into a world that is somehow beyond ours, a dramatic pantheon of a musical project that echoes the ‘turning wheel’ of life, its chaos and its mystery.”
Jesus.
Anyway, Speling’s live set lived up to album’s grandiosity. Cabral seemed very happy while performing, a smile tattooed across her face while she moved and danced around the stage.
I think performing on the Blue stage — the first Blue stage set of this list so far — helped the performance, too. Blue stage is set off to the side, away from the massive lawn that comprises both Red and Green stages. The intimate feel of Blue, the crowd tucked under one large tree, dripping with rain from that morning, pulled us all in.
Spelling simply put on a performance, one that perfectly drew out the theatrical strings that tie “The Turning Wheel” together.
No. 5: Parquet Courts
Parquet Courts’ set partially ruined my Converse.
There was rain interspersed throughout the entire weekend, and while sometimes the grass would dry up, other times the fields in front of the stages would be left a muddy mess. Such was the case with Parquet Courts.
It didn’t help that the crowd turned into, in part, a very wet, muddy mosh during some of the rock group’s songs. “Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience”? Certainly. “Freebird II?” You bet.
The mosh was a bit annoying at times, I must admit. There were points where I wanted to simply stand and enjoy the music but was forced to thrash around with a bunch of other sweaty 20-something white dudes. I did put myself in the mix in the first place, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
Parquet Courts’ set was great because their album “Wide Awake!” was my favorite from 2018. Like Earl Sweatshirt, mentioned above, my anticipation for Parquet Courts was immense, and they more than lived up to it.
And when they played “Human Performance” from the album of the same name, it was life changing.
No. 4: Arooj Aftab
I discovered Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab in late 2021 when going through artists nominated for that coming year’s Grammy awards. Aftab was nominated twice — Best Global Music Performance for the song “Mohabbat” and Best New Artist for her 2021 album, “Vulture Prince.”
I remember first listening to Vulture Prince while sitting in a Washington, D.C. coffee shop. Aftab’s voice, the delicate strings, the compositional detail — the whole record stopped me in my tracks. I listened to “Last Night” while walking to and from bus stops during late nights in November and December 2021. “Mohabbat” found a consistent spot in my music rotation early the next year.
The album is expressive and soothing, to use a word that in no way does the sounds on Vulture Prince justice. Aftab’s story, too, is deeply interesting — a Pakistani-born, Berklee-trained composer who puts on critically acclaimed live performances, as well.
Aftab’s was the first set I saw at Pitchfork on that damp Friday afternoon, and what an introduction it was. Spellbinding might be a better word to describe it — Arooj Aftab the artist, her Pitchfork performance and her acclaimed album Vulture Prince altogether.
No. 3: Injury Reserve
Of all the sets on this list, we were definitely the closest to Injury Reserve. And that’s fitting.
The duo’s record “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was my favorite album of 2021. It’s a collection of 11 songs about loss in all its forms. Ritchie with a T, the vocalist for the duo who’s holding the mic in the picture, and Parker Corey, the sound master, lost the former third member of their group, Stepa J. Groggs, in June 2020. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was Injury Reserve’s first album without Stepa, and it reflects on his passing and its effect on Ritchie and Corey.
There was a beautiful moment during the set when Corey put on a recording of Stepa’s voice and the two remaining members — he and Ritchie — stepped off the stage, leaving the disembodied voice of Stepa to serenade the Red stage crowd.
And overall, the set was, well, strange, if you didn’t know what to expect going into it. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” is a glitchy, off-kilter exploration of how confusing the loss of a loved one is for those it impacts. There are few moments where the album settles. There are no bombastic beats that people might have come to expect from Injury Reserve.
Instead, it confuses and entangles the listener. The duo’s live set did the same — to the point where one person in the crowd looked at me and asked, “Who is this"?”
But for a long-time fan and deep admirer of Injury Reserve’s 2021 masterpiece of a contemporary hip-hop album, Ritchie and Corey — and Stepa — fully delivered.
No. 2: Japanese Breakfast
Unlike Injury Reserve, we were really far back for Japanese Breakfast. That didn’t stop me from crying during the set, though!
Michelle Zauner, the artist commonly known as Japanese Breakfast, released one of my favorite albums in 2021 — Jubilee — and one of my favorite books from last year — “Crying in H Mart.” (Which I now have a Michelle Zauner SIGNED copy of thanks to my lovely sister.) I knew I had to see her, but was a bit disappointed by how far back we found ourselves in what turned out to be one of the larger crowds of the day.
That’s okay, though, because the tenderness and expression in Zauner’s live performance was able to travel all the way to the far back of the crowd, where me and my friends were positioned. And there was one moment during her set which, I think, ended up being my favorite moment of the entire festival.
You see, Jeff Tweedy, the front man of era-defining alt-country, indie rock band Wilco, who released one of my favorite album’s of all time, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” in 2002, was at Pitchfork for a special, private performance the same day. Tweedy’s own musical career has continued as a solo artist as Wilco’s continues; he released an acclaimed album, “Love is the King,” in 2020 as a reflection on pandemic life.
As Japanese Breakfast started playing “Kokomo, IN,” a lovely but quite sad song from the album Jubilee, Tweedy — with his big gray beard and round-frame glasses — strolled onto the stage, catching Zauner off-guard. Her surprise quickly turned to awe and joy, seen clearly in the smile that graced her face as Tweedy grabbed a microphone and sang the second verse of the song.
Then, in THE most unforgettable moment from the Pitchfork weekend, the two played the Wilco classic, “Jesus, Etc.” together. It, like the album it appears upon, is one of my favorite tracks ever — maybe, even, my favorite? Still figuring that one out.
It was perfect. Michelle Zauner’s beaming smile as she strummed her guitar alongside Jeff Tweedy, who looked perfectly at home performing his band’s most famous song alongside the up-and-coming indie pop artist in front of an adoring crowd.
I shed tears during “Kokomo, IN” and again during the two’s performance of “Jesus, Etc.” And, I was able to capture, from the big screen, this really sweet photo of Tweedy bowing to Zauner at the close of their two songs together.
Not the greatest picture, I know, but you can sort of get a sense of what the moment meant for Zauner and, through this brief review, what it meant for me, too. (If you are so curious, here are videos from those performances of “Kokomo, IN” and “Jesus, Etc.”)
No. 1: The Armed
I already waxed poetic about The Armed’s performance in my favorite albums of 2022 review. To not repeat myself, I’ll pull some words from that review here:
“The Detroit band absolutely blasted the Blue stage, tucked away from the two main stages in a more intimate and, therefore, intense environment. It was the coolest musical moment of my life. I thrashed around in the mud and rain, jostled between a crowd of sweaty and terribly-smelling people in a swirling outdoor mosh.”
The Armed hit every beat of an extraordinary live performance. Tons of crowd interaction. Crowd surfing, even. Fascinating visuals. Pyrotechnics. Brolic dudes with guitars. Everything.
The set was made even better because I had heard whispers going into P’fork ’22 about how amazing The Armed are live. I dragged my friends to their set with the promise of excitement and loads of energy. No single performance that weekend blew my expectations — which were already pretty high — out of the water as much as The Armed.
I don’t have a ton more to say, honestly. The Arrmed just rocked. Pictures sort of do the experience justice.
So, here’s one more from what was, hands down, my favorite set of Pitchfork Music Festival 2022 — for good measure.
Notable Exemptions
Earl Sweatshirt: I told you we’d return to Earl. His set maybe wasn’t all that bad, but in terms of the discrepancy between expectation versus reality, man, he really disappointed.
Mitski: I had seen Mitski live by herself in St. Paul a few months before her Pitchfork set, so I think that experience kind of dampened her big festival performance. Plus, I think Mitski is better in a more intimate, concert hall setting, anyway.
The National: I was way too burnt out after the first full day to really get into The National’s closing set, but I think I’d enjoy it a lot more, now. I listened to a solid bit of The National later that summer, fyi.
Toro Y Moi: Maybe it was because we were too far back, maybe it’s just not my type of festival music, but Toro Y Moi was, for me, the most mid act of the entire festival, especially in terms of its timing. Third to last artist on the final day? Are you kidding?
-
I didn’t see Low, Cate le Bon, Ethel Cain, or most of Karate’s set, among many others. Not seeing Low especially hurts now. But there will be plenty more artists to indulge in, and new ones to discover, in just a few weeks’ time.
Here’s to P’Fork ’22 — and P’Fork ’23, soon enough.
On William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”
I finished “As I Lay Dying” in late March 2023, six months almost to the date after my grandmother passed away. You can read a book in any number of different ways, but with that context, I read “As I Lay Dying” as, more than anything, a tale of collective grief and mutual responsibility.
I hadn’t read a novel by William Faulkner before this. I now understand why his style is popularly critiqued and viewed more as a subject of literary study reserved exclusively for classrooms and dusty libraries. The narrative was certainly confusing at times, each of the perspectives not really aligning clearly. Faulkner leaves a lot of work for the reader, which is by no means a bad thing. A writer doesn’t need to hold their reader’s hand, and Faulkner certainly doesn’t in “As I Lay Dying.”
In that way, Faulkner leaves the reader to figure out each character’s grief alongside the characters themselves. It’s at times really painful to watch — Cash’s stoic indifference, Jewel’s rash flashes of anger and frustration, Vardaman’s mental collapse, Dewey Dell’s confusion of motherly instincts, Darl’s attempts to hold everything together before it eventually collapses, and Anse’s pitiful leadership before he too falls into easy affection. Altogether it’s like watching a trainwreck as it slowly twists and turns off the tracks.
The narrative is held together by a few things, because — good Lord — the Bundren family can’t hold it together themselves. For one, it’s held together by the reflections of the characters that the Bundren family comes into contact with. The visiting doctor, the owner of the home where the family stays on their journey, the women from the town — these characters and others, who sit outside the main narrative of the Bundren family’s journey to bury their deceased mother, offer outside reflections on the chaos going on inside the family.
But, more important than these removed reflections from outside the family is the one chapter we get from the perspective from the subject and cause of all this chaos and confusion in the first place — Annie Bundren. Her chapter, which comes near the middle of the novel, is (as I wrote in other, shorter reviews) my absolute favorite moment of the book and one of the most brilliant sections of writing I’ve ever read, honestly.
Hearing the reflections of Annie — who, at that point in the story, is dead — on her role as a mother, how she viewed each of her children, what she thought about Anse’s failings as a father, her relationship to God and religion, and her bitter view of society serve to elucidate why the Bundren family dynamic completely falls apart after her passing. Her simple existence held the family together, gave each individual a reason for being, a North Star to be guided by and to gravitate around. It seems she had a strong personality but made rash decisions that led to a sequence of events and a family she eventually ended up feeling judgmental towards and, again, bitter about.
But bitterness is a strange emotion when it comes from the central figure of a family. It creates a dynamic where those around that person, either consciously or subconsciously, seek constantly to please in order to alleviate that person’s bitterness, or are completely turned away. We see that manifest in different characters. Cash and Dewey Dell, for instance, seek to please Annie always. That’s their guiding force. Cash constantly hammering away at her coffin, Dewey Dell by her bedside with a fan at all times.
Anse and Jewel, on the other hand, are pushed away, flitting in and out of connection with Annie and the family. Darl attempts to thread some middle ground and, in this way, acts a bit like the characters outside the family in the story. He’s almost the most removed, the most level-headed, the best able to lead the narrative and describe things as they’re happening while all the others are simply caught up in them.
Annie’s chapter and where it’s positioned in the narrative is absolutely essential for the story, I think. Without it we’re left flying along the tracks as the train steadily derails. With it, we’re suddenly flown 5,000 feet above the train, it pausing as it spins off the tracks, and shown clearly how we got to this point, a series of causes-and-effects that have left the train without a conductor and with no recourse but to crash and burn.
I feel like there’s so much more I could unpack about “As I Lay Dying,” a ton of separate threads that are steadily unraveling themselves as I sit here and write. But I won’t, lest this becomes hundreds of paragraphs long.
I’ll tie this rather brief reflection together at the end by saying that grief is utterly confusing, especially when it’s thrust upon a family after a prolonged period of slow deterioration. It wears a group of people down. And then, after the ‘event’ happens, you’re suddenly with a whole lot of responsibility. That doesn’t change, whether it’s a death that happened in the 17th century, the early 1900s or this year. Dying carries with it countless burdens — emotional, physical, social, spiritual. Faulkner takes this utter confusion and mess of burdens and puts them altogether into a narrative that is at times just confusing and messy as the grief itself, but ultimately paints an essential picture of what death does to a family.
A must read? Maybe!
My favorite albums of 2022
11 of my favorite albums from 2022, in no particular order
I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say that 2022 has been the most monumental year of my life, so far. It’s the year where I graduated college and moved halfway across the country. It’s also the year where I found love and experienced dear, dear loss. //
My emotions throughout 2022 have been felt deeper and wider than any year before.
Thank the Lord for music; I’m not sure what I’d do without it. //
I cheated again on this year’s favorite albums list, this time so I could include a live album. Yes, that’s right! A live album! Call it a result of going to my first music festival; there’s just something exceptional about a live performance. //
Anyway, these are the 11 albums that walked with me through 2022. A good year for music? Surely. Maybe even one of the best.
1.) Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You - Big Thief
“Change,” the first track from Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, is, without a doubt, my favorite song of 2022.
Its four verses and repeating chorus echo what, for me, has been the definitive theme throughout the year. The questions the song asks in its choruses — “Would you live forever, never die?/While everything around passes?” or “Would you walk forever in the light?/To never learn the secret of the quiet night?” — touch on this theme of change beautifully. It’s a lovely, if not somewhat sad, opening.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is a long one. One hour and 20 minutes, in total. That length initially made me wary to jump into Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (I’m not abbreviating it) when it first came out in February. But the wonderful thing about Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is that once you digest it, once you give it one thorough listen, it’s nearly impossible to pick out a song that you’d want to drop. Each is so distinct, both musically and thematically. Big Thief tries out a whole bunch of different sounds on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, but they all come together seamlessly.
Yet the main appeal of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is Adrianne Lenker’s singing and songwriting. I think her solo record, “songs,” was a definite snub from my music writings in previous years. I adore her lyrics and her raw, never overpowering but somehow always gutsy, voice. Those shine through on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You.
It’s a jingly-jangly record that dives into all sorts of potent themes of universality and collectivism, of intimate relationships between folks and connections to nature. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You has the longest — and by far the most unique — title of any album on this list. I can’t think of a better one to get us started.
Favorite tracks: Change, Blurred View, No Reason
2.) LOUIE - Kenny Beats
J Dilla’s Donuts is probably the most acclaimed instrumental sample record of all time. It’s surely one of my favorites and really stands distinctly all by itself. But it’s hard, when listening to LOUIE by Kenny Beats, to not at least give a passing thought to the legendary Detroit producer.
Now, I’m not saying LOUIE is on the same tier as Donuts. Again, Donuts is a standalone legendary record that created a whole new sound in hip-hop production. But the way that Kenny Beats fuses all sorts of different samples with hypnotic beats of his own, punctuated by light horns and swirling up-and-down keys, certainly evokes Dilla’s 2006 album.
I normally don’t love comparison-based reviews. But because Dilla came to mind almost immediately when listening to LOUIE for the first time, I had to start this little review with a light comparison. More of an evocation than anything, really.
What to say about LOUIE? The album, released in August, is the solo debut of Kenny Beats. You may remember Kenny from last year’s favorite albums roundup. He handled the production behind Vince Staples by Vince Staples. (The California rapper released another album this year; find it in my honorable mentions below) He’s also produced for Denzel Curry, 03 Greedo and, somewhat surprisingly, IDLES. (Again, honorable mentions) This solo project fully embodies Kenny’s distinct production style. It’s got a sharp high-end and a pretty deep and bassy low-end. It’s accented by horns and keys and irresistibly smooth throughout.
LOUIE walks through a ton of instrumental ground. Some might say that it tries to do a bit too much and, for that reason, pulls itself apart a bit. That’s true, I think, to an extent. It does do a lot. But it packs it all into a 33 minute run time, so it doesn’t feel like too long. In fact, it seems just about right. Each song brings its own unique sound, and what LOUIE might lack in cohesion it more than makes up for in inventiveness and novelty.
