Top 25 tracks of the 2010's: #22 Dragging an Ox through Water - Sparrow Command

read #23 here: https://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-25-tracks-of-2010s-23-angel-olsen.html

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#22: Dragging an Ox through Water - Sparrow Command

"freak folk" music may be something that seemed like another blip in time for other people who followed indie music in the mid-2000's, one that produced a handful of artists that became much bigger names (Animal Collective, Joanna Newsom) before promptly disappearing. but the hype train around that music happened to hit just around the time i turned 18 and went off to college and it spoke to me way more as a kid who grew up in the rural Midwest than anything else happening at that particular moment did. like all over-hyped things, it all came and went and descended into self-parody pretty fast... but my favorite album of that time was the self-titled album by the band Akron/Family (unfortunately produced by noted rapist Michael Gira). that album was cobbled together from various little experiments and songs done in FL Studio by the band members and combined electronic textures with folk songs in ways that seemed really adventurous, strange, and unexpected to me at the time. it felt like music of the future to me. it was heavy, deep music that seemed to come from of a lot of pain and felt like the total opposite of the sort of accusations that this kind of music was all just a quirky affectation of rich hipsters slumming as folkies that plagued artists like Devandra Banhart. unfortunately Akron/Family seemed to very suddenly lose a lot of that heartbreaking existential angst and became a fairly mediocre hippie jam-band, a transformation i will never truly understand. and that seems to be what most people know them for now! that honestly hurt me a lot, because that first album still stands to me as a really important album in my life, and a great pieces of work from that era that isn't well-remembered.

but maybe we'll all resigned to our own sort of irrelevance at this point. i discovered Dragging an Ox through Water (aka Brian Mumford) through the song "Snowbank Treatment" on a mix a now-deceased music writer friend gave to me. the backbeat of the song is a lo-fi drum machine thump and very dry, squelchy synths that almost sound like they coat everything in a sort of sticky syrup. it's still basically a folk song, largely because the electronic parts sound just as weathered as the acoustic guitar and the singing, like they're all coming from one source. Brian Mumford sings in a warbly, croony tremolo that sounds almost half-whispered and just adds to this feeling of the music being stuck some sort of liminal space without really resolving anywhere fully. it's direct music from the heart, but it's also tense music with some kind of world-weary irony attached to it. indie superstar Bon Iver is also well-known for doing this sort of folk/electronic mix of styles and trying to mix that kind of folksy sincerity with sonic experimentation, but his experiments are so much more slick. compared to Brian Mumford he sounds like a confidence man, a Christian prosperity gospel cult leader, drenched in so many layers of reverb and bombast that i really truly have a hard time believing in anything he's singing. Dragging an Ox's version is so much more restrained, maybe rickety and lo-fi but very cutting and ironic. i believe what this guy is saying what he feels because there's no reason he wouldn't be.

"Snowbank Treatment" is somewhat of an outlier on the (still good, but not as good) album The Tropics of Phenomenon that came out on in 2008, and it doesn't qualify for this list anyway. but Mumford's follow-up 2014 album Panic Sentry is pretty similar, admittedly without the sort of banger that fused all parts of his sound together as successfully as "Snowbank Treatment".

but - "Sparrow Command", the third track, has slowly gained a lot of resonance for me. and that's because it feels so much like a statement of intent in so many different ways. it's a low-key country-folk song with acoustic strumming and a peddle steel guitar with a little pulsing synth textures in the background. the synths blinks like little lights, filling out the void of space that the other instruments leave, showing what still makes his sound unique even when it's more muted. the melody is simple series of phrases, restated almost like a very bitter mantra. in some ways it sounds like a fight Mumford is waging against the abyss. he's trying to revisit the same point from as many angles as possible, so that you really understand why exactly he's saying what he's saying, constantly pushing back at you or anyone who might be hostile or misunderstanding of what he's doing.

a lot of indie music often has the "undergraduate literature degree" syndrome and uses lots of cutesy, flowery abstraction and literary allusions that either don't have a particularly coherent sentiment behind them... or if they do, they have a regressive and boring one. that really isn't the case here. all the nature imagery is very vivid here, and somewhat ironic by how it illustrates a larger dynamic that's going on here. it pushes you closer and closer each time to getting at the heart of the matter, but before pulling back and never really giving you any kind of easy catharsis.

