i've been very clear that i think screaming like this is stupid, and i've spent the bulk of the last twenty years, at this point, waiting for this to just go away.
it refuses to go away.
so, i'm going to say the same thing i've been saying for twenty years when i run across something in the genre that has some kind of potential: this might be alright, if they'd stop screaming like fucking idiots. the drumming, in particular, is fairly impressive.
but, i'm going to turn this off now and i'll never listen to it again because it makes me feel dumb to do so.
well, ok.
there's a little bit of raunchy noise on the newest blanck mass disc.
but, it's scattered, and short-lived, and the end result is just not satisfying. i don't see why i should have to sit through 6 or 7 or whatever minutes of sappy dance club bullshit to get to thirty seconds of cacophony at the end. just bring the anarchy from the start.
it's not that the juxtaposition isn't welcome, either, it's that it's not really working. the gentle arpeggiation in the sixth track is one of the most interesting parts of the record, but you want it to blow up into an aural catastrophe that kills your brain cells; instead, it opens up into a boring techno-pop thing that meanders for a few minutes before shutting itself off. there was great promise there, but it was totally squandered.
i'm sure the show was enjoyable enough, in the presence of enough drugs. but, the frustration is longstanding and palpable. i don't know who he thinks wants to listen to this.
i fully expected to go to blanck mass at the end of september, but my pay dates get weird when the last day of the month is a monday, and i miscalculated it and got screwed. i'll probably forget this the next time it matters, but when the last day of the month is a monday, the money comes in on the saturday. this is nonsensical, because the money comes in on friday when the last day is a saturday.
i needed to get paid on friday morning to hit the show on saturday night; instead, i got paid at about 3:00 on saturday morning, when the show was just ovver. drats.
i caught fuck buttons open for caribou in 2007 or 2008 and have been keeping a distant eye on them ever since, through various disparate shifts in sound. i'm not sure why they shift their sound so dramatically, but it comes off as throwing shit out there, hoping something sticks.
this is actually kind of generic ebm, and i'm not very impressed by it. however they shift their sound, what i want to hear is that dissonant power electronics head cave - i want to be floored by the noise. it's not here.
this is mostly pretty boring.
i consequently suspect that i may have found the show a little disappointing.
and, that would be all of the records from the pitchfork list that i think are worth commenting on.
50. floating points. B.
44. holly herndon. C.
42. 1000 gecs. C.
40. thom yorke. D.
24. kim gordon. C.
08. fennesz. C.
02. fka twigs. C.
i don't exactly want to give everything else an F, so much as i just don't even want to bother listening to it. i did at least check a song or two out from most of it.
i know better than to rely too much on pitchfork, but based solely on their analysis, that would be a pretty shitty year for music.
so, what am i thinking about this fka twigs disc?
it picks up a little after the fourth track, which is horrible. the second track is also terrible. if you scratch those two tracks out, what's left is more along the lines of an ep, and i think you should probably look at this that way - it's a relatively interesting ep with some bad pop pushed down into it to move units. this is what happens when you release your music through major record labels, and that's my first reaction - somebody tell her to sign to warp, instead, so she doesn't need to ruin her records with bad singles.
thematically, i was right to be skeptical about the idea of her elevating mary magdalene to an icon of female autonomy. rather, the record broadly promotes a concept of female weakness that is consistent with patriarchal dominance. her female characters are consistently reliant on the men in her life for strength and meaning, and that should actually be seen as kind of a problem from a young person in 2019. i would suspect that fka twigs is actually a christian, and is trying to reclaim mary magdalene from both a submissive female perspective (as patriarchy programs us with) and ultimately a theistic perspective. i don't want to tell people what they should or should not relate to as their life experiences are their own and they will work things out as they will, but i'd be worried if i found my daughter relating to something like this - it would suggest i was losing the fight against the media in trying to instill a sense of autonomy in her.
musically, she doesn't really explore the promise that exists on a few of the tracks to delve into more substantive, serious music, preferring instead to dabble in pop forms. as is the norm in pop music, these melodies and structures are all borrowed from existing tracks. you've heard these songs before.
and, if there was one thing i wanted from a list of best records of the year, it was some songs i hadn't heard before.
the production on the record is often very thick, but the focus here is on writing marketable pop songs rather than on creating abstract art. these are essentially pop songs sprinkled with ideas from classical music as gimmicks, rather than a substantive synthesis of low and high art.
i would advise keeping an eye on her, as she's clearly talented, and she's clearly interested in being creative. but, this is a step towards an end point, rather than an endpoint in itself.
the liner notes in this newish fka twigs record are something else, aren't they? lots of people involved in this....
it's also a poppier record overall, as far as i can tell, poppy enough that it's probably fallen out of my sphere. what's going to be left to me to connect to with this is the more serious side of the writing, which is kind of what i said for all of these records, isn't it? this is actually consistent with something i posted not that long ago that argued that the basic concept of this era is rooted in the idea of merging serious music with electronic music.
i'm in need of a little rest, and will get back to this. maybe. if i can connect to it, and i might not be able to.
i want to briefly comment on mary magdalene, though.
like jesus himself, mary magdalene probably did not actually exist. we can't be completely sure of course, none of us were there, but she should be seen as a fictional character rather than a historical figure. it is absolutely true, though, that the character of mary magdalene has been suppressed by the church, which saw her as a threat to patriarchy.
and, let's be clear on the purpose of medieval patriarchy, too. it was to create soldiers. we have patriarchy because of war. it's not some glib comment to suggest that we'd have less wars if women were in charge of things, it is literally the historical fact of the matter - patriarchy is upheld by religion to ensure the rulers have soldiers for war. that's what it is.