Simply put, Kenny Beats is on fire.
Favorite tracks: Hold My Head, Still, Last Words
3.) Aethiopes - billy woods
billy woods is remarkable. I think many would consider him the most potent and prolific underground rapper producing at the moment. He released two records in 2022, Aethiopes and Church. I did listen to both, and I do think Aethiopes is a better representation of woods than is Church.
Aethiopes is heavy and claustrophobic. There’s a certain intensity and pain that comes through in all of woods’ lines on any project, but there’s some distinct sense that Aethiopes turns that intensity up a notch. If opening tracks set a tone for what albums are going to bring, then Aethiopes’ “Asylum” is a clear example. It eptimozies this intensity, bursting to life with a slammed piano chord and off-kiltered, rapidly descending strings. Then woods enters with a ton that sounds serious yet at the same time bored, or at least a little tired and lethargic.
There are too many excellent lines and turns of phrase on Aethiopes to start listing them here. Yet the first lines on the album do give a good example of the record’s tone and themes of familial strife and postcolonial reconstruction:
“I think Mengitsu Haile Mariam is my neighbor,
Whoever it is moved in and put an automated gate up.
Repainted brick walls atop which now cameras rotated.
By eight the place dark, one light burn later.
Razor wire like a slinky.”
According to a Genius annotation, “Mengistu Haile Mariam was the head of Ethiopia’s socialist government from 1977 to 1991. He fled the country at the end of his reign and sought asylum (hence the song title) in Zimbabwe, where he still lived as of this song’s release.” woods spent most of his childhood in Zimbabwe and returns to the African nation a lot in lyrics throughout the record.
Aethiopes features the likes of EL-P of Run The Jewels fame, Boldy James and frequent E L U C I D, a frequent billy woods collaborater. (See: Armand Hammer) It’s a somewhat intense listen, but it is what I’d consider billy woods’ best project. And among all the various hip-hop records I’ve heard this year, it’s the one that I keep coming back to, over and over.
Favorite tracks: Asylum, Sauvage, NYNEX
4.) Hysteria - Indigo Sparke
Sometimes an album finds its way into your life at just the right time. So it was with Indigo Sparke’s Hysteria, a record that came out in early October but that I didn’t really fall into until about a month later. Sparke’s melancholic acoustic sound provided much the soundtrack for my autumn in Albuquerque. There’s even a line that makes reference to the state on the song “Real”:
“Warm afternoon/Spend the day thinking of you;
New Mexico dream/All the colors scream.”
At its core Hysteria is a pretty simple singer-songwriter record. It echoes Joni Mitchell’s Blue — quite a lot now that I think about it. It’s stripped back instrumentally and covers themes like perceived alienation, hopeless passion and lost dreams. It’s an album that doesn’t do anything extraordinarily well, but sometimes that’s all okay when you’re dealing with a singer-songwriter record. In the end it’s simply a collection of really well written songs that all string together into a cohesive near-hour-long project.
I’m not saying you have to be sad to really pull the most out of Hysteria. But I’m not saying it would hurt, either.
Favorite tracks: Hysteria, Pressure In My Chest, God Is A Woman’s Name
5.) God’s Country - Chat Pile
There are always a couple records that sneak into my favorites of the year from other year end lists. God’s County by Oklahoma City band Chat Pile is one of those this year.
It’s somewhat remarkable how quickly I fell in love with this album. I think part of what sucked me into it so quickly was hearing the second track, “Why,” for the first time. It’s an arresting song, not only because of the heavy, punctuated bass line and open hi-hat, driving drum pattern. It’s really because of the first lyrics you hear.
“Why do people have to live outside?
In the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing, there are people that are made to live outside. Why?
Why do people have to live outside?
When there are buildings all around us, with heat on and no one inside. Why?”
Raygun Busch, a pseudonym for the band’s lead singer (pun intended, I hope), sings these lyrics with such passion and anger, perfectly matching the instrumental ferocity of the song. Not to be incredibly cliché, but it’s an anger that a lot of people have felt over the past couple of years, made so much more raw when the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic made many of capitalistic society’s starkest inequities more clear than ever before.
Although “Why” made me fall headfirst into this album, it’s not the only excellent moment on the record. It is, to be clear, the heaviest and darkest album on this list. It’s an album of melancholic sludge metal that alternates between sentiments of pure depression to violent anger, oftentimes on the same song. “Pamela,” the song after “Why,” is maybe the best example of this.
God’s Country is a cathartic exclamation of capitalistic angst; it’s a fitting record for a year that has, more often than not, been more than a little despondent.
Favorite tracks: Why, Pamela, Anywhere
6.) Natural Brown Prom Queen - Sudan Archives
The Current, the Twin Cities’ independent alternative radio station, just loved “Selfish Soul” after it came out as a single in mid-May this year. But I didn’t fall in love with Sudan Archives’ Natural Brown Prom Queen until I saw it featured in one of Bandcamp’s Essential Releases round-ups. The music website included “Home Maker” as the one song to preview the album for interested readers, and, oh my God, I was hooked.
The track builds slowly, with a sort of ambient feel punctuated by little bursts of horns and key, until the drums kick in around the one minute mark. Then we fall headfirst into an infectiously simple hi-hat, snare and bass groove until a quick snare pattern introduces us to Brittney Denise Parks’ lyrics.
“I just got a wall mount for my plants, hoping they’ll thrive around the madness/
Won’t you step inside my lovely cottage? Feels so green it feels like fucking magic.”
I don’t know — I hadn’t really heard a song about building a living space for yourself before, and all the emotion and care that goes into that effort. It’s a lovely idea for a song, I think. And again, one particularly suited for a pandemic-infused period where so many people have turned inward instead of outward.
“Selfish Soul,” the Current-loved single, is a banger, too, of course. It’s a song about how Parks views expressing herself through her hair and comes with an excellent pseudo-chorus of its own.
“I don’t want no struggles, I don’t want no fears.
I don’t want no struggles, I don’t want no fears.
Does it make sense to you why I cut it off?
Okay, one time if I grow it long, am I good enough? Am I good enough?
’Bout time I embraced my self and soul. Time I feed my selfish soul.”
Besides these two songs, the whole album carries themes of self-care and self-confidence, introspection that turns outwards to approach the world with more openness and courage and care. It’s also about embracing one’s body and looking at yourself with unflinching love rather than critical cruetly. About truly and deeply embracing oneself.
Parks is a violinist, and her strings grace a number of tracks on the record. The whole instrumental feel of the thing is quite cohesive. It’s 53 minutes but really flies by — in a good way.
Favorite tracks: Home Maker, Selfish Soul, Homesick (Gorgeous & Arrogant)
7.) The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom - Jens Lekman
Like Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, Jens Lekman’s The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom is an over-one-hour-and-fifteen-minute album with an over-five-word title. In fact, it’s the longest album on this list, at least in terms of run time. But, like Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, there’s not one second I’d want to leave off the record after listening through it a couple times.
Linden Trees (I’ll abbreviate this one) is possibly the most introspective album on this list. But it’s not introspective in the sense of personal growth of self-realization, per se. It’s much more about how a person relates to their memories of the past, and how those memories come to influence a person’s present and future. That’s pertinent, for me at least, in a year that I’ve spent a lot of time, especially recently, thinking about how memories impact my own life. They’re weird things, those memories of past people, place, things and experiences.
I think Lekman does a wonderful job sharing his thoughts about memories with a slight sense of sadness and longing, but also with humor and more passive reflection. No song shows this better on Linden Trees than “Sipping On The Sweet Nectar,” the album’s second track.
“Do you remember your first kiss? Well how could I forget? My hands still shiver from the very thought of it.
Sometimes I almost regret it, like I regret my regrets. I see myself on my deathbed saying ‘I wish I would have loved less.’
But that’s when the feeling hits. So just lick your lips. These are the good times that you’ll miss when you are sipping on the sweet nectar of your memories.
So just take a sip, and let it wet your lips. You won’t understand all this until you’re sipping on the sweet nectar of your memories.”
It’s my favorite song on the album, and I remember listening to it while walking around Loring Park in Minneapolis in the summer while the flowers and greenery were all in full bloom. Summertime brings with it a certain nostalgia that’s distinct from that of the fall or winter, I find. And this song fueled my own summertime, post-undergrad nostalgia in a way that few other songs came close to.
Linden Trees is, I think, just a really, really sweet record. It’s the Swedish singer-songwriter’s first project since 2019. I’d recommend reading through some of the ‘small talk’ posts from his website, where Lekman responds thoughtfully to questions from fans. The most recent was from last December, but I still think they give some more context to a lot of the lyrics and themes we hear on Linden Trees.
It’s true: The Linden Trees are still in blossom. Always.
Favorite tracks: Sipping On The Sweet Nectar, Your Arms Around Me, A Little Lost
8.) ULTRAPOP: Live at the Masonic - The Armed
Here it is — the previously-mentioned live album that made me break my 10-album-list format, again.
Why did I want to include a live album this year, you ask? And why this one? Well, this summer I went to Pitchfork. It was my first music festival and an all-in-all extraordinary experience. I got the chance to see something like 30 artists live over the course of three days. But no single show stood out as much as The Armed. The Detroit band absolutely blasted the blue stage, tucked away from the two main stages in a more intimate and, therefore, intense environment. It was the coolest musical moment of my life. I thrashed around in the mud and rain, jostled between a crowd of sweaty and terribly-smelling people in a swirling outdoor mosh. A photographer even captured me mid-show.
I’m there, in the patterned golf shirt and light brown-reddish tuft of hair. It’s remarkable, this picture. One of my favorites. From @jonestakesyourphotos on Instagram.
So if there’s an album that comes close to capturing the energy of that performance — captured almost poetically in the photo above — it’s The Armed’s live album the band released this year, a collection of songs from their breakout 2021 record ULTRAPOP performed at the “mysterious” Masonic Temple of Detroit, a massive 550,000-square-foot structure. The group released an accompanying 50-minute film to go alongside the album.
I’ll admit, I haven’t seen the film. But if it gets anywhere close, again, to capturing the hardcore punk band’s visceral energy and raw talent, then I’m sure it’s a good one. You really have to listen to this album yourself to understand what I’m trying to convey. Or you can just listen to my favorite tracks while staring at this picture of me from Pitchfork. Your choice!
Favorite tracks: ALL FUTURES (Live), AN ITERATION (Live), WHERE MAN KNOWS WANT (Live)
9.) Some Nights I Dream Of Doors - Obongjayar
Nigerian-born Obongjayar’s Some Nights I Dream Of Doors is the other of my favorite albums that I found very late in the year through other year end lists. (Shout out to Oliver Kemp. @deepcuts = YouTube channel) Instrumentally quite different but thematically similar to Jens Lekman’s Linden Trees, Steven Umoh, stage name Obongjayar, sings of topics of homesickness, familial love and diaspora troubles on Some Nights I Dream Of Doors.
Obongjayar has been a name that’s bounced around a lot recently. He’s picked up some excellent features on Little Simz’ Sometimes I Might Be Introvert (see last year’s list) and Jeshi’s Protein. He released a brief album/EP in 2020, Which Way Is Forward? But Some Nights I Dream Of Doors, at 35 minutes, is Obonjayar’s full-length debut. And it’s absolutely wonderful.
Umoh’s voice is so singular, not just because of his somewhat raspy Nigerian-British accent. He shares a painful and impassioned perspective on Some Nights I Dream Of Doors. A lot of the lyrics seem to reference his move from Nigeria to the U.K. when he was 17. He followed his mother, who had left Nigeria early to escape her abusive husband, Umoh’s father. Lyrics on the album’s title track bring through some of the pain and heartache that could stem from this period.
“Some nights I dream of doors. I need a way out, I’m suffocating.
Some nights I dream of doors. My obsession will drive me to the end or set me free.”
And later on on the song, he seems address his mother and his choice to follow her overseas.
“No matter where I run, the ways they lead me right back here.
I think it’s time I stop running from myself. You want to make a life here, you and everyone else.
You want to be happy, yeah, well so do they. So do they.”
But other tracks, like Tinko Tinko (Don’t Play Me for a Fool) share a more personal sense of introspection. Umoh sings on the song:
“Don’t play me for a fool. I’d rather be alone than be next to someone who don’t feel like I do.
Are we in love or are we just comfortable?”
Instrumentally, Obongjayar fuses light influences of Afrobeat with an almost dreamlike mix of synths and keys. Even the album cover itself — the bright colored one at the bottom of the collage above — evokes these themes of dreams. And that’s not to mention the record’s title, too.
Memories and dreaming, love and loss often come hand-in-hand. Expressing those themes earnestly and majestically, Obonjayar’s debut is a gem.
Favorite tracks: Parasite, Wrong For It, Tinko Tinko (Don’t Play Me for a Fool)
10.) Ants From Up There - Black Country, New Road
I wrote at the end of my review of last year’s For the first time, “If For the first time had high expectations, its revealed quality has created a seeming fervor to discover where Black Country, New Road go from here.” Well, BC,NR have done it again.
Ants From Up There takes much of what was excellent about For the first time — its horns, its instrumental swells, its dramatic lyricism — and refines it. I don’t know if it’s too vague to say that every song on Ants From Up There just feels so quintessentially Black Country, New Road, but I think that’s true. It feels right to say that.
The record’s release comes with a bit of a sense of sadness. BC, NR’s lead singer and songwriter, Isaac Wood, left the group shortly before the album’s release. It’s been reported that he left because of depression and other mental health issues that, at least in part, stemmed from writing Ants From Up There.
Isaac’s doing better now, according to some reports. But still, when you listen to Ants From Up There, it’s possible to trace a line from many of Isaac’s lyrics to his struggles with mental health. He sings with melancholy and forlornness, but also with anger and desperation at times. He tackles topics like addiction, abuse and longing for what once was.
Still, Ants From Up There is a gorgeous, gorgeous record that features some of my favorite lyrics and musical moments from the year. (I guess that’s why it’s on this list, huh) Take the imagery in the song “Concorde,” for instance:
“And you, like Concorde, I came, a gentle hill racer.
I was breathless upon every mountain, just to look for your light.”
Or a passage from “Good Will Hunting”:
“And if we’re on a burning starship, the escape pods filled with your friends, your childhood film photos. There’s no room for me to go.
Oh I’d wait there, float with the wreckage, fashion a long sword, traverse the Milky Way. Trying to get home to you. And you’d bring some piece of the stars.”
It’s gut wrenching and tear-inducing. Isaac’s pain is real, written throughout Ants From Up There, on full display. But the beautiful thing about these themes on the album is that they’re so universal. They’re pulled from one person’s experience, of course, but they’re things a lot of folks can relate to. The lyrics are hard to listen to at times, for sure, but that makes them better, more moving, more potent.
Ants From Up There fuses a variety of instruments, ranging from horns to violin to keys to, of course, guitar and bass. Like For the first time, the record starts with an instrumental intro, driven in large part by those horns and the violin playing of Georgia Ellery. But certain songs are driven more by guitar, others by the drums and still others by the keys. There’s even a track in the middle of the album, “Mark’s Theme,” that is, like the intro, instrumental-only and features and saxophone-violin duet, joined by piano later on the song. It’s a wonderful moment on the record.
Listening to the album is sort of like traversing a mountain range, or watching waves on the ocean. It’s full of slow builds, majestic swells that crash into intense choruses that then slowly fade. As I wrote about For the first time last year, you never really want the songs to end.
My only issue with the record, if I had to find one, is that its last two tracks — “Snow Globes” and “Basketball Shoes” — feel somewhat excessive. That’s not to say they’re bad songs. No, not at all. Rather, “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” the album’s third-to-last song, feels like a closer. With all of the themes on the album, for some reason “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade” just feels like where the record should end. It’d be about 37 minutes without those two last songs instead of 58 minutes with them. Again, not an inherently bad thing, but cutting those two I feel would make the whole album feel tighter.