"Sparrow Command" is, to me, an ode to stubbornness. it's about someone who is so painfully aware that he doesn't particularly fit in with any particular space or have any power in this world in any real substantive sense. So imagines himself as having command of nature in a real way...only to later acknowledge that that's a projection too, but one that serves a purpose. because the fact is that you don't really know anymore than he does what's going on. it's about recognizing the fundamental absurdity of the reality you're presented with as an outsider who is trying to blaze their own path and not even accepting the framing you've been given at all... because that framing is meaningless and irrelevant.

in a decade where indie artists take up less and less of the cultural landscape, and command an increasingly less interest, discourse, and resources, i see it as a sort of rallying cry for forging your own path in spite of the hostility and disinterest of the world. the first two verses repeat the lines "you ain't never seen me and i don't know who you're trying to be". when i was thinking about the repetition of this line, i suddenly remembered the lines "you never really understood me. you never really tried" from Kate Bush's song "The Big Sky". in that case she clearly calling out the press for all the ways they ignored and belittled what she was trying to do with her music and treating her as a joke. in Mumford's case he's not even in an ecosystem that would focus on his existence long enough to really be misunderstood. he lives entirely outside that landscape - not even really seen that much as an artist at all, so far from any kind of larger zeitgeist or relevance that being that way would be totally alien to him.

even if you're some sort of outsidery indie musician, it's really hard to ignore how the sort of bastardized mix of mainstream pop culture and capitalism haven't infiltrated into everything. no matter what space you are in, it's likely that there's someone with much greater stature out there, with much greater commercial potential that you're always supposed to compare yourself to. and there's some great big corporate force to align yourself with that wants you to put on every mask possible, and align yourself with power as much as possible. and this ends up filtering down to person to person relationships, and how we construct and love one another... creating false desires and expectations for how things are supposed to happen in our lives. which then making rifts between us and tear us away from our natural environment while substituting a heavily constructed and fabricated one in its place that will never serve most people.

in the forth verse, Mumford sings:

I don't command nothing
but I imagine myself with the rats and the weeds
a one way alliance
go stepping through the lots in the night with me
I'm a wolf with a mask and I can't hear anything
over my rubber hide and a penchant
for bumping high amplitude low frequencies

he shows some candidness here. he knows his alignment with nature might be a one-way projection, he's not one who thinks that all nature is his best friend. but he knows that it protects him, and he's going to do what he's going to do anyway to protect himself. he's going to make his silly electronic folk because it's clear that that the world outside doesn't seem to particularly know what it wants from him anyway.

in the fifth verse he sings:

out in the twilight
there's a spine in the heart of the weeds
a coward between worlds
making salve from names of the stories getting cleaved
you ain't never seen me and I don't know what you are
Do you know how the names got rigged? tell me
baby won't you whisper like a man for me?

the way i read this line is he's talking about people and artists who have been destroyed and forgotten by the establishment, and their work is often later butchered and used to fuel whatever movement that is in vogue of the rich and the powerful farther down the line (i.e. "freak folk"). someone is always there taking your work and shaping it into something with more commercial potential. there's always a man in a suit there hiding behind all your high-minded outsidery romanticism.

underneath the midnight moon
got the names rigged up in the seams
a crack beneath the midnight moon
run a line thru the light for demands you can mean
I can see what you mean when you mourn for the nameless
charging up all your stones with the moon
taking sides with invisible war machines

i read this as the futility of inventing narratives and investing yourself into something that at the end of the day, isn't going to matter because it'll be rolled over by something new. you're putting your identity deeply into a construction of something that is unstable, and putting you on the side with powers who contain all sorts of invisible, unseen harms beneath them. i think about this when i think about twitter, and how people are quick to jump behind defending companies like Disney for doing what is supposedly in their interest as a feminist, or anti-racist, or whatever - but masks all kinds of invisible harms behind it.