so, when these gnostic christians started promoting this woman as a potential equal to jesus, it threatened a revolutionary overthrow. that was dangerous; she had to be destroyed. yet, there are fragments of a gospel that is attributed to her.
despite what you may have heard, there is no extant biblical source that suggests her character was written as a prostitute. that's actually ancient propaganda, designed to smear or discredit her. it's just not in the source.
there are sources that suggest she was jesus' partner, and a few that suggest she may have borne him children. as neither of these people actually existed, it's not likely that a bloodline exists. but, the premise of the character of jesus having sex contradicted christian dogma.
what i'm getting at is that, while it benefits nobody to treat her historically, there is value in deconstructing her back into the composite legends she came from, and treating her as an allegorical myth. as an atheist with classicist and neo-paganist tendencies, i'm actually pretty strongly in favour of that. the greek, roman, egyptian and babylonian constituents into the magdalene syncretism are powerful and should be, err, resurrected. as we decolonize and dechristianize (and deislamicize), we can learn a lot from these ideas that were suppressed, in rebuilding a new post-messianic society. the magdalene myth has powerful potential to help re-establish a cultural norm of female autonomy.
i'm not sure that this is the angle she's coming at with this.
but, it's the angle i need to approach something like this with, and i'll be pondering it when i get back to this after i get some rest.
the people at pitchfork tend to prefer a collection of static ambient artists that includes the like of fennesz and hecker over more sweeping, moving ambient music. they're consistent on this point, and i'd suppose it probably comes down to the personal tastes of some senior writer there. something else they keep coming back to that i find kind of head-scratching is 4tet.
fennesz is something i've tried to get into a whole bunch of times, and i'm just consistently left with the feeling that nothing is really happening. should i be listening more closely? well, i think i'm doing that, already, and that i'm actually pretty good at careful listening. if this is my fault, it's that i'm defining "nothing" as less sparse than others, that my nothing is somebody else's something, but that's the premise of me doing this, isn't it?
historically, fennesz is kind of like what would have happened if the fripp that worked with eno on records like (no pussyfooting) and evening star had become the fripp - if he had denounced his pop work with the gabriels and bowies, and forgotten about reforming crimson, and just did the frippertronics thing. and, is his output worthwhile in that context?
i'd like to hear something more developed from him, and keep hoping i will. this record isn't bad, relative to his previous ones, but it's not the artistic breakthrough i keep hoping for, either.
if i had kids, they'd be watching my girl, instead.
clearly the better film. hands down.
so, the canadian government removed trump from home alone, which i think is kind of absurd, and the president, i think rightfully, took some offense to it.
this is especially frustrating to macaulay culkin, who has been asking to be removed from the film for years.
i want to be clear: kim directs some of the best sonic youth tracks. the sprawl, for instance.
but, she's also responsible for some of the band's least interesting and most pretentious moments, and, left to her own devices, without any sort of a check, the pretension has really dominated the sound, since the band broke up.
there are some moments on the things she's done over the last ten years, but it's mostly been largely forgettable, imo. what she needs to be able to do, stylistically, is write killer one-liners to cut through the noise, and she's mostly not done that - it's been more of a cathartic process, for her, with the listener kind of just peering in on it.
it would be easy, but very silly, to nail kim gordon for not making guitar rock, because she was always the least inclined to actually do so. that said, this is certainly a departure from the previous body //head sound, which was at least expected by those familiar with her dominant direction over the syr projects.
with the exception of 'air bnb' and 'hungry baby' (the weakest tracks on the record), i guess she's really just traded in her treated guitars for skittery beats; it's otherwise more or less fundamentally the same thing she's been doing for quite a while, in the sense of producing scattered statements over soundscapes of noise. the change in aesthetic may be jarring, but it's kind of just surface deep.
and, here's the thing: if you found her work with feedback to be a little on the aimless side, the fact that the shift to electronics is really just aesthetic means that it shouldn't fundamentally alter your perception of what she's doing. if you liked the rambling over atonal guitar noise, you should still like the rambling over glitchy electronic beats; if you didn't, it's hard to see how the shift in sound is going to shift your opinion.
personally, i always liked my kim gordon in smaller doses, and the sonic youth records where she overpowers are, in my opinion, their weakest. i could maybe handle an ep. but the process of removing the other two singers is mostly going to tune me out, and that's just the absolute truth of it.
but, don't let the layers of technology scare you off - there is no fundamental shift in compositional style, here, and your opinion of her solo work should more or less remain static after digesting this.
i haven't said anything about thom yorke's new record, have i?
there was a time in like 1998 when i was a very big radiohead fan, but i actually didn't really like the direction they took in the early 00s, and i haven't kept up at all. i've heard very small amounts of music by radiohead or thom yorke since hail to the thief, which most of his existing fan base is too young to even remember.
i actually had a discussion with somebody outside of a bar about this not that long ago.
"you don't even remember ok computer, do you?"
"no."
he even seemed sort of baffled that i was that old.
my perspective is actually to liken radiohead to the smashing pumpkins, and yorke to corgan; it's just a constant process of disappointment, to realize where these guys are at now, and how distant it is from where i'm at. corgan's stuff is often unlistenably bad. yorke's tends to be uneventful, predictable, repetitive and downright boring.
it seems like everything he's done for the last fifteen years is essentially exactly the same.
so, i mean, i could no doubt throw the record on, and listen to it a few times, and have it pass over me like a blur, unable to distinguish one song from the next, on this record or the last however many; i'm not going to bother. i checked a few tracks out to confirm the basic truth that it sounds exactly the same as everything else he's done this century. and, i'll just leave it at that.
i don't know if yorke has ever come out in public with exactly what his mental illness is. i think everybody knows there's something there, but what? i'd hazard a guess that it's ocd. the repetition gives it away.