Still, “Snow Globes” and “Basketball Shoes” are great, and the album isn’t any worse because they’re on it. “Basketball Shoes” in a lot of ways epitomizes the BC, NR song construction formula better than any other. And it’s the longest track at around 12 minutes. The band pulls in many different swells, climaxes and resolutions into the one track. Even though I think “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade” would make a great closer, it seems fitting that BC, NR would leave us with “Basketball Shoes.”
I love Black Country, New Road, and I love Ants From Up There. It’s a painful — yes, quite painful — record, but it’s so, so excellent.
Favorite tracks: Concorde, Good Will Hunting, The Place Where He Inserted the Blade
11.) In These Times - Makaya McCraven
“I’d never want to be known as anybody opposed to progress,
But this is no longer a matter of progress, or not progress.”
Makaya McCraven’s In These Times, a sprawling, 41 minute jazz record, opens with spoken word. It’s pulled from an interview with Harry Belafonte, the American singer, activist and actor. He’s chatting with Studs Terkel about the tale of John Henry, the Black American folk hero who out-dug a steel drill through a Southern rock tunnel.
“My brothers, my cousins, my friends have died trying to built this tunnel,
And it just kinda seems to me that nobody has the right to take away our responsibility to finish what these people have died for.”
The recording of Belafonte continues as McCraven’s band slowly builds. We hear a light marimba pattern repeating in the background, a set of sweeping, overarching strings, all pushed ahead by McCraven’s own drumming through an incessant, driving ride cymbal.
“Our dignity is involved in it. Our integrity, and everything that we believe as working men are involved.
I ain’t really opposed to the machine. I just feel that the machine can’t take the place of the soul and sweat of the many men who died to help build this tunnel.”
The band continues up to a fever swell, a crescendo of strings and drums and keys and horns, until:
“We gotta finish it, and it just ain’t two ways about it.”
And then, everything clears. A cathartic moment of release from the tension that had been building over the one-and-a-half minutes or so while the recording of Bellafonte’s voice played. McCraven’s drums suddenly slow into a relaxed beat, the strings and horns extended their lines and we hear, for the first time, a harp on the record that offers quick, delicate melodies on top of everything.
McCraven is a part of International Anthem, a Chicago record label that features some of my other favorite jazz musicians from the city that I love so dearly. But In These Times might be my singular favorite release from the record label. In These Times is lush, pulled together by the cohesion and rhythm of McCraven’s drums but accentuated by moments of individual brilliance from the various soloists and guests on the record. Brandee Younger’s harp, Jeff Parker’s guitar, Greg Ward’s alto saxophone.
All of the instrumentation is pulled together by McCraven’s deft compositions. We get moments of tranquility, like the release on the first song. But we also hear moments of fervor and energy, and anger and frustration. And, in the end, everything circles around that theme spoken by Bellafonte at the top of the record. A sense of integrity, pride in work, determination to move on and to move forward. It’s an acute sentiment, one that’s as universal as it is motivated by the individual.
We do have to finish it, whatever “it” may be. It’s a determined, almost energizing sentiment for the year ahead, one that I’m sure will feature more of this album and its cascading strings and soft horns and patterned drums from, what is, my favorite record of 2022.
Favorite tracks: In These Times, Dream Another, So Ubuji
Honorable Mentions
5 to the Eye with Stars - R.A.P. Ferreira
Home, before and after - Regina Spektor
And In The Darkness, Heats Aglow - Weyes Blood
Deathfame - Quelle Chris
Could We Be More - Kokoroko
The Forever Story - JID
There Will Be No Super-Slave - Ghais Guevara
Hellfire - Black Midi
Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers - Kendrick Lamar
We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong - Sharon Van Etten
five seconds flat - Lizzie McAlpine
Timewave Zero - Blood Incantation
RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART - Vince Staples
Chloe and the Next 20th Century - Father John Misty
Melt My Eyez See Your Future - Denzel Curry
Warm Chris - Aldous Harding
PAINLESS - Nilüfer Yanya
Time Skiffs - Animal Collective
Few Good Things - Saba
Laurel Hell - Mitski
These are my 11 favorite records from 2022, in no particular order. As I wrote at the top, it’s been a monumental year, full of the highest highs and some of the lowest lows. But, ending with the determination shared on In These Times feels appropriate for looking ahead to 2023.
My favorite albums of 2021
11 of my favorite albums from 2021, in no particular order.
I wrote a lot for my 2021 album review this year. So much, in fact, that the whole production had to get pushed back a few days as I struggled to put into words my thoughts about all of these projects. I also cheated and included eleven albums instead of ten, purely for the sake of variety. But despite the delay and the breaking of format, I hope you enjoy reading a bit about these eleven albums that helped me move through a year that was at times challenging, at times exuberant, yet always intriguing.
1.) Sometimes I Might Be Introvert - Little Simz
Introvert opens with a marching snare cadence that, after about two measures, adds three booming, descending bass hits. Then, a few measures later, what sounds like a trio of blaring trumpets join in with a two-note harmony. All of this continues until a chorus of voices sound and, 48 seconds in, everything shifts into an infectious 8th-note snare pattern, carried forward by the same booming bass sound. Such a grandiose opening sets the tone perfectly for an album that listens like a dramatic play, full of well-placed interludes and lyrics that echo melodramatic introspection. The first words we hear from Simz carry the theme — “The kingdoms of fire, the blood of a young messiah/I see sinners in a church, I see sinners in a church.” Then, the title of the project — “Sometimes I might be introvert/There’s a war inside, I hear battle cries.” This six-minute intro track might be my favorite of any project I listened to throughout the year, so it’s fitting that Simz gets to open the list here of my favorite albums from 2021.
Introvert runs one hour and five minutes, but at no point does it lag or feel lethargic. Each song and interlude is used wonderfully, even if the project can’t be said to follow one definite narrative throughout. Some themes persist, though, no doubt. Simz tackles feelings of isolation, misplaced love, womanhood, and self-image, among others. “Woman,” the album’s second track, featuring Cleo Sol, is about her mother, while “I Love You, I Hate You” is about her strained relationship with her father. “Standing Ovation” includes a number of excellent thematic instrumental changes throughout. Obongjayar features on the dark soul track “Point and Kill,” which is reminiscent of any number of excellent SAULT songs. That makes sense, as Inflo, who I mentioned in last year’s review of SAULT’s Untitled projects, handles the production on this record as well. “How Did You Get Here?” and “Miss Understand” round out the record, a brilliant pair of closing tracks after the final interlude that see Simz at her most direct and introspective. “Miss Understood,” in fact, is the most stripped back track on the record, a far departure from the grandiose opening, with Simz talking straight at the listener in a constant, stream of consciousness flow.
While Simz expresses self-doubt at points throughout Introvert, she simultaneously acknowledges that, on this project, she is at her best. I can’t help but agree.
Favorite tracks: Woman (with Cleo Sol), Two Worlds Apart, Protect My Energy
2.) New Fragility - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Certain albums remind me very distinctly of specific periods in my life. New Fragility — Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s (CYHSY) first full album since 2017 — is one such record. Released February 12, New Fragility walked alongside me as I picked my way through a spring semester at college that shaped me in ways I’m still trying to figure out. I’ve returned to it countless times throughout the summer, fall, and now the winter in order to pull myself back to that sequence of time, as St. Olaf thawed from another Minnesota winter and I pieced together my plans for the summer. Alec Ounsworth, now running CYHSY by himself, provides gorgeous balladry and lyrics that have stuck with me long after I first heard them. “I can’t believe the things I do to myself/I want to leave what I had never intended/To never set foot inside this burning house again,” he sings to end the album’s title track. “We could spay the lion/We could save ourselves some time/But am I really gone/When anywhere I hang my head is my home?” he asks on “CYHSY, 2005.” And, in a fitting ode to publishing this list on January 1st, Alec sings on “Mirror Song,” “Oh, despite our best efforts here comes another new year/Walking in circles, you say, ‘I swear I’ve been here before’.”
Alec’s intonation is entirely unique, each song comes packed with intimate portrayals of transient feelings and emotions, and it all comes together into 41 minutes of listening that helped me define such a rollercoaster of a year.
Favorite tracks: Thousand Oaks, CYHSY, 2005, Where They Perform Miracles
3.) Vince Staples - Vince Staples
Vince Staples, by Vince Staples. Speaking of albums that very clearly pull me back to a certain period of my life, Vince Staples by Vince Staples will forever be lodged in my memory as the soundtrack to my 2021 summer in Chicago. I would get off work at midnight and, before hopping on my bike to begin the half-hour ride home, pop my headphones in to begin listening to Vince Staples by Vince Staples straight through. The entire project only runs 22 minutes — by far the shortest on my list this year — but the ground it covers in such a brief run time is astounding. Propelled by Kenny Beats’ production, Vince tells stories of life in Los Angeles and how the past few years have shaped him as an artist and a person. Similar to The Alchemist (see below), Kenny Beats is a producer who has had a compelling run of projects — his collaboration with Denzel Curry last year the most notable. Now, his work alongside Vince can add to a catalogue for both artists that I hope will only continue to grow in the years to come.
The opening notes of “ARE YOU WITH THAT?”, right into the beat drop and the introduction of Vince’s lyrics a few measures later, will forever transport me back to those nighttime bike rides north through the streets of Chicago. And, for that, I am eternally grateful.
Favorite tracks: ARE YOU WITH THAT?, THE SHINING, TAKE ME HOME
4.) Bo Jackson - Boldy James and The Alchemist
The Alchemist had a big year. The prolific producer followed up his 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album, alongside Freddie Gibbs, by releasing a total of seven projects in 2021, a mix of solely instrumental and producer roles alongside notable lyricists. Haram, which The Alchemist released in March with Armand Hammer (who featured in my Honorable Mentions last year), has seen the widest critical acclaim, landing in year end lists for several prominent outlets and freelance music lovers. Don’t get me wrong, Haram is a phenomenal record in its own right. However, my choice Alchemist from 2021 is his near 45-minute long August project with rapper Boldy James, Bo Jackson.
Bo Jackson has a raw and gritty feel that is less noticeable on Haram and other Alchemist projects from the past year. James’ intonation is similar to that of Freddie Gibbs, so the record echoes the general tenor of Alfredo, the duo’s 2020 Grammy nominated project. I think The Alchemist’s production style best compliments the type of melancholic, straightforward delivery that is produced by James and Gibbs alike. Gibbs even features on the record. So too does Benny the Butcher, another rapper cut from the same cloth, if you will. Earl Sweatshirt, who features on Haram, pops up on the album’s sixth track too.
Overall, Bo Jackson is full of twisted stories of drug dealing and ill-found love, delivered distinctly by James on top of an eccentric, sample-heavy collection of Alchemist beats. The project is both artists at their best, and it clearly stands out among the voluminous and rapidly growing catalogue of The Alchemist.
Favorite tracks: Brickmile to Montana, Photographic Memories (feat. Earl Sweatshirt), Fake Flowers
5.) Occult New Age - Book of Wyrms
Like many things, I’m a sucker for a heavy, sludgy brand of rock music. Whether it’s Inlet by Hum (see last year’s list) or the classic tones of Black Sabbath records like Paranoid or Master of Reality, there’s something cathartic about listening to a heavily reverbed guitar tucked inside a mix alongside a chunky bass and a drum pattern propelled by a driving high-hat. Occult New Age hits this auditory combination right from the off, with a quick intro drum fill that leads directly into one of the most infectious guitar riffs I heard all year. Sarah Moore Lindsey, who handles vocals on the record and is one quarter of the group that makes up Book of Wyrms, offers a vocal style that is slightly muted and forlorn, pushed a bit farther back in the mix than you’d usually find a vocal track. But such a delivery perfectly compliments the instrumental stylings of Occult. The tracks feature numerous time signature and tempo changes, adding to the record’s complexity. There’s even a laid-back acoustic cut three songs in; maybe a little early for such a breather, but an intriguing song nonetheless.
If you’re a fan of Black Sabbath (who isn’t?), you’ll surely enjoy all 40-odd-minutes of Occult New Age.
Favorite tracks: Meteoric Dagger, Hollergoblin, Weatherworker
6.) Talk Memory - BADBADNOTGOOD
BADBADNOTGOOD (BBNG) are a strange group. I’ve always enjoyed their music and frequent collaborations with other artists, but I recognize their complexities, most notably their contentious split with former keyboardist and artistic director Matthew Tavares in 2019. The group was most prolific early in the decade, but they saw a decrease in output under their own name with a shift of focus to contributing production and instrumentals to other projects in the latter part of the 2010s. Among their most notable contributions during this period is the instrumental for the song “LUST” off Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., production of “WEIGHT OFF” with KAYTRANADA from 99.9%, and the closing track off Mick Jenkins’ Pieces of a Man. Their sound is distinct and often easy to pick out when they do contribute an instrumental or feature on an album or a remix. Sour Soul, their 2015 project with Ghostface Killah, is easily one of my favorite hip-hop projects from the last decade.
But, despite this continuous musical output, Talk Memory is the first project under their own name since 2017. It represents, for me, a clear return to form — if not alongside a stylistic shift — for Alexander Sowinski, Chester Henson, and Leland Whitty, the trio that now make up the core of BBNG. While elements of the group’s electronica-infused jazz fusion stylings are present throughout Talk Memory, the incorporation of strings and piano make the project feel more like a classical jazz album. I’m sure this instrumental change is due in large part to the arrangements of Arthur Verocai, a Brazilian jazz musician whose 1972 self-titled album has been cited as an influence for artists like Cut Chemist and Madlib. BBNG even pick out the record in their 2017 “What’s in My Bag?” video with Amoeba Records. Verocai’s influence bolstered the orchestral instrumentation heard distinctly on tracks like “City of Mirrors,” “Beside April,” and “Love Proceeding.” It’s this combination of more traditional strings with BBNG’s unique blend of jazztronica that make Talk Memory stand out.
No single cut from the record displays the potency of this combination better than “Talk Meaning,” the final song from Talk Memory. It features Terrace Martin — saxophonist, Kamasi Washington collaborator, and the acclaimed producer for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly — and Brandee Younger — a harpist who has featured on acts ranging from Moses Sumney’s Aromanticism to Resavoir’s self-titled record to, most recently, Kanye West’s DONDA. It’s Younger’s harp notes that bring the record to a close, a fitting end to a project that showcases the musical versatility and the collaborative ability of BADBADNOTGOOD.
Among these different aspects of Talk Memory, I think the best way to describe the project, in relation to BBNG’s previous records, is maturity. It’s a revelatory growing-up moment for the group and an excellent entrance into a new decade that, I hope, can bring as much proclivity for the group as the previous one.
Favorite tracks: Beside April, Love Proceeding, Talk Meaning
7.) For the first time - Black Country, New Road
I’ve heard them referred to in a number of different ways. The English speedy wundergrounders, the British post-rockers, our new favorite prog-men — all monikers for the trio of bands that is Squid, Black Midi, and Black Country, New Road. Where each group’s sound is distinctive, their shared youth and sudden rise up the ranks of British rock have inevitably found the three grouped together in the minds of me and other music fans. All three bands released albums this year, and while the decision between including Black Midi or Black Country in this list was certainly a difficult one to make (sorry Squid), I came to my senses and put For the first time on here, a record that is at once more approachable without losing its uniqueness and progressive rock appeal. Plus, I already hyped up Black Midi in 2019, so I figured it’d be better to write about Black Country this time around.
For the first time was a hugely anticipated record after Black Country, New Road jumped into the spotlight with their excellent song “Sunglasses” that appeared on NPR’s year-end singles list in 2020, primarily due to the band’s performance at the South-by-Southwest music festival. Although the album version of the song differs slightly from the earlier single, the track is a perfect encapsulation of how Black Country shape and mold a track — a ponderous opening that builds slowly into a frenetic climax and then a steady close that you never really want to end. This pattern is effortlessly repeated on songs like “Opus” and my personal favorite track from the record “Athens, France.” The instrumental opening to the project, aptly named for its vocal absence, is a punctuated introduction to an enthralling 40 minutes of music. (40 minutes really is the sweet spot for album length, innit?)
Apparently Black Country, New Road have the 2022 follow-up to their 2021 debut record — Ants From Up There — mostly put together and ready to release in February. If For the first time had high expectations, its revealed quality has created a seeming fervor to discover where Black Country, New Road go from here.