there's a line in this song: "I can move the cursor, but I can't remove the curse all alone." in the universe of Dragging an Ox through Water, digital and analog spaces seem very much connected to each other.

the last line is of the song is the phrase "when the night comes burning down thru the breeze" repeated a few times, as what's left of the song seems swept away like a wind by the blinking synths in the background.

today the music publication Tiny Mix Tapes tweeted out that it was going on indefinite hiatus. while i found the tone of their writing at times both maddeningly insular and also somewhat reactionary, and can't say i often like to read their reviews... it is not a good sign to see so many outlets that actually covered some sort of independent music, with their own unique character disappearing, or at least receding into the background.

it's a particularly dark time for music, and it's hard to exist as any kind of outsider without being forced to turn your art into some kind of entrepreneurial monetization scheme. if you want something better, you have to put more active support behind who are actually trying to envision something better - not just climbing the ladder and aligning themselves with power. that's why i find the great stubbornness of "Sparrow Command" so cutting, and so resonant at this point in time... far beyond the usual folsky "back to nature" stuff, plugged-in and with irony and gristle and wit... but still very much understanding the need for something deeper and more fundamental. which is where we need to be.

Top 25 tracks of the 2010's: #23 Angel Olsen - Lark

read #24 here: http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-25-tracks-of-2010s-24-vessel-paplu.html

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#23: Angel Olsen - Lark

this is probably not the only time i'll mention this, but the 2010's were the decade where i lost almost all interest in the critical darling American indie rock/folk scene i used to put a lot of mental effort and energy into trying to follow in the previous decade. i honestly didn't feel like there was anything more there for me. most of this past decade, i would frequently revisit an ongoing internal fight with myself over trying to find something that still spoke to me at all within the what's left of the whole ecosystem of indie rock music. Angel Olsen was one of the few new indie songwriters who broke in the 2010's that i actually felt a genuine spark of something from. there is an urgency and distress to her voice that reached me when a lot of stuff didn't... even when a lot of her song structures and arrangements didn't really rock the boat in any particular way.

Angel Olsen's breakout album was 2014's Burn Your Fire For No Witness, which opens with a cute little lo-fi track that i like named "Unfucktheworld" before bouncing around a few different styles and eventually settling on a bunch of slower songs at the end. But the first one i heard was the slightly less adventurous/more full band-oriented My Woman from 2016. on that album in particular, Olsen is a very solid songwriter and a great performer and the songs are very well-arranged... but there's very little that feels new or exciting there outside of her voice. the reference points for her first three solo albums come very much from rock, folk, and country music of the 60's and 70's... very old, well-worn musical tropes by this point (to put it lightly). she definitely works from within a particular framework for her songs without jumping too far outside of that. and she does a good job with it. My Woman is a very polished album... but it's really, really not anything you haven't heard before. and that's really the story of so much indie rock in the 2010's for me.

that's why something felt genuinely amiss when i watched the video premiere for her track "Lark" this year. "Lark" is the opening track of her album from this year's All Mirrors and feels like a pretty strong statement of intent. the track, at its core, is still recognizably an Angel Olsen song. the same straightforward guitar chords are there, and the lyrics are a pretty simple, if gutting, story of a romantic relationship completely gone awry. but everything else is far more ambitious and strange - more like something you'd hear on a Radiohead album, especially in how seems to musically wear all of its themes on the surface in a more fully-realized way. i'm sure her songwriting/arrangement collaboration with electronic producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Babbitt for this entire album is part of that (hi Ben! i know you're probably reading this). also Jherek Bischoff's string arrangement on "Lark" is like a thick layer of fog on top of what in someone else's hands might be a far more conventional song, obscuring and drastically heightening all of the uncertainty and anxiety you can feel from her voice. when the song drops into a thunderous refrain for the first time around 80 seconds in, a wash of reverb envelops her voice and she sounds like she's belting her lyrics from the mountaintops (which she literally is in the video). within the first two minutes, we're in a far more alien and intense place than anything on any of her previous albums.

