In This Episode: deferred prophecies, metonymy through stationery, stoner metal Significant Others, slow-moving sex grandmas, and an American cartooning institution.
Once again, Kanye West has proven me wrong. I prophesied that, come Easter morn’, we would discover that his new album, So Help Me God, would ascend from its earthly tomb (in this case, being Yeezy’s MacBook) and be seated at the right hand of MBDTF and Yeezus. It seemed to make perfect sense that the latest testament of ’Ye’s devotion/heresy would make its way to the world on that most holiest of Christian days, but maybe he has bigger things in mind. Knowing Kanye as I do (we go way back), he most definitely has the biggest things in mind. But that hype though; can we get much higher?
(A short discussion on the state of rap releases in March 2015, among other things)
I could be using this space to promote Kendrick Lamar’s new album To Pimp a Butterfly, which is undoubtedly one of the biggest releases of the year, and will be discussed intensely for the months (if not years) ahead. One of the reasons I am not, however, is because of this. It’s an album that requires a significant amount of time and spins to parse out, and I couldn’t build a cohesive statement on it after the few listens I’ve fit in between Sunday and now. As could be surmised by my hesitation, I also expected to be instantly taken with the album and after these few listens, I’m still not sure if I completely like the thing. I’m not a huge fan of the FlyLo over-caffeinated jazz style production that permeates this record, and sometimes Kendrick’s appreciation of signature West Coast rap styles comes across as uninteresting. Beyond that, I also don’t know what to make of the gender dynamics in the album yet, but songs like “These Walls” use women as symbols in a way that seems irresponsible at best and, at worst, actively works to undermine the overarching statements that Kendrick attempts to make. That being said, there are a lot of interesting, great things going on here, and even if Kendrick didn’t fully deliver on the hype surrounding this album, it’s a substantial document that will (and should) be investigated as the year goes on. Who knows, maybe I will warm up to it even more on repeat listening. If anything, the presence of this and D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, which both make heavy and creative use of the sounds of ’70s funk, soul, and rock might indicate a genuine trend, one that we should welcome with open arms.
Portland Dining Month
Wanna get fancy on the cheap? A bunch of the best restaurants in the city banded together to offer three course meals of their best stuff for $29 each. While that isn’t exactly as cheap as sum tastee burger’n’fries from Burgerville, it is nowhere near the price that some of the meals at these restaurants would usually be. So drag your smelly butt out of the library to some PDX fine dining. Wear your Reed crewneck, too, so everyone else in the joint knows where that grungy kid with the greasy hair and bad table manners is coming from. I’d say that we would be really making a name for Reed College among the hoi polloi of Portland foodies, but (1.) Reed already has made an ivory-casted name for itself and (2.) Half of the foodies in PDX are grubby sweatshirt-wearing greaseballs anyways.
Kanye’s Media Blitz for his next masterpiece, "So Help Me God"
It’s Kanye’s world, and we are just living in it. Said differently: YEEZY SEASON APPROACHING. And fuck whatever y’all been hearin’, because “Only One” is a great song, and “All Day” perfectly combines the sound of Yeezus with this new McCartney kick that ’Ye’s been on. But honestly, Kanye is usually pretty on point (on sight, if you will) but rarely so much so as he has been in the last month. Check out some of the interviews he’s been giving lately. He’s been getting into some pretty great discussions about classism versus racism in contemporary society, and his forays into fashion with Adidas have some pretty solid ideological underpinnings. Plus, he was literally spitting some fire on that television debut of “All Day.” My body is ready, Kanye, drop this new album on me. (As a sidenote, I had a dream/nightmare that Kanye, Death Grips, and Kendrick all dropped their albums surprise-style on the same day and the world just imploded because of it. It would be too much greatness to handle.)
"Republican National Convention" by PWR BTTM / Jawbreaker Reunion
Besides boasting some of the best album and band names pretty much ever, the new split by PWR BTTM and Jawbreaker Reunion carries some pretty great tunes with it as well. I’m a huge fan of JR’s 2014 album Lutheran Sisterhood Gun Club, and this continues on their roll of great bandcamp lo-fi pop-punk jams. PWR BTTM is a bit newer on the scene, but this split proves that the queer-rock duo has what it takes, and I’m anxiously awaiting news of a debut LP from them. Both of these bands are from Bard College, which makes me think that we should offer up some sort of band exchange with them. Who should we send to Annandale-on-Hudson? Any takers?
"After Birth", by Elisa Albert
I won’t pretend to know anything about childbirth. I know it happened to me, in so far that I didn’t care to leave my mother’s womb on time and so they had to wrench me out via incision, eliminating the possibility of a pleasant gondola ride down the birth canal for me. None too soon, either, considering I was “the biggest baby they ever saw” according to one awestruck nurse, and if I waited much longer I may have gained so much mass that an escape out of my mother would be nigh impossible. That being said, Elisa Albert’s new novel After Birth gives tons of insight into the mind of a new mother. Not just any new mother, either; Albert’s protagonist Ari has one of the most distinct, caustic, and engaging narratorial voices in recent memory. She navigates the world of motherhood and sisterhood with scorching insight, attempting to figure out what keeps women emotionally divided between each other, and whether or not she even cares that much for women, anyway. After Birth is hilarious, pregnant with acerbic barbs on everything from milk formula to Nazi joy divisions. Yeah, it goes there.