Favorite tracks: Athens, France, Sunglasses, Opus
8.) The Turning Wheel - Spelling
My story with The Turning Wheel is interesting. The first I heard of Spelling’s album, released in late June, was from a review by theneedledrop, the YouTube standout music reviewer who shaped much of my music taste in high school and early college. Anthony Fantano, man behind the channel, famously gave the album a 10 out of 10, making it his fifth project out of hundreds reviewed to earn the prestigious “perfect” designation. This immediately turned me away from the project, as its release and subsequent needledrop review coincided with a time when I was pretty turned off from Fantano. I had begun to find I no longer got much out of his reviews, and I found his online persona quite annoying.
But, when I began to see other’s heap praise upon the album, I realized I inevitably had to check it out. I listened to the first song, “Little Deer,” once, and thought it was just okay, nothing too special. Then I put it on again and made it through “Little Deer,” this time thinking, “Huh — there might be something here!” After several subsequent listens, I, just like Fantano, fell in love with the album and all of its theatrics.
In a somewhat similar vein with Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, The Turning Wheel listens like a massive dramatic play, with cascading ups and downs fueled by a 30-piece orchestral backing and Spelling’s overexaggerated vocal style. The production is immense and the themes of the songs are unique, even strange. “Little Deer” is definitely up there with “Introvert” for best opening tracks of 2021, greeting the listener with two staunch piano chords accompanied by an ascendant string arrangement; a hi-hat pattern helps move the whole thing along. “Turning Wheel,” the album’s third song, sees Tia Cabral, the artist behind Spelling, take the role of a societal outcast imploring her peers to ignore the constant need for attention from others and to join her “up on the hill.” “Boys at School,” which opens the album’s second half, details Cabral’s isolation and ostracism in school and her adulation of a fictitious figure on their TV, who “gave me a heartbeat” when she metaphorically hadn’t had a real one before.
The Turning Wheel feels like a luscious, grandiose escape into a world that is somehow beyond ours, a dramatic pantheon of a musical project that echoes the ‘turning wheel’ of life, its chaos and its mystery. I’m very happy I did decide to listen to this one.
Favorite tracks: Little Deer, Awaken, Boys at School
9.) I Know I’m Funny haha - Faye Webster
Each year I like to include one record in my year-end round-up that is simply a really nice listen. Last year it was Lianne La Havas’ self titled record. 2019 had some highlights in the pop subsection. This year it’s Faye Webster’s I Know I’m Funny haha. Another album that, like Vince Staples by Vince Staples and Spelling’s The Turning Wheel, featured heavily in my Chicago summer soundtrack, Webster’s 40-minute record is just really sweet and warm. There’s a few themes that shine throughout, like anxiety, loneliness, distracted love, and long-sought happiness. These plethora of feelings that Webster covers on Funny (is that a useful abbreviated title for the record? idk it’s kind of comical tho) come off like the introspective musings that have been heightened by an isolated and pandemic-stricken world in 2021. When you don’t have much of an outlet, you wind up rewinding moments or feelings in your own head over and over, and that comes through on Funny. Webster’s lyrics are complimented by the primarily smooth and laid back instrumentals underneath. It’s not that I would necessarily call Funny a ‘feel good’ record, but it’s certainly a record that I’ve put on at times when I’ve felt down and wanting to brew in my own poorly introspection.
Why journal when you can just listen to Faye Webster?
Favorite tracks: In A Good Way, Both All The Time, A Dream With a Baseball Player
10.) For Those I Love - s/t (David Balfe)
Loss is a theme that has been at the forefront of many lives throughout 2021. The last two records on my list deal with loss, but each in very different ways. For Those I Love, a self-titled project from David Balfe, a Dublin-based poet and musician, is one of the most direct, unapologetic explorations of what it means to experience loss that I’ve ever heard. Balfe shares memories and exhortations about the time he shared with late bandmate, fellow Dublin poet, and childhood friend Paul Curran, who took his own life in 2018. It’s Balfe’s debut solo record, and it’s an album that expounds deeply personal experiences in a way that is fraught with universal expressions of frustration over what will never be again.
On For Those I Love, Balfe expresses a love for Curran that “will never fade” — the record’s motif that is pronounced over and over again in a singularly Irish accent on top of piano-infused dance-electonica beats. This instrumental combination caught me a bit off guard on first listen. It seemed like a clash — stripped down spoken-word, poetic stories of childhood and teen exploits over instrumentals that sound like something you could reasonably dance to if divorced from their accompanying lyrics. But the more I listened through For Those I Love, the more I came to appreciate the unique dynamic formed by the combination. Balfe and Curran had in fact been working on the project together before Curran’s death, and the final verse on the album’s intro track portrays a moment of the two’s special musical connection.
“And a year ago or so I played this song for you on the car stereo in the night’s breeze/
This bit kicked in with it's synths and its keys and you smiled as you sat next to me/
You in the front, Gilly in the backseat, going ninety to the sounds as we roared down the street/
The other boys stompin’ feet, and me in utter disbelief from the joy from the break in the beats/
We got out and stood, by the Kia Rio caged stage, and I felt like I had it all/
Because I have a love, and it will never fade/
And neither will you, Paul.”
The record balances storytelling with both introspection and social commentary. “Top Scheme” asks, “How can we not feel this rage?/When the therapy costs more than half your wage,” and, a few verses later, derides a commercialized society that “jokes about the junkies” — “Addicts that get dehumanized ’cause they’re poor/But those problems start at your door.” The next song — “The Myth / I Don’t” — sees Balfe reflecting on how such a society has personally affected him and his battle with drugs. “I’ll take debt over death/And stress to keep breath/’Cause I see no other option yet,” he says. “The weight of this hangover/Hungover this year/And you drink to stop the trembling fear.” “Birthday / The Pain,” one song later, questions the purpose of aging when no amount of time will bring things back to the way they were — “So don’t fucking ask me why I don’t want to age/It just marks the time of things staying the same.”
The same song holds one of my favorite moments on the record. The track opens with what sounds like a muffled, far off crowd chanting. This sample came from the sounds of fans at Tolka Park, the home field of Shelbourne FC (the Shels), Curran’s favorite Irish soccer team. During the first game after his death, the Shelbourne ultras — depicted on the album’s cover — joined in a 27th-minute celebration of Curran’s life, full of red banners and flares and the chants that are heard on “Birthday / The Pain.” Curran was 27 when he died, and after the game was over, Balfe and other fans spread his ashes on the pitch. The story is gut-wrenching but beautiful, an encapsulation of how the love of sport can bring people together during periods of sorrow. Balfe using the chants on the album shows his musical aptitude and, of course, his continuous love for his friend. The next song finds Balfe expressing these memories with candor and sincerity.
“You live in every twist and turn at Shels/Alan Byrne head the ball/And all the glory and hell/And at times we win as well,
Still sit in your spot at the New Stand/Watch the young ultras throw cans and get banned/Beside old men smoking subpar soapbar hash/As we look out onto the field where we laid your ash.”
For Those I Love packs adolescent rage and memories into a forthright expression of pain carried onward by a love that will never fade — a simplistic yet impactful motif that exemplifies how difficult and confusing loss can be.
Favorite tracks: I Have A Love, The Myth / I Don’t, Birthday / The Pain
11.) By the Time I Get to Phoenix - Injury Reserve
Injury Reserve, alongside other artists like MF DOOM, Kendrick Lamar, A Tribe Called Quest, and Danny Brown, provided much of the soundtrack to my four years in high school. I’ll go back and listen to Floss, Injury Reserve’s enigmatic 2016 project, to hear Parker Corey’s boisterous production under Ritchie with a T and Stepa J. Groggs’ braggadocios and slightly off-kilter lyrics. “Ttktv” from their first record sticks in my memory, and “S on Ya Chest” from Floss is one of my favorite rap songs of all time. So when I heard the news that Stepa — Jordan Groggs — had died in June 2020, I, among countless others, was floored. An act that had all the potential to become one of the great hip-hop trios of all time, fusing glitchy electronic production alongside witty lyricism in a seemingly natural symbiosis, was suddenly divided, never to be reformed again.
Corey and Ritchie pick up the theme of loss on By the Time I Get to Phoenix, their first full length project since the loss of Groggs. But in contrast to For Those I Love, the way Ritchie and Corey deal with loss is much less straightforward, not as candid, and more confused. Corey’s production and Ritchie’s lyrics express the disorientation the duo feels following Groggs’ death. Where For Those I Love states simply the certitude that Balfe’s love for his lost friend will never fade, By the Time I Get to Phoenix sees the hip-hop duo still searching for the right way to mourn and to move forward.
Phoenix opens with “Outside,” a six minute track that finds Ritchie rapping in a somewhat abrasive, disjointed style, imploring the listener to “Let me talk to ’em kindly!” and that “We cannot end this with an agree to disagree.” The last two minutes and thirty seconds or so of the song, after Ritchie’s verses, is one of the standout musical moments of the year. The track builds and builds into a stuttered rhythmic beat, where Corey mixes the sounds of heavy breathing with a monotonous drum pattern and a simple repeating synth melody. It’s just off-kilter enough to be intriguing and even anxiety-inducing, and it sets the tone for the production style throughout the remainder of the record.
As soon as you think the beat is going to find a reliable pattern on any song, something to latch onto for more than a few seconds, it switches again, keeping the listener constantly off balance. The disjointed, fractured nature of each track matches Ritchie’s lyrical expressions. “Postpostpartum,” the ninth track on the record, is where Ritchie most directly addresses these feelings about the death of Stepa and its aftermath, how it shaped and altered his relationships with other people while looking for some sort of guidance — “I had my arms to the sea but now they gotta close.” “Bye Storm,” the record’s closing track, and its lyrics somewhat echo Lupe Fiasco’s “The Show Goes On,” with Ritchie acknowledging that he and Corey must continue to make art despite the loss they’ve experienced. Yet Ritchie and Corey must go on in a way that is forever altered by the loss of their groupmate and friend; you can’t have a “Three Man Weave” — the closing song from their 2019 self titled album — without a third man.
The hardest hitting, standout song on Phoenix is “Knees,” which comes between the two tracks just mentioned. It features posthumous lyrics from Stepa in verses that are difficult to listen to. He acknowledges his battle with alcoholism, sharing the advice his aunt told him shortly before his passing. He knows his drinking habit is dangerously unhealthy, and he promises, “Okay, this last one is my last one, shit.” But he knows that he “Probably said that about the last one” and is “Probably ’gon say it about the next two.” Ritchie’s own verses, before and after Groggs’, refer back to the song’s title, where he says, “My knees hurt ’cause I’m growing/And that’s a tough pill to swallow/’Cause I’m not, I’m not gettin’ taller.” In one sense loss can help a person to grow. But growth is never assured, and Ritchie acknowledges that here. The combination of Ritchie’s feelings of stagnation and pain with Stepa’s verses about his addiction — made more meaningful in light of his untimely death — make this the most emotionally potent moment on Phoenix, a sobering understanding of a future minus one.
With loss, it seems, Injury Reserve are saying that there’s nothing to really ‘get over.’ It’s just confusing and painful — “It rains, it pours, but damn, man, it’s really pourin’,” as Ritchie says on “Bye Storm” — until, after some indeterminate period of time, it suddenly isn’t anymore. I don’t know where Corey and Ritchie go from here, but I’m entirely glad the two were able to come together in reflection and sorrow on By the Time I Get to Phoenix — what is, without a doubt, my favorite record of 2021.
Favorite tracks: Outside, SS San Francisco (feat. Zelooperz), Knees
Honorable Mentions
Haram - Armand Hammer & The Alchemist
Lonely Guest - s/t (Tricky)
WE ARE - Jon Batiste
30 - Adele
CRAWLER - IDLES
LP! - JPEGMAFIA
Friends That Break Your Heart - James Blake
The Melodic Blue - Baby Keem
GLOW ON - Turnstile
Animal - LUMP (Laura Marling & Mike Lindsey)
Dark in Here - The Mountain Goats
I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES - Backxwash
Imaginary Everything - L’Orange & Namir Blade
Super What? - CZARFACE & MF DOOM
Promises - Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders
Notes With Attachments - Pino Palladino & Blake Mills
CARNAGE - Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
IMMEDIATELY Remixes - Perfume Genius & others
Jubilee - Japanese Breakfast
Uneasy - Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, and Tyshawn Sorey
I wrote at the close of last year’s review, “If 2021 as a year overall can match the type of music released in 2020, I think we’ll be in for a good one.” I think we might have missed the mark on that prediction a little bit. But, with hope forever lodged in our hearts, I echo the same sentiment for 2022. We all know even-numbered years are better anyway.
The charade of climate resilience
The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, ended last Friday. One of the most contentious points that came out of the conference surrounded disaster aid, or funding that would be provided to vulnerable populations to help manage environmental disasters fueled by climate change. Tangential provisions have been included in previous climate deals to help nations adapt to a quickly warming environment.
These finance streams meet the demands of poorer countries — that suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate change — for richer countries to pay their fair share from their greater carbon and methane outputs. But although these calls for funding are certainly much needed in the short term, as natural disasters grow in volume and intensity, they ignore the causes of climate change that have gotten us to this point in the first place, driven by capitalistic factors like overproduction, outsourcing of labor, and globalised demand. The emphasis placed on building adaptability and resiliency implicitly accepts these root causes, and instead of trying to uproot and change them, looks to place a bandage over their worst effects.
It’s no wonder that several of the world’s largest multinational corporations directly sponsored the COP Resilience Hub. These companies, like Google, JP Morgan Chase, and Deloitte, have vested interests in maintaining the capitalistic status quo that has allowed them to amass such wealth and global influence.
These companies are certainly capable of adaptation and building resilience technologies, like Google’s development of a global flood mapping tool using the Google Earth platform. But often pledges for adaptation are imperceptible from forms of greenwashing modern companies use to appease shareholders in the short term without altering their core business practices. And even further, it is critical to ask what the use is for such technologies like Google’s flood map. If these floods are still decimating the lives of millions of people around the world each year, especially those in the global south, what instrumental, climate change-altering good is there in mapping them?
Google’s flood map is only one example. Much of the language used throughout the COP26 summit incentivizes such technological developments, as long as they “focus on helping the most vulnerable, frontline communities to build resilience and adapt to the physical impacts of climate change,” in light of increasing natural disasters and warming trends. Such language fails to advocate for tangible overhauls and exculpates many of the factors that have driven and will continue to drive these drastic events that necessitate such resilience in the first place.
As I was putting together a literature review for my upcoming research paper, I stumbled upon an article that radically shifted my views on climate resilience and that inspired this little editorial. Published in the journal Antipode in 2019 by Malini Ranganathan from American University and Eve Bratman from Franklin and Marshall College, “From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC” reimagines resilience “through an abolitionist framework.” The two authors write in their abstract, about resilience as a solution to climate change vulnerabilities, “this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place.”
When I read that sentence, I felt as if my thoughts and feelings about commonplace approaches to mitigating climate change were instantly validated. I had always been internally skeptical of national and international climate pledges pronounced by massive corporations and federal governments alike. The majority of climate activists my age share similar feelings, having expressed outrage in Glasgow led by youth celebrity activist Greta Thunberg. “This is no longer a climate conference. This is now a global north greenwash festival, a two week long celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah,” Thunberg said outside the COP26 conference to a crowd of hundreds as world leaders deliberated climate adaptation and resilience strategies inside. Skepticism seems the natural response when we’ve lived our entire lives fearful of the growing threat of a warming climate while watching those in power do nothing to avert such catastrophe.
Ranganathan and Bratman’s article, although being focused on the District of Columbia, offers sentiments that echo the type of transformative change that is needed, and that is currently lacking, to halt climate change, restore the earth’s environment, and re-enfranchise indigenous populations that have for centuries suffered harms “through settler colonialism yoked to industrial capitalism.” The two authors cite another article by four researchers from UCLA and the University of Sydney, Australia that explains a “global urban resilience complex” that produces “norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes integral to urban development planning and governance.”
Again, it is no wonder that several of the world’s biggest corporations sponsored the resilience hub at the globe’s largest international conference on climate change. These private companies and public-private partnerships have found a way to directly benefit from forms of resilience that have become commonplace response strategies against climate change that is only perpetuated by the capitalist system they uphold.