speaking of Angel Olsen's voice: what separates Angel Olsen from a lot of other critically-hyped mid-tier success indie songwriters for me is she really feels like she absolutely believes every single word that she's singing. she is very much a "what you see is what you get" type of performer. she's not the type to easily or adeptly put on another kind of mask. and that's why it's all pretty funny to me, because she often seems to go for various different high-concept approaches and concepts in her music videos. the 2010's is the decade of the pop performer as all-encompassing media figure who lives many different lives, and i have no doubts that indie songwriters who want to have any place in that ecosystem have to find their own ways to keep up within the limited amount of budget and resources they have. and i imagine some of her videos have attracted more fans to her (her widely-viewed video for "Shut Up Kiss Me" is how i discovered her music). but most of her videos tend to fall pretty flat for me because a) they generally feel like they consist of one idea that isn't expounded upon much, and b) i don't think she knows how to a put on a mask long enough to convincingly sell a role. that's not really unusual for the less budgeted world of indie music, but it's hard to come away thinking she's anyone but Angel Olsen.

and that's alright to me. in a decade where a lot of performers, and really just the music industry in general, were at an all-time high with bullshitting their audiences (a trend which in no way excluded indie music), her directness is still refreshing. she does feel like she's hinging on your every breath as a listener. her voice can often be powerful like in "Shut Up Kiss Me", but more often it's strained and upset, and confused... and sometimes more gentle. and you feel her channeling all those emotions from very deeply within herself. and that's honestly why i've always thought her packaging as a Prestige Artist in the often more quirky and tongue-in-cheek world of indie rock is a bit odd at times. there is all this deep angst that trembles throughout her voice that often doesn't match with the way she's presented. Angel Olsen is not Mitski: she's not a super clever performer. sometimes i also feel like doesn't ever exactly know how to package herself as a performer, but somehow that kind of adds to the tension that makes her music feel more urgent and unstable and exciting. she's a lot of raw nerves and frayed, jagged ends just waiting to surface but never really able to. she carries the vibe of an everyday person who is just about to enter middle age and already has several broken dreams she's carrying with her - not of a hyper-composed, finely curated, ultra-savvy artist.

and yet what wasn't really able to surface before seems to come out far more within "Lark", and all at once. the song musically climbs and falls into different fragments of melody that alternate between tenderness, righteous anger, and pure horror throughout its over six minute length. they never seem to really resolve or coalesce around a particular structure. the music video begins with her immediately walking out of a clearly violent argument with her boyfriend, and you can see bruises and scratches on her chest. the presence of mountains (i'm imagining this was filmed in Asheville, North Carolina where she lives) feel intensely isolating as she wanders out alone into the night, bruised and battered. at various points in the video she seems to emerge triumphant among the thick woods, but it's short lived and nothing actually gets resolved. while the video still suffers like a lot of her others from not being particularly coherent, the imagery and mood of it is very clear. there's a brief image towards the end of a seeming flashback of her with her head and her hands at home, totally exhausted as a seemingly supportive arm reaches out to her, only for her to jerk her arm away abruptly in fear and anger. the point is there's no comfort here - it's all bullshit and lies.

if i can make an incredibly heavy-handed comparison: this track feels very much like America in 2019 - there's so much tension that never really goes anywhere but kind of just builds and builds into a gradually unfolding, slowly escalating nightmare. and there's really no escape from it - everything joins from a bunch of disparate threads and comes to the surface all at once in a disorienting and deeply disturbing jumble. there are no more new dreams to dream anymore, just the complete dissolution and destruction of all of our existing ones. and that echoes a lot of what she carries through her voice when she screams "what about my dreams?" in the final spike of intensity lined by electric guitar towards the end of the track, just as everything in the song seems like it has run out of steam... as if she's having one final flare-up of anger that she had to get in before collapsing into total exhaustion. she has all the internal dilemmas of a millennial who was raised expecting to come into a very different world than the one she ended up in. it's what Slavoj Zizek might call "wrong dreams" - the inability to recognize that what she thought she wanted was always going to end in disaster. and so she's in the midst having a desperate hysterical breakdown as she realizes just how deeply she was invested in something that was actually always a nightmare. after this, the track actually ends far more discordant and frayed than it began. this song is very much about a relationship that's gone extremely sour, but the fact that so much is left unsaid and the music carries the mood so heavily leaves it open to a lot of other kinds of interpretations.