The GIF of a Pig Solving a Pig Puzzle
Ben Metcalf's "Against the Country"
Metcalf’s novel(?) is a hyper-verbose diatribe against the false pastoral of his youth, an auto-fictional attack on the American idealization of roughin’ it in the wild. I’ll let you know right now that this book is not for everyone. If the thought of some white guy complaining about his childhood for 350 pages makes you a bit green around the gills, you will likely fling this book against the nearest perpendicular surface. That being said, Metcalf is by-and-large calling out the bullshit of all these other white men from throughout America’s long and storied history of white men “returning to nature.” “Thomas Jefferson seems to me to have sinned cardinally,” Metcalf writes, “with his comfortable slaver’s dream of an agrarian wonderland and his criminal transfer of public funds to the Napoleonic war effort so as to avail us of the hectares needed to prove that dream a nightmare.” This gives you a pretty good idea of the dude’s writing style, and for a certain type of reader, his grandiloquent rancor goes down like a delicious, sugary, angst-filled cup of iced tea on a hot summer’s day.
Pharmakon @ Mississippi Studios
Okay, so this one is pharm- and not “farm”, but you get it. Pharmakon is to industrial noise what Deafheaven is to black metal, which is to say she has garnered a lot of critical praise and some scorn from “true fans of the genre.” Take it or leave it, but if you take it, this show will be something to behold. The first time I saw Pharmakon she was chewing on a slab of metal, and I had to leave her set early and run 3 miles through Chicago at 1 in the morning to catch the last train out of the city. That night was the only time I’ve ever had Popeye’s Fried Chicken, and let me tell you, their interpretation of Ranch Dippin’ Sauce is unique and commendable.
Arca's Sheep
Death Grips’ Fashion Week instrumental album is pretty good, and probably the most listener-friendly release that they’ve come out with ever, but this is the real fashion show soundtrack that you want. Arca is a Venezuelan musician/producer who exploded all over that prime 2013-era scene with production credits on Yeezus and his own superb mixtape &&&&&, and released his debut album Xen last year (although Xen had some cool things going on i/r/t gender dysphoria, it wasn’t quite as nice musically as &&&&& this keyboard’s ampersand button has never been so flagrantly exercised!). While Arca’s been getting a lot of press for production creds on Bjork’s new album—but really, Bjork deserves pretty much all the credit on that one—this is the real release you wanna look out for. It’s only 17 minutes, but it’s free on the internet somewhere, and it’s perfectly creepy music (with even creepier album art) for the somewhat-creepy concept of a fashion show. It doesn’t take a PhD in Literary Theory to connect the symbolic connotations of sheep to the behavior of people following the fashion industry. Perhaps Arca is making some ~subversive~ comments here, but the lambs haven’t stopped screaming yet; they just bought some Yeezys.
Chez Dodo
PIFF Schedule
The Portland International Film Festival is upon us, and it gives us such an embarrassment of riches so that if one cannot find something of interest, they probably haven’t even taken a look yet. PIFF goes on for most of the month of February, and our local Moreland Theater is showing films, so nearly anyone, from thesis-crazed seniors to freshmen newly discovering the joys and terrors of a full class load, should be able to find time to see at least one film. I’m personally excited for The Duke of Burgundy, a sexy S&M tale with an all-female cast by Berberian Sound Studio director Peter Strickland (who also promises a follow up about a male-on-male S&M relationship, for, ya know, balance and whatnot). This promises to be better than 50 Shades of Grey, not that it would be difficult to top that. The other movie I’m excited for is totally-not-sexy The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his devastating and amazing documentary The Act of Killing. The Look of Silence shifts attention from the perpetrators of Indonesia’s awful massacres to the victims and the families of victims. If it’s even half as good as The Act of Killing, it’ll still be one of the best documentaries in recent memory.
Genius.com
I, for one, welcome our new annotating overlords. By which I mean us, I suppose, although I haven’t completely figured out how one becomes an annotator for Genius. It might be rather easy, but I’m still too awestruck as a witness to the process to become an active cog in the exegesis machine. For those that aren’t familiar, Genius.com is the website formerly known as Rap Genius, that has long been expanding its purview to include non-hip hop genres like rock, pop, and historical tracts and speeches. But did you know that now you can type genius.com/ in front of nearly any website and see/create annotations on that webpage? It’s crazy! The new motto of the company seems to be “Annotate the World” and I’m excited to see where this goes; in the least, it will be interesting, and at most, it could revolutionize the way we relate to the consumption of media and news and, well, the world. Genius is attracting some big names, including their poaching of music writer Sasha Frere-Jones from New Yorker. Hell, Judith Butler is annotating her own works and interviews on the site. Judith Butler! All hail the new age of annotation.
Father John Misty's I Love You MIDIbear
In the age of PONO (I’ll be using the ‘age of ...’ phrase a lot this week, it seems), corporate synergy seems to be taking a backseat to audio quality in the music listening experience. At the very least, Neil Young has tricked us into believing that audio quality should be what matters. We’ll have to see if the boomers buy into it, shelling out for that triangular monument to post-iPod minimalist mindfuckery, and also shelling out for $40 album downloads on the PONO webstore (like honestly, what the hell?). But if we know where old Neil’s cards lay, we also know where new folk troubadour on the block, Mr. Josh Tillman of Father John Misty himself, stands with his new website http://www.fatherjohnmisty.com/sap/, which offers a “Free to Hear” album stream of his new album I Love You, Honeybear. Like many early album streams (and leaks) the sound is extremely low quality; in this case, it’s actually in that audioprimitivist format MIDI, a sonic experience reminiscent of an acid trip in one of the SEGA Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games. The website and the MIDI stream is a work of art, but seriously, the normal album has merit as well. I never cared for J. Tillman’s work in Fleet Foxes, or even his first Father John Misty album, but this record is a brilliant exercise in balancing self-aware shmaltz and even more self-aware (and frequently hilarious) cynicism. In lesser hands, it would elicit an eye roll, but he really pulls off the mix in this album, and it will be resonating for quite some time to come.