I don’t consider myself a particularly radical person, nor am I usually outspoken. But when it comes to climate change, it’s hard not to become radicalized. When international conferences like COP26 are lauded for their ability to foster a “green vortex” of climate action, it’s impossible not to become cynical. Accepting pledges not backed by policy and cross-national agreements that fail to define any clear plan forward as meaningful solutions to a crisis that displaces tens of millions of people every year and causes billions of dollars of disaster-related damages is nothing short of insanity.
Maybe insanity is the best way to describe the whole charade of climate resiliency. Albert Einstein’s definition of the term gets thrown around a lot — doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But it seems particularly applicable here. Scientific consensus is quite clear in the fact that systems of energy consumption and transportation that drive capitalistic markets around the world are the primary causes of a rapidly changing climate. So without altering these fundamental systems of consumption, we won’t see any meaningful reduction in global warming trends.
Yet, again and again, the outcomes of global conferences like COP26 always uphold such systems, with only minor tweaks for adaptability and resilience. To see real change, we have to move past the praxis of climate resilience and reshape our collective understanding of what it means to operate in an environmentally-friendly world.
Traveling up, via the train
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, passed and signed by President Biden on Friday, includes a $66 billion investment in passenger and freight rail. I think this investment is quite worthwhile, as I believe, like the President himself does, that taking the train is probably the best way to cover long distances. No mode of transportation better lets a traveler appreciate the pastoral Atlantic coast scenes than the great northeastern rail, which I had the distinct pleasure of riding up and down this weekend and for which I will forever go to bat in the future.
The U.S. is a notoriously car dependent country. There’s an entire subsection of YouTube videos that tear the near continuous suburban sprawl of America to pieces, a genre of content I enjoy watching very much. The train, in that sense, feels somewhat counter-culture. Even though passenger train travel has existed for far longer than the car has, and even though such a mode of transportation has inevitably serviced millions more individuals throughout its history, the train’s diminution as the main way to get around vast swathes of the country makes the whole experience much more uplifting, like you’re actively participating in the underdog’s victory.
And, in most scenarios and depending on the infrastructure, train travel has a lot greener of an environmental footprint — nearly half that of airplane travel over comparable distances. Of course, efficiency is always a consideration, but enjoying pastoral landscapes and halving your carbon footprint seems sure to be a worthwhile trade-off for an extra two days or so of travel. And that’s not to mention the cost and the overall hassle of airport navigation.
All of this goes to support the fact that my trip up the Atlantic coast on the northeast regional Amtrak route from New York City to Boston was one of the most wonderful four-and-a-half hours of my life. Leaving the Big Apple at around 1:30 p.m., I arrived in Boston at approximately 5:45. Over this stretch of time, the train covered about 230 miles, making stops in Bridgeport, New Haven, Providence, and of course and finally, Boston. As the rail stretched farther and farther north, the sun sank lower and lower over the Atlantic in the east. A golden hue unraveled over the waves and the picturesque seaside villages and ports. The autumn foliage of the coastal forests majestically reflected the rays of sunlight. The climate was perfect.
Inside the train I managed to do a little bit of everything. I read a couple of chapters of my most recent novel, I texted back and forth with family and friends, I read an excellent article, I called my lovely sister, and I listened to a few podcasts and some new albums while staring out over the coastal vistas. All throughout the journey I retrieved my phone and snapped photos of particularly gorgeous displays (several of which can be seen in the Photography section of this very site). Each new cove we passed, each reflection of the sun on the ocean, brought me such immense joy that I couldn’t help but capture it whatever way possible.
The train ride felt, quite literally, like poetry in motion. At certain points I tried to take a step back and picture myself in third person, once removed, a way to capture the beauty I was feeling much like a director would capture the perfect shot in a film. I imagined that if I could hold onto those vivid images, I could likewise hold onto those beautiful feelings. The combination of the pictures that I took and this third person self-reflection have helped me to do just that. Now, when I go back and look at the photos of the golden Atlantic, or listen to the electronic harmonies of J Dilla’s “Donuts,” I know that I will always be transported back to those consequential moments in time where I was well and truly at peace, watching the sun set and knowing that some moments in life simply are special.
So, thank you Joe Biden for investing in an experience that has given and will continue to give me, you, and countless others boundless joy. May the train continue to sweep our collective imagination away with the cascading Atlantic tide.
Family? Fam-ILY!
I’ve spent the vast amount of my time over the past four years hundreds of miles apart from my family. This is in no way a unique circumstance. It’s the same position most of my friends have found themselves in. And it’s an inter-generational rite of passage for thousands of other late teen/early 20-somethings around the world. You strike out on your own and forego all of the ties that have kept you together over the course of your life so far.
But the sharing of experiences doesn’t make their effects any less profound, and I write this introduction in a mood of consideration, as I’ve found myself reflecting much about what family means over the past few months. I’m now farther away from home than I’ve ever been, and maybe that’s why family has been on my mind so much. The geographical distance has made me recognize the emotional distance that sometimes crops up when your loved ones are no longer a car ride away.
This distance — both physical and emotional — is in no way a bad thing, however. Quite to the contrary, I think it’s a very good thing. For what would family be if not a net to land in when you suddenly find yourself all alone, astray in a wide world of mystery and fascination?
My sister calls me sometimes. Not super often, but often enough that we’re able to stay informed about each others’ lives and somewhat in tune with each others’ emotions. I sort of rely on these calls during certain moments for emotional support, and I think she does the same. This support is part of how our relationship takes a different shape when there’s this extended distance, when our only form of communication is over the phone. But this unique shape is quite good and strong, for all of its strange edges and bends.
It’s this way because my sister and I are, in many ways, the same. There’s no one either of us can relate to more about our struggles with anxiety, loneliness, and heartbreak. We share the same family, the same upbringing, the same pains of divorce and constant relocation. I see these experiences quite differently than she does, but the mere sharing of such experiences has shaped our approach to the world such that we are each others’ best friends and only true confidants.
Sure, I have conversations with my mom and my dad frequently as well. I talk with my dad most frequently, even, more often than with my mom or sister. But these chats are burdened by the constraints of parenthood, to a large extent, where the majority of the talk will revolve around catching up about life’s most recent experiences and how they’ve presented themselves. Do I have enough money for groceries? Am I learning a lot in classes? What kind of opportunities have you been up to in D.C.? All good and fair topics to discuss, surely, but not ones that necessarily elicit my emotional responses to the world.
And in these conversations with mom and dad, I’m more closed off. I’m more reluctant to divulge my most recent doubts and anxieties because I don’t want to worry either of them. It’s difficult enough navigating the web of adulthood — of having to provide not only for yourself but for your partner and kids — that my impertinent feelings about love and sadness and regret shouldn’t interrupt.
Yet with my sister, none of these ulterior concerns really matter. We’re really going through the same stuff — difficult classes, balancing work and life, navigating relationships. Our conversations can cut right to the heart of the matter without being diluted by talk of grades or finances. None of that really matters anyway. My sister and I understand that; that’s why we’re so close.
In another layer, only my sister and I can complain about our parents. There is literally no one else in the whole wide world that would understand my particular parental gripes better than my sister, and vice versa. I never speak poorly of my parents with others, or if I do it’s with great reluctance and always with a caveat. But with my sister? Our parents are open season for a slew of complaints, not always justified but usually quite cathartic.
When we complain or we muse about the world together, my sister and I, we know where each other is coming from. This shared comprehension of things is rooted in an understanding that at any moment, no matter the distance or the circumstances or the other complexities of life, we can always call and make time for one another. When it seems no one else is there for us, we are there for each other, in only the way that two individuals who have found themselves in the unique circumstance of sharing an entire life and genetic code can be.
This gets back to the core of the matter — family is a net that can catch you at your lowest and somehow spring you back up again. But beyond that, family is the closest connection you’re ever going to have with other human beings. And within the web of familial connections, from great-aunts to second cousins to long-lost uncles, no bond will ever be greater, no net stronger, than that of your sibling. I’m incredibly lucky to have such a great one.
Well, here you are Ellie. This one’s for you! While you were my motivation for writing (thank you for the idea, no matter how self-ingratiating it was), all of my sentiments remain undoubtedly true.
Karma — it’s all Karma!
I’ve long been obsessed with the concept of Karma. Something about it seems naturally appealing. In a world of incoherent and inconsistent statutory justice, the idea of an omniscient cosmic justice is a hopeful conception. One gets what one deserves — maybe not consciously or intentionally, but definitely polemically. Karma is the ultimate arbiter of truth and justice. As someone who very much likes both of those ideals, Karma is an attractive force.
So much so, in fact, that I use Karma as a guide for a lot of my actions. This can be both positive and negative. Thinking about not composting that coffee cup? I better, because if not I might hit a rock on my bike later and tumble off into the dirt. Give up my seat on the bus for a woman holding two grocery bags? Well, I might get a message out of the blue from an old friend I haven’t connected with in several years. This is seriously my internal monologue quite often. And I justify such a moral code by telling myself that as long as my actions have some wider social benefit I can hope for Karma to deliver some just desserts.
But this raises an interesting question: Why is receiving benefit — whether that be the presence of a positive outcome or the prevention of a negative outcome — necessary to do things that are just plainly good? Shouldn’t the nice feeling that you’ve done something positive for someone else be enough to motivate future positive actions?
Karma originally had a fairly narrow definition in the traditional Hindu text, the Rigveda, where it denoted ritualistic actions only. It’s meaning expanded to its more contemporary understanding within the Upanishads, the foundational religious texts in Hinduism. Here is where Karma gained its moral or ethical weight through an attachment to a system of cause-and-effect; what one puts into the universe through their “actions”, the universe will return upon them.
Part of the expansion of Karma within the Upanishads is an extension from our material world to the universe more broadly. This is why Karma is often compared to the notion of heaven and hell in Abrahamic religions, where God determines one’s ultimate fate by judging the moral weight of their actions in accordance with a religious code. But in the absence of an omnipotent God, Karma occupies a more distinct space in Hinduism and as an accompanying concept in Buddhism. Instead of a focus on the afterlife, Karma in eastern religions pervades all actions that ripple widely throughout the universe. In a world that is perceived as completely connected, Karma is a powerful way to help ensure one considers the full weight of acting one way or another. If you put good out into the world, the world will summarily return good to you; vice versa with bad.
If you buy this view, then Karma is necessary to enforce such a doctrine of interconnectedness. Personally, I really enjoy feeling like my existence is in some way tied to the existence of all other beings in our world, so, likewise, I really enjoy the concept of Karma.
That’s why simply feeling good about your actions isn’t enough, in my view. It misses this core tenet of what Karma represents. Not only can Karma be an ultimate arbiter of truth and justice, but it can also help us all understand our existence in the universe through the actions we take. One should, before they act, consider what kind of energy they’re putting out into the world. Then one can align their actions with Karma and be promised a commensurate return for their positive or negative energy.
But I think, as a consequentialist, a belief in Karma isn’t necessary to lead a virtuous life by any means. However, I would advocate for a firm understanding of Karma as a grounding doctrine for one’s day-to-day actions because I believe a more profound realization of our interconnectedness could help solve at their roots a number of deep-lying social problems. Thinking climate change, for example. A major part of the problem in trying to reverse a rapidly changing climate and seek positive environmental outcomes is an individualistic thinking. We see this philosophy even in supposedly progressive climate legislation like cap-and-trade. A major company can do as much bad to the earth as they want as long as they pay for it in some way as an individual entity.
This is no way to go about correcting the type of rut that seems to persist in our society. Embracing Karma as a guiding moral principle and complete interconnectedness as its worldly foundation can, I think, help start to correct such a rut. That’s why I like it so much; it can be good both individually and, even better, cosmically.
Deactivating my fun Twitter because
I’ve quickly come to realize that most people don’t make decisions based on any sort of reason or logic. That would be far too time consuming of an endeavor. Rather, people make decisions on whims, based on what their gut is telling them to do or because they have some sudden impulse. Most actions are poorly planned and oftentimes even more poorly executed. Why did that woman decide to stop abruptly in the middle of the crosswalk so that I had to slam on my brakes and going flying off my bike? It’s inconceivable, and certainly not reconcilable with any type of logic or basic reasoning.
But isn’t that beautiful? What would life be if every action, every decision made by every individual was as thoroughly processed and thought-out as possible? I conjecture to think that such a life would be quite boring. I wouldn’t currently have two massive scrapes on my elbow and left leg, respectively, if that woman wouldn’t have made the illogical decision to stop in the middle of the crosswalk, but at the same time, I wouldn’t have such an engaging story to tell and I also wouldn’t have the sweet comfort of knowing some people truly do care for others when they stopped to check to see if I was alright. I fist bumped that lady after picking my bike up off the concrete and got on with my day, and I’m all the better for it, and it’s all because of an irrational decision.
Deactivating my fun Twitter falls into the category of such rash, whimsical decisions. I suddenly decided, midway through watching Tottenham Hotspur get demolish by arch-rivals Arsenal, that I was spending too much time “doomscrolling.” I somehow was subconsciously comparing myself to all of these hip and cool accounts I saw on my screen. Why couldn’t I generate such a following? My tweets were funny enough, surely. A light chuckle here, a disappointment there, nearly an hour of my life each day gone — that’s all Twitter was giving me.
So now it’s gone from my phone and now I only access the website via my laptop and now the only Twitter accounts I have access to are my pseudo-professional one and the one for a podcast I’m interning with.
There’s a bit more I want to say about rash decision making. At the same time I’ve come to realize that most people make decisions irrationally and that this is indeed a beautiful thing, I’ve also come to realize that these types of decisions aren’t really irrational at all.
So often, I think, people can get caught up in a senseless pursuit of perfection. It’s cliché to say that no one is perfect; it’s less cliché to say that no decision is perfect. We strive to make perfect decisions in all facets of life — what jobs we apply for, what restaurant we go to eat at, what loaf of bread to buy at the supermarket. But while these choices may seem calculated and supported by some reasoning, at their heart they are all incredibly arbitrary, influenced by a mess of conflicting factors.
What I’m trying to say is that even the most seemingly rational, logically calculated decisions are fundamentally unreasonable and irrational. As someone who has long prided themselves as being logical and reasonable, this is a challenging realization to make. However, I’m beginning to understand the real truth of it and, better yet, the real liberty in it.
I think that action of any kind is of paramount importance. There is little need to get trapped in cycles of deliberation. Simply doing is enough. People have this amazing capacity for adaptation and for growth and for learning, all things that happen in the most profound sense when risk is preferred to caution and when actions are simply taken, not carefully deliberated but rather approached with eagerness, curiosity and a healthy amount of naiveté. Maybe that’s the operative word here, “naiveté.” Being naïve is beautiful. Even more, it is essential.
Now this — this feels like a blog post! I’m getting better at this format! I hope you enjoyed.
This post has been in honor of the Twitter account @jakesPancakes — May 2016 to September 2021. If you made people chuckle even once, you were worth all the senseless hours of doomscrolling.
Should broadcasts show replays of gruesome injuries?
In the 58th minute of their away game against Leeds United this past Saturday, Liverpool found themselves with an excellent opportunity to attack. Leeds got too hasty with their incessant press and were caught out when Liverpool central defender Joel Matip flicked the ball over Kalvin Phillips’s head to a wide open Harvey Elliot. Elliot was virtually all alone, with the closest defender over five yards behind. The entire right side of the field was vacant, a clear path down the flank toward the Leeds United goal.
Elliot caught the ball in stride and sprinted forward. The closest Leeds player to Elliot, midfielder Pascal Struijk, was in quick pursuit. Elliot’s first touch of the ball after the pass from Matip took him further toward the inside of the pitch than he may have wanted. This wayward touch allowed Struijk the opportunity to lunge forward and make a desperate tackle, hoping to stop Liverpool’s sudden attack in its tracks. The tackle did just that, catching part of the ball and forcing it away from Elliot’s forward charge. But in the same motion Struijk collapsed upon Elliot’s back left leg.