"Lark" is a truly fucking exhausting song. there's nothing particularly fun or clever here. it's like slogging uphill through the mud in an intense rainstorm as hard as you can. but it's also extremely cathartic in a way a lot of music of the last decade wasn't. maybe it's a relief that the rest of All Mirrors is mostly not like that, but the rest of All Mirrors also doesn't hit quite as hard as "Lark" because of that.

i have to admit i haven't revisited All Mirrors much since it came out, but i also don't think i really ever absorbed it that much the first place. it's funny, because this album is only from a handful of months ago... and i saw it get a brief time in the sun with lots of praise before quickly fading into the background. that's not uncommon for any album these days, where things have to be immediate and grab your attention right away. but i didn't see it appear on too many best of the year lists this year in spite of all the praise either. a lot of critics seemed to forget about it pretty quickly.

and maybe part of that reason is i do think there is something a little more quietly disruptive about this album. it's a very musically ambiguous album - it doesn't resolve in a clear or easy way, and it's musically dense and full of parallels to other things, and it doesn't fall back on as many cutesy references to old music of the 60's and 70's as her previous work did. i think it can be hard for a lot of critics to make something out of that, because it seemingly came from left-field for an artist who seemed pretty set on staying in on a typical indie folk/rock path (an increasingly conservative and restrictive genre). but as usual, critics are being unimaginative and wrong.


to me, "Lark" points out a future direction for indie music - defined by more open ambiguity, anxiety, and ambition. it feels like it's trying to drag indie rock, with all its baggage and increasingly conservative and regressive tendencies, kicking and screaming into a newer and more interesting place. whether indie rock really follows behind that is maybe not the interesting question. how will artists who come from that ecosystem, possibly realizing it's a broken and regressive place, take more of a leap into the unknown and experiment far more in order to stay alive and relevant? that's the interesting question to me. and i'm happy to see Angel Olsen, of all people, doing that here and on All Mirrors in general. maybe this will be a one-off, or maybe it'll be a longer-term shift for her - but i definitely don't think this mood will be a dead end for indie music in general in the next 10 years.

Top 25 tracks of the 2010's: #24 Vessel - Paplu (Love That Moves The Sun)

read #25 here: https://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-25-tracks-of-2010s-25-kanye-west.html

if you don't like orange, you can also read this piece on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32500345

#24: Vessel - Paplu (Love That Moves The Sun)

as someone originally from the Midwestern United States of America, where much of modern electronic dance music is originally from, i always find Europe and especially the UK's monopoly on so much electronic music culture kind of infuriating. so many of the prestige, ultra-hyped artists that led me to embracing and finally wanting to explore that space a lot more as an artist (Aphex Twin, Burial, Boards of Canada) all come from some part of the UK. i grew up having more of an affinity to experimental music from the start without really knowing that, but i came from the rock music-loving state of Ohio, where being a producer of beats and sounds was extremely niche and unpopular. (i'm sure that's changed somewhat, but anyway...) most of my favorite stuff back then all came from the more experimental moments of artsy indie rock albums, or prestige artists like Radiohead, but i never thought of electronic music as its own space worth exploring until later. for whatever reason the culture in the US doesn't seem to produce nearly as much electronic music i have any affinity towards compared to the UK, and i really couldn't say exactly why that is! if anything, the last decade revealed to me how much rock music has failed to go anywhere or do anything particularly new and other genres (hip-hop, pop, r&b, and electronica) are all taking the exciting leaps forward.

that's not saying that electronica is always this great birthing ground of exciting new sonic innovations or whatever. it has plenty of its own stiff, tired cliches that artists like to endlessly trot out because those ideas feel comfy or familiar. it's common to look to the past for inspiration, but the it's same past as everyone else: some sort of retro-futurist dreams of the early to mid 20th century, or the future sci-fi Blade Runner dystopia that literally already so oversaturated in media that it's a copy of a copy now. it's easy for artists working with that same set of references to just do a worse and less interesting job of what someone else did before them, because why wouldn't they? hard to say anything new there.