For a brief moment play resumed, with Liverpool attacker Mo Salah making a quick attempt to win the ball back after Elliot had lost it. Then, as Salah looked over to see Elliot sprawled on the field and began urgently waving to Liverpool’s training staff, everything came to a stop. The instant reaction from Salah to disregard all aspects of the game and call the trainers over, coupled with sudden exclamations from both benches and fans close to the field, immediately marked the situation as a horrific. Raphinha, a Leeds United player, comforted Elliot while the trainers quickly began tending to him. Salah walked away with his shirt over his head. A camera shot of Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp caught a player in the background saying, “Why?”
The full outcome of the injury wasn’t revealed until later in the evening, after the game was long over and Elliot in hospital. Elliot’s ankle had dislocated under Struijk’s tackle. The quick response from Salah and the Liverpool training staff ensured that no serious ligament damage was done. Elliot is now out of hospital and will begin a long road to recovery, a cruel twist of fate for one of the Premier League’s most promising young players.
As the training staff continued tending to Elliot and fellow Liverpool players huddled around their young star to comfort him, the commentators made repeated references to the replay of the tackle that caused the horrific dislocation. At one point you could hear Arlo White, one of the broadcast commentators, verbally recoil after watching a replay himself.
“I think, if they do go to a replay, our host broadcasters and our colleagues at Sky here, everybody, I would advise you to look away,” Lee Dixon, White’s broadcast partner, instructed the television audience.
No broadcast did show a replay of the tackle. Searches on YouTube days after don’t show close-up replays, only poorly zoomed videos from the regular live broadcast. Pictures have emerged from different areas of the field showing Elliot’s ankle twisted unnaturally to the left. Clearly the tackle which caused such a distortion was gruesome, although casual spectators did not see the closer extent of the injury. Producers live in studio at Sky Sports in the U.K. and NBC Sports in the U.S. made the decision not to allow any close replays to be shown on broadcast.
This decision certainly makes sense from an ethical perspective. It is morally impermissible to make a spectacle out of another’s suffering, the motivating factor for Sky and NBC’s decision not to air any replays. But such a decision also raises questions about the efficacy of both sides. Are there any compelling arguments to be made in favor of allowing replays to be shown that depict such painful and traumatic events?
My inclinations tell me no, there are not; refer to the reasoning provided above. But there is an argument that holds some weight, saying that spectators should be provided as full amount of information as possible and then they can make the decision whether to view such replays or not. This is a bit of a libertarian argument in favor of viewer freedom. Cutting off replays is overly restrictive to the audience’s sense of viewer freedom, and so any and all replays should be shown regardless of their content.
Such an argument, of course, ignores the very curatorial nature that goes into even the most banal of replays. Certainly not every replay of every single action in every game can possibly be shown in the same broadcast as the game itself. Social media allows such a system to occur, regardless, as live viewers catch moments and quickly upload them to Twitter or Facebook for others to watch again. But broadcast networks have to balance allowing a game to flow and interrupting such a flow with replays of what producers deem are “important moments.” These producers and their crews make hundreds of these decisions every game, and, although I don’t know for sure, I can assume that a greater number of replays are disregarded than are shown. The very nature of sports broadcasts are restrictive to their audiences, all in favor of the best viewing experience possible. The alternative is no replays whatsoever; I doubt even the staunchest libertarian audience member would advocate for such a situation.
Other gruesome injuries have raised the same questions, with different broadcast teams choosing different responses. One of the most poignant and the most enduring in recent memory, for American sports fans at least, was the compound tibia and fibula fracture Louisville basketball guard Kevin Ware suffered during a 2013 March Madness game. Ware had leaped into the air in an attempt to block an opponent’s shot. When he landed on his right leg, it snapped, directly in front of the Louisville bench. Ware could be seen at the opposite side of the court from the camera, lying on the floor, part of his bone clearly visible outside of his skin, the result of the double compound fracture. All of the reactions from his teammates, the fans, the coaches, and the broadcasters told the story. The images live on in mine, and I’m sure countless others’, heads. CBS, the broadcast network responsible for that game, showed replays of Ware’s injury twice, allowing the video to quickly recirculate on all corners of the internet. Now a cursory YouTube search can show you the full period of the broadcast, multiple replays and all.
That was in 2013. CBS was heavily criticized for their coverage. Comparable injuries have occurred in the intervening years. Everton players Andre Gomes suffered a fracture and partial ligament tear in his ankle against Tottenham. The broadcast didn’t show any replays of that injury. It would seem this is the modern trend, and it is a good one. Still, this wasn’t always that case, with broadcast teams previously favoring extra replays of circumstances they knew would engage more of their audiences just due to the sheer horror of them.
Former Redskins quarterback Joe Theisman’s leg break in 1983 was one of the first, and most widely populated, horror injuries that set the standard for how broadcasts would cover such events. The standard has now changed, however, for the better of the players involved and for the fans and spectators alike.
Watching the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team is excruciating
The U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team (USMNT) is in the middle of a campaign to qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the largest upcoming soccer tournament that has been embroiled in scandal over appalling working conditions and corrupt funding. The anticipation for the Cup, and for the slew of qualifying games, is immense. The men’s national team failed to qualify for the World Cup in 2018, a disappointment after qualifying for the past seven previous; competing among the world’s best countries in Qatar is a necessity.
Now, after their first two qualifying matches against El Salvador and Canada, that goal looks shakier than ever. This is in spite of a team full of young talent, the type of players not seen since the likes of Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey guided the U.S. to consecutive round of 16 finishes in 2010 and 2014. It seems that there is something missing from this current group of American talent, something that was present in those other successful teams. Individual talent alone can’t define a soccer team; it takes another ingredient or two for that to happen, ingredients the Americans seem to be missing.
It would be difficult to defend such a negative position two weeks ago. On August 1st, the U.S. defeated Mexico 1-0 to win the Gold Cup, a regional competition among North American national teams. The result felt cathartic. Beating Mexico, a perennial North American soccer powerhouse, is always celebrated in the U.S. But there was something extra to this particular success. The team that took the field for the cup final in Denver was a squad of second-strings, an ostensible group of back-ups that have been serving the team nobly for many years but have recently taken the back-seat in favor of a younger generation. This group of reserves, led by the likes of Paul Arriola, Gyasi Zardes, and Sebastian Lletget, had a chip on their shoulders. They had something to prove. They wanted to earn a spot as part of the team that would attempt to qualify for the World Cup and, hopefully, find themselves competing in Qatar in 2022.
Off the back of this success, and with the reemergence of this group of players, fans were excited for the qualifying campaign. The U.S. would bring in more players from the “new generation” in combination with the old guard that had just proven themselves more than capable of finding success. The energy was palpable as the team traveled to San Salvador.
Then, after 90 minutes and a 0-0 draw, the tone began to shift. And now, several days later and after failing to hold a 1-0 lead and coming away with only 1 point against Canada on home soil, worry and doubt have wholeheartedly replaced energy and anticipation.
Where has it gone wrong? It seems that there are a few key factors to these recent disappointing performances in World Cup qualifying.
The most tangible is the exclusion of important players. Against El Salvador the U.S. was missing Christian Pulisic due to COVID complications. Against Canada Pulisic returned but Giovanni Reyna and Weston McKennie had to be sidelined, the first due to injury and the second due to breaking team COVID protocols. Zack Steffen, the team’s usual first-choice goalkeeper, has been out for several weeks with an injury. While much of the core is still in place, and while goalie Matt Turner has proven himself more than capable between the sticks, missing these players surely affected the team’s on-field performance, especially when those exclusions had to be made last-minute, mere hours before the matches started.
But more prescient than injuries is the lack of unity and focus among the “new generation.” A gutsy combination of grit and determination, coalesced through the lens of always being viewed as the underdog, has usually pulled the USMNT together. Sharing the moniker of a nation more occupied with its own brand of football and basketball than with the rest of the world’s sport created a natural chip on the shoulder of each player. And coupled with this chip was the fact that the majority of stars in the past had never tasted individual or club success, fueling a need to always prove themselves on the national stage.
This is no longer the case. Several members of this new soccer generation have found individual or club success, or both. Reyna, Pulisic, McKennie, Steffen, and Sergino Dest play for some of the largest, most historically successful clubs in Europe, not as outsiders but as important parts of their respective teams. Pulisic, with English club Chelsea, just recently won the Champions League, the most prestigious European club competition. Steffen has made numerous appearance for Chelsea rival Manchester City in important games. The USMNT is now furnished with a group of core players that know what it’s like to play with some of the best footballers in the world, and even more, to find success with them. Carrying this spirit to the national team has bred high expectations.
But despite all of these individual and club accolades, this American core lacks coherence when playing together. This is where the lack of a team identity really comes into play. Part of the blame for missing an identity goes to the players themselves, but a larger share goes to the team’s coaching staff, led by recently-appointed head coach Gregg Berhalter.
Berhalter, formerly the coach of Columbus Crew SC and Swedish club Hammarby IF, has failed to instill a consistent style of play to the national team, instead choosing to allow individual performances to miraculously lead to wins. When the likes of Pulisic, Dest, or Reyna have an off-game, or are playing tired, the team simply doesn’t function. The lack of identity has been more than evident in the first two qualifying games.
El Salvador was always going to be a difficult match, the USMNT having to travel into an intense South American environment and play against a rugged, defensive El Salvador team. But this game was certainly winnable — in fact, a win should have been the expected result. However, as the minutes ticked by, it became more and more evident that the low, defensive block El Salvador had set up was going to be enough to stymie the U.S. offense. While the U.S. maintained more possession of the ball, there was no creativity. In fact, El Salvador found the better chances at goal throughout the game, hitting the U.S. on the counter attack after the USMNT found themselves too far out of position, lured in by the El Salvador defense. The game was simply difficult to watch as a U.S. fan, as time and time again the team would hold the ball for several minutes without making any meaningful chances or simply giving it away without so much as a shot toward goal. But, despite these unappealing aesthetics, the draw wasn’t too bad. Again, the game was always going to be difficult on the road. At least it wasn’t a loss.
The U.S. carried much of this same discombobulated energy into the game against Canada. Although now on home soil and backed by almost 40,000 fans in Nashville, Canada looked like they were playing with more intensity and determination.
Going into half-time, the U.S. was on the back foot. When they found a goal early in the second half courtesy of an excellent cross from Miles Robinson to Brandon Aaronson, who put the ball in the back of the net, the tide could have shifted. But Canada continued pressing on, and less than ten minutes later found their own goal in a similar way, with verifiable superstar Alphonso Davies crossing to forward Cyle Larin for an easy tap-in. Davies had tormented the U.S. throughout the game, with U.S. left back Dest unable to properly defend against the power and pace of the Bayern Munich winger. It seemed inevitable that at some point one of Davies’s bursts down the wing would lead to a solid chance at goal, and in the 62nd minute that finally happened.
While not every coach can inspire a team’s passion and identity, those that can’t often make up for it with tactical expertise, being able to shift their game plan from match-to-match, expertly countering the opposition while making timely substitutions to properly impact the game. It is on this count that Berhalter doubly failed his duty as head coach.
It became clear, as the game wore on after Canada equalized, that many of the U.S. attackers were tired, unable to come up with the types of attacking runs that led to the first goal. At this point Canada had already made a number of substitutions, reinforcing their own attack in an effort to steal a win from the U.S. Where Canada had used all of their five substitutions, the U.S. had only used one — replacing an injured Dest late in the first half.
Finally, near the 80th minute, the U.S. substitutions finally came, with Josh Sargent, Konrad de la Fuente, and Deandre Yedlin entering the game. This would prove to be too little, too late for the team, as they failed to find the second goal that would give them all 3 points at home against Canada. Berhalter was critiqued heavily after the game for failing to properly utilize his subs, especially as Pulisic was low on energy after having just recovered from his bout with COVID. Missing McKennie certainly hurt the team, but in the face of this, Berhalter’s tactical prowess lacked significantly.
The USMNT now find themselves with their backs heavily against the wall, only finding two points from two games so far in World Cup qualifying. But even more worrying besides these lackluster results is the lack of coherence on the pitch. Poor results can be excused if a team is playing with passion and vigor, really going for it. This isn’t the case for the U.S. team at the moment. It’s a team that feels, despite all their individual talent and success, like they have no identity. Their Gold Cup success was merely an illusion, a false look into a soccer program that finds itself simultaneously at its most promising and its most disappointing.
There’s no easy answer to the current plight of team. It would be extremely difficult to get rid of Berhalter at this moment, as it could fracture the team so much that qualifying for the World Cup becomes out of the question. It’s going to be up to the coach and to the players to find some coherence within the next couple of games, next against Honduras. This should be possible, especially if the COVID and injury situation levels out. A more consistent team on the pitch could contribute significantly to a more consistent performance on the pitch.
But it’s going to take more from Berhalter to find an identity for this group of players as the qualifying campaign presses on. If not qualifying for the World Cup in 2018 was a massive disappointment, not qualifying in 2022 would be an utter catastrophe for a soccer program that is looking to take itself from perennial underdogs to contenders. I don’t know if it’s time for #BerhalterOUT, but something must change quickly, or else every game for the U.S. will continue to be an excruciating combination of eager excitement and anticipation leading to bitter disappointment.
The Windy City or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Paradox
It’s 9:27 p.m. on June 30th. I haven’t written anything to post on my website (not a blog!) this month. I have a little over two and a half hours to rush something out. In the spirit of the moment, allow me to muse a bit about social anxiety.
“But, Jake,” you may be thinking, “weren’t your last two posts about anxious thoughts and feelings, at least a little bit?”
“Indeed they were!” I would reply earnestly. “We have a lot to unpack! And I might even extend it to include the last three! Economics and philosophy are anxiety-inducing subjects, after all.”
Don’t worry, this piece will have a slightly different spin. Whereas “Sadness” and “Weirdness” (as I will colloquially refer to them) were deeply personal, this piece (we may call it “Paradox”) will be more pointed outward, a more intimate reflection on the urban environment I’ve thrust myself into over the past month or so. Really it hasn’t even been that long, but the impressions of the concrete and the congested highways have already left their mark.
The major concern I had when deciding to move to Chicago for the summer was loneliness. I’ve had many great times catching up with old friends from high school who have made their new lives on the banks of Lake Michigan. I’ve met many cool people at my new job. My uncle, when he’s not across the country at some bluegrass music festival, has provided good company and sound advice. But despite these largely positive experiences, I’m left essentially alone. I’ve forgone the comfortable familial connections of back home for the constant energy of the city. In a way it feels reminiscent of my first year at college. Many of the feelings are the same. There’s a similar level of eager exploration mixed with worrisome isolation.
Yet the best, and simultaneously the worst, part of living in a city of near three million people is what I’ll call ambient sociality (I’m sure sociologists have a better term for what I’m about to explain but, again, we’re on a tight deadline here and I don’t really have time to do the research to find it). As soon as I step out the door of my apartment, I step “into it.” That is, I step into a world that is full of life, teeming with energy and the hustle-and-bustle of individuals hurrying about their daily routines, running chores or commuting to work. The common spaces of streets and sidewalks are all shared amongst one another. Even cars feel more a part of the living environment than they do in less crowded areas. Everyone and everything becomes part of the same nexus, and when you walk out onto the sidewalk, you become a part of it.
This sensation can be either socially inclusive or isolating, depending on which way you look at it. On one hand it feels good to feel like you’re a part of the world in such a way, even if you have nothing to do. When I find myself languishing alone in the apartment I’ll just get up and go for a walk to socialize passively. This is different than going for a walk in the St. Olaf Natural Lands, for example, which is a largely solitary experience (refer to “Weirdness” for a counterexample). I get to go out and feel like I’m a part of the world, a living organism in the big city, even if I’m not really doing anything besides walking. I like the phrase “pulse of the city” here; I can extend the analogy to say that I feel like a single blood vessel that is a part of the city, which is as a whole the heart that is pulsing.
This passive, or ambient, sociality sensation is so much more heightened when you do actually have something to do. Oh how I’ve cherished my walks up to Whole Foods for groceries or Target for miscellaneous supplies, or my runs along the lakefront path where I get to join hundreds of other cyclists, walkers or fellow runners along the Lake Michigan shoreline. These routines have become highlights of my time in Chicago, times where I put myself into the world without really necessarily doing anything with anybody else directly.
Here’s where ambient sociality can turn from a feeling that you are a unique part of a greater whole to a feeling that you are an isolated grain in a sea of sand. When you don’t have anyone to share these experiences with directly, you can look about you and see other people walking and talking with their friends, partners, even dogs, and not help but feel a bit jealous. Even if you’re perfectly comfortable alone, listening to your favorite new record while you strut down Clark Street with your Target tote slung over your right shoulder, you look over at that couple across the street walking their little corgi together and think to yourself, “How sweet would it be to be sharing this moment with someone else?”
Eventually this isolated thought may pass, but it will certainly recur. It’s kind of a trade-off you have to make when you appreciate the ambient sociality of the city around you. Sometimes the trade-off feels more difficult, more pronounced. Sometimes you really want to have someone to share experiences with, or to speak with about the sights you’re seeing. But at the end of the day you’re alone. And yes, it’s true that you are a unique individual in a vibrant world, an integral blood vessel in a beating heart. But you also know there’s so much more out there, that life expands when you share the world with another. This is also why loneliness sets in the hardest (is that the right qualifier?) when you are doing the coolest (certainly there’s a better word) things (again! word choice!).
So where does this leave us? I do really enjoy the ambient sociality of Chicago, the lush potential of a city that seems to be always moving. I wouldn’t trade the solitary experiences I’ve had running along the lakeshore or walking up to get coffee from my favorite neighborhood café (shoutout to Two Hearted Queen!). But still, I can’t help but hope for a little bit more. A better routine could help instrumentally. And maybe even a good friend to share it with.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks! My writing has gotten really bad! I’m out of touch. Hopefully I’ll start writing more, about a better variety of subjects that aren’t just my own subjective grievances with the world. Already I feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins as my fingers fly across the keys.
If you have a favorite spot to eat in Chicago, let me know. But until then, stay cool.
What to do when you’re the weird one
So there I was, on my nightly 8 p.m. walk around the big prairie loop of St. Olaf’s Natural Lands. The sunset was gorgeous, the sun itself tucked away beyond the horizon but its warm orange glow melding exquisitely into the bluish-purple haze of evening sky. I was listening to Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” an album I would categorize as “perfectly collegiate.” And that’s how I was feeling on this particular walk — perfectly collegiate. Alone, out in the chilly air, thinking about the relationship I’d recently torn asunder, allowing myself to bask in the melancholy glory of such songs as “Kamera” and “Jesus, Etc.”
I rounded a bend in the prairie loop and saw, ahead, coming toward me on the path, three people. Now, I’m accustomed to seeing others on these nightly excursions. In fact, I’ve even met a few acquaintances that share the same walking habit. However, this situation was distinct.
The two people nearest to me were evidently a couple. They were walking close together, masks off, carrying that air of incredulity that only hovers around two people intimately comfortable in each other’s presence. The third was farther off, but running purposefully, sporting a hot pink track jacket and sporty earbuds.
My perception of space and time being excellent, I instantly knew we were all destined to converge on the path in the same spot and at the same time. I doubt the other characters in this little story recognized the impending confrontation as distinctly as I did — they were three moving in the same direction, so could not see one another. I guess the runner might have; but the couple were left unawares of the predicament they found themselves literally in the middle of.
I continued walking, now much more anxiously, waiting for something to give. We all approached one another. I tried to slow down and allow the runner to pass, but they had the same thought, themselves bringing their pace to a stunted trot. So I suddenly accelerated, leaning forward and hustling past the couple so the runner could continue their journey onward. I escaped the little unplanned rendezvous and noticed I was breathing heavily, my natural demeanor sucked away when presented with this tense moment.
Part of the tension of this random encounter came from the fact that I perceived myself, and I’m pretty sure was also perceived, as the weird one. I was by myself, walking in the opposite direction, with jeans and sandals on, bookbag still around my shoulders while walking a little too fast as I tried to keep my legs in time with the music. I looked, in a phrase, a bit out of place, like some omnipotent being had just picked me up out of the library and dropped me in this prairie, leaving me to scamper my way back to campus.
The couple, of course, were a couple, relaxed in their general demeanor, enjoying each other’s company. The runner had their own purpose, motivated to finish their run strong and to feel good about doing something physically challenging. The other three characters in the story had their own separate meaningful intentions, whether it was to spend time with a loved one or to improve their physical health.
Me, on the other hand, my only purpose was to walk, and even that I was doing in the most perplexing way. Why would I still have my bookbag on? There’s nowhere I was going that needed it. Why was I walking so fast? If the purpose of this walk was leisure, surely I would be better served slowing down to enjoy the environment. And why did I try and slow down first? I should have read the situation better and just continued walking.
Taken altogether I’m sure I portrayed a semi-frantic figure awkwardly maneuvering their way through the Natural Lands. I was, in that moment, among that quartet of fellow big prairie loop travelers, the very essence of weirdness.
I pattern so much of my life off of not being weird. I consciously avoid scenarios where I may be perceived as strange or awkward, and I avoid relationships when I myself perceive too much of a dichotomy between one person’s relative social standing and my own. “Surely,” I think to myself, “if I talk with this person right now, they’d think I’m quite weird.” For my own self-preservation I rarely push myself outside of my comfort zone and into an area of uncertainty and awkwardness.
So feeling that way tonight made me extra vulnerable and uncomfortable. But it also got me thinking, and that’s why I’m here now, writing about being weird.
Being weird is a pretty subjective thing, but I think we all, in a way, operate such that we limit our perceived weirdness. That’s why we, for the most part, stick with the same core group of friends, sit at the same spot in the library, or follow the same day-to-day routines. We want to minimize feelings of weirdness or strangeness, so we cast ourselves into the trap of comfortability.
That’s not at all a bad thing. I myself am probably the biggest offender, to the point where I somewhat brag about how diligent I am at sitting in the same window seat or getting breakfast at the same time every Monday-Wednesday-Friday morning. I feel weird when these plans are thrown off or interfered with in some way.
I also feel weird when I think back to moments where I was too comfortable, where I had sunk myself into an environment I knew in some way was bad for me but which I was too hesitant to leave because the act of leaving, or of separation, or of finding myself someplace else, would feel too foreign and too strange. But that’s why I call comfortability a trap. It can trap you in a sense of stagnation and lead you to do things that ultimately aren’t good for yourself.
We, as people, need constant growth and exposure to new things. Or at the very least we need to be able to recognize when we’re only staying in a spot — whether it be a relationship, a class, or just a certain specific environment — because it is comfortable, although we know it is not ideal and we would prefer something else entirely.
None of this final tangent really has anything to do with the story above. Or, I guess it might. I guess without putting myself in that weird situation out in the Natural Lands I wouldn’t be writing this piece right now. That exposure to that uncomfortable circumstance has driven a new piece of writing. So surely if I, Mr. Comfortability, can push myself to build off of and learn from a particularly uncomfortable and weird experience, so can you. So can we all.
Go be weird. Go push yourself to be uncomfortable. We all deserve it.
Sadness as a virtue: Why we should allow ourselves some melancholy
This piece originally appeared in The Olaf Messenger, Vol. 134, Issue 12, Thursday, April 22, 2021
As we enter the apex of what many would regard as the happiest of all earth’s seasons, I want to take some time to write about sadness. As the earth becomes green and vibrant, I’ve found myself falling into feelings of gloom and melancholy usually reserved for dreary winter days.
Once upon a time these sensations would have been all-consuming. Many times over the course of my first year at St. Olaf do I distinctly remember spending weeks on end languishing in states of depression. It seemed, at the time, my depressed outlook on life would never end. I drifted through the quad and Buntrock Commons, headphones in, wallowing in my sense of alienation as I struggled to build and define myself as a college student.
Part of the reason these feelings felt so pervasive was because I perceived them as unnatural. I believed people’s natural constitution bent toward happiness, or at least toward contentment. So I caught myself in a pitiful cycle of entering sadness, feeling I was less-than-human for it and then collapsing deeper into personal grief. My sadness wasn’t caused by an estrangement between me and the world, but rather an estrangement between me and my self. My enrollment in the class “Kierkegaard and Existentialism” at the time probably didn’t help my thought processes much.
Time has helped me realize that sadness is not something that should be seen as unnatural. Rather, sadness is one of the most natural and fundamental of all human emotions. In a sense it is sadness that affirms our experience of all other human emotions. It confirms the fact that you have felt something so deeply that you express a sense of heartache over its loss, something that now exists only as memory. Sadness is, in essence, the consequence of living a meaningful life.
This understanding builds the foundation for recognizing sadness as a virtue. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain complex mindset. A significant aspect of this mindset is the wholehearted acceptance of a distinctive range of considerations as reasons for action.”. To practice sadness as a virtue, one must fully understand the importance of feeling and expressing sadness and their alternative options. Knowing you could respond to sadness-causing experiences with empty joy or simple resignation, and then choosing to feel and express sadness, is the mark of a virtuous person.
I don’t think I’m perfectly virtuous when it comes to practicing sadness. In fact, I still hesitate to accept the notion of sadness as a practice. It would seem to lead to a life full of melancholy, romanticized in films and literature but impractical in a constant world of noise and busyness.
Maybe that’s why I’m trying to advocate for sadness here. I find that when I embrace my sadness and express it in positive ways, through conversations with my dad, journal entries or tearful walks in the woods, I’m able to put a pause on the chaos of life. By sinking into sadness, I float down, away from an external world that is constantly pestering me for my attention and toward a truer sense of my self.
In this way sadness is a practice. It is a practice of self-realization, of coming to better know all parts of yourself, all corners of your heart. Without being able to express sadness, I feel that I wouldn’t be able to really express any feelings at all. And since sadness is as natural a part of the human condition as feelings of joy and of fear, why shouldn’t I embrace it with open arms? Sadness will always persist, it just comes down to whether we choose to deny it or accept it.
I’ll accept my sadness and all the long conversations, pages of my journals and tears that come along with it.
Kierkegaard would agree. “My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have ever known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return.”
How to be an economics and philosophy major and not suck
I’ve stumbled into a topic I know a little too much about. It’s not that I’m overly defensive of my choice in majors; rather, it’s that I’m quite offensive about the unique practicability of an economical and philosophical intersection. The two complement each other quite well — Adam Smith and Saint Thomas Aquinas are two examples. So I want to take a few paragraphs to expound a little about how I view the intersection, why it gets such a bad reputation and how to reconcile both an economical and philosophical approach to life’s problems. Let’s begin.
First, let’s flesh out the intersection. At their core, economics and philosophy are doing the same thing. They’re both attempts to explain and, to an extent, regulate human behavior. I’d put more emphasis on the former in terms of economics and the latter in terms of philosophy. One discipline is built much better to explain, while the other is built much better to inform. I use the term “built” because that’s what any good discipline is — a construct of formulations that bend and shift over time but that hold some sort of central thesis. In the same way that a decrepit 19th-century home can be remodeled to meet 21st-century needs, the disciplines of economics and philosophy can be reconstructed to better meet the growing complexities of the world.
Philosophy, in its nebulas of ethical conundrums and definitions of what is good and bad, right and wrong, roots itself firmly in the future. This is the central thesis of philosophy; the discipline can use history, as it does often, but it will always use history to paint a picture of an idealized future. Very rarely do you see seminal articles or books in philosophy that are exclusively reinterpretations of historical arguments. Rather, philosophers tend to move their discipline by using historical contexts to inform some normative argument.
Take, for instance, contemporary debates about the role Artificial Intelligence should play in the lives of human beings. Philosophers of Greek antiquity, renaissance continentalism or eastern communitarianism have nothing to say about a field they could have never known would exist. It’s the job of philosophers to take the writings of, say, Confucius on self-cultivation, and apply them to how Artificial Intelligence may trick humans into a false sense of self that is not based off tradition but instead is based off a fragmented, artificial reality. Writings abound that take this form. Type “Plato on artificial intelligence” into Google and you’re presented with a number of articles speaking to the subject. “What would Plato have to say about A.I.?” asks one writer.
Philosophy then takes these considerations and turns them into arguments about what we should or should not do with A.I. or other areas of life. At its core the philosophical discipline is a discipline of arguments, whether it be in the form of dialogue or geometrical proofs.
Economics uses a different model. Instead of trying to argue for what should or should not be, economics seeks to explain and then to predict. Economists will say, “The U.S. Gross Domestic Product rose 7.2% in 1984. Huh. I wonder why that is. Let’s go and try to explain it.” It will take certain variables that may or may not affect G.D.P., toss them into a model and see how they correlate. If there’s a negative correlation between amount of imports and G.D.P. growth, but the correlation is relatively weak, we might say that imports have a negligible effect on G.D.P. relative to other variables (this is not the case).
Economics can expand this look-and-explain approach to any number of unique circumstances in life, whether or not they are tied to traditionally economic-sounding areas. As nearly as economists will say, “A growth in G.D.P. is caused by …” they might just as nearly say, “The selling of wives at open auctions in Industrial-era England can be explained when we consider the prohibitively high costs of leaving a marriage via divorce or flight and the dismally low amount of rights given to women during that time. So, if a woman wanted out of a marriage, the most efficient way of executing the split is by selling the rights of the woman to a different man who she would be happier with.”
This is a crude example, but highlights the way economists can use certain tools — transaction costs, contractual agreements, marginal value — to explain any type of phenomenon. In certain cases these tools, when employed often and in various different contexts, can be used to predict certain outcomes. “If rights are set up in this way and if contracts are difficult to enforce, we would expect this outcome to follow given the presence of these two parties.” What economists won’t use their tools to do is to say what outcome should happen, in a normative sense. They don’t have the tools for that. Saying “X variable has a positive effect on G.D.P.” can allow those with the normative tools to craft policy or advocate for different measures that promote some variable, if, for instance, growing G.D.P. is a beneficial goal to achieve. Maybe it’s not. Economists can’t say.
If philosophy is interested in what should be, and if economics is interested in what has and what is, then the two form a natural relationship. In a perfect world a philosopher-economist can use the tools of economics to make an accurate prediction about what will happen if some change is made, and then they can further deliberate about the relative ethical merit of making that change. This is the type of analysis that fuels policy making, that drives think-tanks — the type of combined analysis that occurs when economists say “this is what we can expect” and philosophers say “this is what we should do.”
I know, I hate (most) policy-making and think-tanks too. That’s where the defensive part of the intersection comes in, and where I hope to pull us out of the stinking mud of bureaucracy and into the enlightened clouds of economical philosophy.
It’s an Aristotelian notion that wisdom comes from the ability to reason well. The wise person is the person who can not only understand the relevant facts of a situation, but can use those facts to arrive at an ideal decision. Reasoning well, if we apply it to the two distinct economical and philosophical approaches laid out above, is the natural consequence of applying both disciplines in combination.
Let’s take a college-specific case study: Whether or not certain student government members should be appointed or democratically elected. To start, we can gloss the philosophical history of the two approaches to governance. We could find support for either side, but most notable philosophical support would lean into a democratic model. “Give the people a voice!” philosophers would cry, falling upon The Republic and Two Treatises of Government as their argumentative bulwarks. Continuing, we can look at particular instances of shifts in government models. The French Revolution may be the most notable example here, although the data with which to carry out a thorough economical analysis may be lacking. We could instead turn our attention to more specific instances, such as when the Rock Island, Illinois’ city council wanted to sell its sewer system to a private company and citizens voiced their concern, leading to a public referendum. Or when certain other cities have shifted their own government structures from appointments to elections. Anyway, the specifics don’t matter here. Rather, we know this data and these examples exist out there somewhere if we look hard enough. With this data and these examples, we can find the effects of appointments versus elections by tracking a number of variables over time, such as the quickness of policy passage, amount of policies passed or voter engagement before and after the switch to the alternative model. Then, as a final step in this process of reasoning, we can combine our two initial steps and come to a decision. If the benefits of democracy, as gleaned through a philosophical interpretation of the matter, are greater than the possible downsides to electing leaders, we would want to institute a democratic system. We would want to elect our student government members democratically.
The opposite could just as easily be true. The economic analysis could show that appointments are actually more efficient in terms of policy passage and constituent satisfaction. Then, although the philosophers would favor democracy under strong ethical grounds, we may want to favor a more efficient system that would follow from appointments.
This is just one example of the economics-philosophy intersection in practice. Other examples abound. Most involve well-trodden issues, but as the world becomes more complicated — as the surface area of our collective knowledge base expands — there becomes more opportunities to apply such an approach to more topics. We could return to Artificial Intelligence and see how radical shifts in technological efficiency have impacted job growth, unemployment, exports, etc., while simultaneously interpreting whether an easier, more efficient approach to solving problems, removed from human consideration, is preferable.
The approach is not perfect. When you try and combine two rather complicated disciplines into one sort of mega-discipline, things may fall through the cracks. You may miss some niche historical argument that would have compelled you to prefer a different outcome, or you may have excluded some relevant data that would have predicted a higher correlation in a different model. Putting everything under one umbrella may not be, and often simply is not, the best way forward for solving issues.
However, I remain an advocate for the intersection in its ideal form. I think there is no better way to apply prognoses with values to reach a sound decision. Consulting economics and philosophy, carrying out the two approaches together, allows one the capacity to reason well. Where economics brings in all the relevant facts, philosophy applies its comprehension to dictate the best course forward based on those facts. Where economics is perception, philosophy is understanding. The two go together like an umbrella and rain.
Why Trump’s use of misinformation is so effective, and so dangerous
In the early hours of Friday, Oct. 2, President Donald Trump hit send on a tweet confirming he and first lady Melania Trump had been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Twenty-four hours later, the President was at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital and a team of his doctors was addressing the media gathered outside.
The update delivered by the President’s physician, Navy Commander Dr. Sean Conley, was quite positive — Trump was in good spirits, fever free and able to walk out of Walter Reed if he so chose. Immediately after this rosy press conference however, a rogue official — later identified as White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — convened with a small group of reporters and offered sentiments in stark contrast to that of Conley: Trump’s vitals were not great, and the next 48 hours would be vital for the President’s health.
Not only do these two pieces of contrasting information muddle the truth, they epitomize politicking in the era of Trump and social media. The President harnesses chaos created by obfuscating facts and releases it onto social media platforms that feed on untruth. In this sense Trump has perfected the social media politics of the 21st century, and his strategy threatens the integrity of democracy in America.
To retain power, Trump will incite anger, hatred and violence between his loyal following and everybody else in an inflammatory appeal to human beings’ natural tribal tendencies, all through 140 characters on Twitter or brief campaign videos and slogans on Facebook. There is no better time to be a nationalistic populist than right now, and that is thanks to the groupthink propagated by platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Social media allows individuals to plug into whatever sources of information they want and to surround themselves with people that agree with them and share the same information sources; the platforms themselves incentivize this by categorizing people into groups for the sake of clicks and profits. It’s a vicious, self-affirming cycle that doesn’t drive real dialogue over shared facts but rather drives regurgitation of talking points and perceived truths, no matter how reputably true they actually are. Roger McNamee, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and a former advisor to its founder Mark Zuckerberg, has observed this dynamic that blinds us to how manipulated our digital environments are.
“Each person has their own reality with their own facts,” McNamee said in an interview for “The Social Dilemma.” “Over time you have the false sense that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your news feed sounds just like you. And that once you’re in that state, it turns out you’re easily manipulated.”
Trump operates in the interconnected web of fake news and half-truths that drive his supporters on Facebook and Twitter. As long as the President can push whatever reality he wants on these folks, he can maintain his sense of security and portray himself as the self-assured leader he wants people to see him as. It’s all part of his political plan. The image of Trump comes before the reality of Donald.
This makes the job of the news media and key administrative officials essentially impossible. When the President can flip-flop on critical issues via a series of hastily typed tweets, how is any legislative progress supposed to be made? How is a citizen supposed to come to an understanding of what is really going on?
As long as social media profits off of propagating political falsehoods, which cascade through social media many times faster than truths, there is no incentive for politicians to run on platforms built on facts. They can simply peddle whatever information they want, without repercussions, to make sure the people voting for them see what they need to see.
The spread of false information and lack of a clear, guiding voice in regard to the health of arguably the most politically powerful individual on the planet is the most recent glaring example of this terrifying phenomenon. Without more responsibility placed on politicians and the social media platforms that allow the wildfire spread of false information, the U.S. will only see more Donald Trumps.
Trump and social media have built the playbook, now it’s only up to other politicians to follow it. Please, burn the playbook and start over.
My favorite albums of 2020
10 of my favorite albums from 2020, in no particular order.
2020 has been a hell of year. All that needs to be said of the past 365 days has necessarily been said elsewhere, so let’s jump straight to the music. That’s what we’re all here for anyway, right?
Below are ten of my favorite albums from 2020, in no real order, plus some honorable mentions at the end that just missed my ten. If you’ve got a second after reading, send over a message with your favorite song/album/EP from the year and I’ll most definitely give it a listen. That’s the best part of the new year, for me at least - going through and listening to everyone’s favorite music from the previous year and, most likely, finding a new all-timer.
1.) NO DREAM - Jeff Rosenstock
This album slaps you in the face right from the off. “Did you learn to make amends with your pile of flaming shit?” Rosenstock asks over a raucous slam of snare hits and descending guitar chords. And, carrying a 40 minute run time, the project doesn’t really lose much of that intense energy so poignant in its minute-long opening track. As I wrote in my brief Bandcamp clip for this album, it feels like a long, hot drive through the summer time thinking about how futile life can sometimes feel. Rosenstock pulls the listener through alternating highs and lows, while maintaining the consistent theme of existential pointlessness. I don’t think there’s an album on this list that better matches the energy of 2020 than NO DREAM. A fitting place to start, I think.
Favorite tracks: Scram!, Leave It In The Sun, Honeymoon Ashtray
2.) Inlet - Hum
While NO DREAM offers more chaotic punk rock energy, Inlet focuses its sound into heavier, more concentrated riffs that envelope your soundscape and crash over you much like an ocean would crash over an inlet, as captured in the album’s cover art. There’s a sense of hopeless longing carried throughout the record, like something close but also very far away, almost unreachable. I hesitate to say Inlet feels post-apocalyptic, because I think that classification misses what’s really going on throughout the project’s 55 minute run time. But it is close, and if you’re in the mood for some heavy, enveloping riffs juxtaposed by smooth, distinct and even gentle vocals, Hum packs some great moments into Inlet.
Favorite tracks: Waves through Step Into You is just a fantastic run of songs to kick off the album. I feel it kind of trails off after that. Sorry for breaking format. Didn’t get very far.
3.) Unlovely - The Ballroom Thieves
I don’t have a ton to say about this album. Right from its sweet opening piano chords and vocals by Callie Peters, one part of the trio that make up The Ballroom Thieves alongside Martin Earley and Devin Mauch, you get the sense Unlovely is going to be a wonderful listen. And that’s truly what it is. Just one really good, unique song after the other. I caught this one early in the year and just kept returning to it throughout. “I took the blue out of the news today/Wrap it around me, it shields me from the thoughts people think they need to say,” Peters sings to open the album. This is another project, similar to NO DREAM but quite different in its approach, that matches the emotional tenor of 2020 excellently. The Thieves acknowledge this, noting Unlovely is a “sonic encapsulation of emotional and political dissonance, the constant state of discomfort that’s enveloped the world for the past few years.”
Favorite tracks: In the Dark, Don’t Wanna Dance, Love Is Easy
4.) RTJ4 - Run The Jewels
Let’s jump into some hip-hop, shall we? RTJ4 was easily my most listened to album of the year, noted by Spotify in its year-end Wrapped — even if that’s only because it was a constant feature during runs for a solid month or two over the summer. But RTJ4 offers much more than just the energy needed to burst through the streets of Rock Island. At its best it’s a sharp commentary on the irony and despair that has encapsulated the plight of Black men in America in 2020, heard most distinctly on walking in the snow, or JU$T featuring Pharrell and Zach De La Rocha of Rage Against the Machine fame. It’s also a moment of personal reflection for Killer Mike and EL-P, heard on the final cut of the record, a few words for the firing squad (radiation). And, in true Run The Jewels form, RTJ4 offers the potent lyricism and high energy, bombastic beats that make the duo so distinct.
Favorite tracks: out of sight (feat. 2 Chainz), walking in the snow, pulling the pin (feat. Mavis Staples & Josh Homme)
5.) Dark Matter - Moses Boyd
We head across the pond for my next album, Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter. This was my standout release from the ever-prolific London jazz scene in 2020, a scene that continues to produce some of my favorite music during the past few years. Moses Boyd is a scene mainstay, a drummer and composer who has collaborated as both a writer and player alongside other London artists including Nubya Garcia, Sons of Kemet, Yazmin Lacey and Joe Armon-Jones, who features on Dark Matter. Dark Matter is Boyd’s first full-length studio album, and it’s packed with the type of youthful, vibrant energy that is quintessential to the sounds coming out of London over the second half of the past decade. Stranger Than Fiction opens the project with an infectious drum line and booming bass that joins the mix during the bridge. Poppy Adjuha and Obongjayar feature on Shades of You and Dancing in the Dark, respectively, in the middle of the record. And Joe Armon-Jones offers his exquisite piano stylings on 2 Far Gone towards the end of the project. Dark Matter is London jazz-tronica, and Moses Boyd, at their finest.
Favorite tracks: Stranger Than Fiction, Shades of You, Y.O.Y.O.
6.) The New Abnormal - The Strokes
I was debating leaving The New Abnormal off this list and letting NO DREAM takes its sonic place, maybe featuring it in honorable mentions. But, alas, I felt the need to give some personal love to a project that has been neglected or even downright excluded from notable year-end lists from prominent publications. Julian Casablancas will forever be one of my favorite songwriters, whether it be with The Strokes, The Voidz or as a solo artist. And I can’t help but feeling The New Abnormal is a return to form for Julian with The Strokes. I loved The Voidz’s most recent album, Virtue, from 2018, and The New Abnormal feels like a continuation of the type of electronica-influenced rock that made Virtue so distinct for me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Comedown Machine, maybe wrongly so, but it is refreshing that The Strokes are pulling in a new direction with The New Abnormal, and doing it so successfully.
Favorite tracks: Selfless, Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus, Not The Same Anymore
7.) Lianne La Havas - Lianne La Havas
Lianne La Havas’ self-titled third studio album is one of the most exquisitely produced, warmest records I’ve heard over the past few years. Lianne’s vocals just melt over a host of songs that are wonderfully mixed by herself, Beni Giles and Matt Hales. Bittersweet, released as a single from the album in early 2020, exemplifies this mix perfectly, and might be my favorite standalone song from the year. The sounds of Lianne’s self-titled project are pure and poised, mature and reflective, and offer a summery soundtrack to what has otherwise been a particularly chilly year. I have distinct memories of listening to this album while on a summer vacation, relaxing to Lianne’s vocals on a warm midwestern beach. Few projects make me feel as warm as this.
Favorite tracks: Bittersweet, Can’t Fight, Weird Fishes
8.) Anime, Trauma and Divorce - Open Mike Eagle
Open Mike Eagle’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream was, possibly, my favorite hip-hop record from 2017. Anime, Trauma and Divorce finds itself among my favorite hip-hop records now, three years later. Mike’s deeply personal lyricism, accentuated by his vocals’ prominent placement in each songs’ mix, never fail to prod my own consciousness. This type of personal rap is taken to new heights on Anime, Trauma and Divorce, as Mike pulls apart one of the most personally devastating years in his own life, a year that featured a separation from his wife and the cancellation of his recent television production. Anime, Trauma and Divorce is a deeply reflective record, one where Mike questions his own place in the world in a type of mid-life crisis not usually expressed via hip-hop artistry. Everything Ends Last Year is one of the most soul-crushing songs I’ve heard in a long time, as Mike reviews these negative events in a simple, stripped down, spoken word style that strikingly interrupts the album’s flow. Yet Mike approaches all this seeming negativity in a semi-ironic and self-deprecating way with which I think we can all relate.
Favorite tracks: Death Parade, Sweatpants Spiderman, Everything Ends Last Year
9.) Untitled (Black Is)/Untitled (Rise) - SAULT
SAULT is one of the most mysterious and one of my favorite collectives from the past two years. They eschew media attention while simultaneously releasing four critically-acclaimed full albums since May 2019. Their albums 5 and 7 came out in 2019 as a pair of infectious, synth driven neo-soul records, which both featured some of my favorite tracks from the year. The British collective followed up 2019 by releasing another pair of records, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) in 2020. While the two are distinct albums, many other publications have grouped them together in lists, and I feel inclined to do the same, since sonically and thematically (Black Is) and (Rise) cover very similar territory. Sonically, the Untitled records follow much the same thread as 5 and 7, mixing swirling synths, sometimes faded and sometimes flashy vocals, clean drums and quick guitar licks into a cacophony of tracks that flow effortlessly together, produced, to much acclaim, by Inflo, who has worked with Michael Kiwanuka and Little Simz, two other standout British artists, on various other projects. One change from their 2019 is the inclusion of more drum sounds, like tambourines and congas, which add depth to the mix. Thematically, the Untitled records unapologetically forward social, political and cultural issues facing Black people in both Britain and the U.S., a clear distinction from the more personal theme of 5 and 7. Tracks such as No Black Violins in London, Don’t Shoot Guns Down, and Black provide evidence of this focus, as well as Wildfires, my standout cut from the two near hour-long albums. SAULT continue to provoke and enchant. Their Untitled duo is essential listening.
Favorite tracks: Wildfires, Bow - Michael Kiwanuka, Black
10.) Purple Moonlight Pages - R.A.P. Ferreira
Purple Moonlight Pages is my favorite project of 2020, and it doesn’t feel particularly close. In the echelon of modern conscious hip-hop records, I confidently place Pages among the likes of To Pimp A Butterfly, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, and We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service. While Pages doesn’t take as much of an outward focus as these three or other conscious hip-hop records, Rory Allen Phillip Ferreira deals with the internal struggle that takes place on the fringes of artistry unlike any other album I’ve heard. Ferreira offers the type of existential reflection on Pages that has in many ways defined the year, but also defines what it means to be an artist in the modern age in general. At a time when artistic expression through music making is as approachable as ever, while the artist is simultaneously underappreciated and undercompensated for their efforts, putting work and dedication into musical craft can feel pointless and unreasonable. Ferreira poses these questions on Pages, and doesn’t seem to offer too many answers. We’re hearing what he’s thinking about his own position as an artist and as an individual, and how those two interact. “At the end of world, we was fighting back with brushes and pens/ We decided that the suffering should end, no matter how good it feels,” Ferreira raps on CYCLES, which includes a spoken-word excerpt from an essay by American writer Susan Sontag that sort of encapsulates the ethos of Pages, noting that an artists job is to invent, “trophies of experience.” “Why those low frequencies always be your final destination, huh?” Ferreira questions on NO STARVING ARTISTS, a possible reference to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a novel that deals with similar questions about personhood and caricatured experiences as both an artist and as a Black man. Purple Moonlight Pages is an existential hip-hop journey like no other.
Favorite tracks: CYCLES, LAUNDRY, NO STARVING ARTISTS
Honorable Mentions
folklore/evermore - Taylor Swift
Shrines - Armand Hammer
Consummation - Katie Von Schleicher
Petals for Armor - Hayley Williams
Heaven To A Tortured Mind - Yves Tumor
LESS IS MOOR - Zebra Katz
Mystic Familiar - Dan Deacon
Honeymoon - Beach Bunny
The Neon Skyline - Andy Shauf
I Disagree - Poppy
Suite for Max Brown - Jeff Parker
Fetch the Bolt Cutters - Fiona Apple
Underneath - Code Orange
Mia Gargaret - Gia Margaret
Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
Okay, that is all. I really loved all of these albums, and, as I noted above, this is not a ranking, but simply a list of ten records I can definitely say were some of my favorites from 2020 and which I wanted to write about a little bit.
Please, send me a note with your favorite album from this year, and I’ll give it a listen and maybe even write you back about my thoughts on it.
If 2021 as a year overall can match the type of music released in 2020, I think we’ll be in for a good one.