as far as i care to interpret it, dubstep was an attempt to fuse some kind of virtuosity with sonic experimentation and have it be danceable that gained widespread popularity in the late 00's. by now dubstep is all but dead and a lot of artists who came from it have shifted their sounds and approaches in interesting ways. Sebastian Gainsborough's (great name btw) first album as Vessel, 2012's Order of Noise definitely sounds dubsteppy to me, if not on the weirder and quirkier end of that style of music. it's definitely sonic experimentation that exists from within a very particular palette of sounds and framework of genre that probably seems much less clever and more dated to someone like me who is not coming from that scene. i'm more familiar with Vessel's second album Punish, Honey which sounds more like some kind of dark industrial music that's started to fester and grow worms and bacteria out of it. my favorite track from that is called "Red Sex" with its perversely gyrating buzzsaw synths. they're very simple - they're like low-level organic lifeforms. but they've grown legs, and now all they've learned to do is how to have sex and it's kind of bizarre and kind of terrifying, but also kind of funny. i like how silly the pitch shifting in that track is. but most of the album is not so silly but dirty, rusty music that is pretty fun sonic adventure into the coal mines but not something that's necessarily going to take you on a ambitious journey to some place you've never been. to be honest, i mostly forgot about Punish, Honey other than "Red Sex" several years after.

Queen of Golden Dogs from 2018 is far more virtuostic in its instrumentation - the chamber strings and voice, and the cover art seemingly inspired by famous female surrealist artist Remedios Varo obviously point to that. this is a more stereotypically "female" album i guess you could say (a generalization i hate using, especially in the age of heavy mainstream TERFdom). most obviously the album is interspersed with several tracks tend to very slow, languid meditations that are filled with mostly strings and female-sounding choirs not speaking in English. in the more ambitious electronic tracks, the lead synths sound far more lacy and intricate than anything in his previous work... but they also have an unmistakable edge to them. they're more highly developed than the low-level lifeforms of the previous album. they don't just stay in one place - they're quick. but they can still shock you if you touch them. these tracks are actually really fun and energizing to listen to.

"Paplu (Love That Moves The Sun)" contains many of the strains of the most forward-looking sonic experimentation of the last decade in electronic music. but it's also being more ambitious and tightly structured than most of that stuff, and feels like it'll end up coming off far less dated in the future. in spite of Sebastian Gainsborough's dubstep origins, this isn't the work of a "scenius", and it's not really something you need to be well-researched in a specific scene or have a lot context to understand. it's music you feel first and it's universal, in the way the Romantics might have envisioned it.

"Paplu (Love That Moves The Sun)" comes towards the end of the album and it's the longest and best distilled of any of Vessel's music. it also just summarizes a lot of the best ideas put forward by the biggest sonic experimenters of the decade in an extremely tight music package. It starts a little slow: the melody mostly jogs in place energetically for the first 3 minutes as its warming up its different component parts as much as it possibly can before peeling out. as a side note, i generally find this album mostly to be sonically perfect (however you want to interpret that), EXCEPT FOR the damn handclaps he uses which feel a bit too obvious and clumsy on top of everything else for me. but that's a nitpick: because this is all about polyrhythms and juxtapositions and layers upon layers of instrumentation that warp and change dimensions in strange ways. it's a kind of surrealism, but a very old (almost ancient kind of surrealism)

we're far beyond the point of just sitting inside a vibe or a framework and appreciating the little innovations that might exist there. this album isn't commenting on or reacting to any contemporary scene or movement as far as i can tell. if i were a more uncharitable person, i might ascribe some strains of "cultural appropriation" to the sound of Queen of Golden Dogs because some of its instrumental timbres are obviously non-Western and the intent to marry classical music with is very reminiscent of other recent sonic experimenters like Ash Koosha. you could also definitely hit it with some accusations of Orientalism in the overall sound and approach. but i think the problem with using that critique here is that the package isn't distinctly either Western or Non-western, but a smashing together of different ideas or sounds. i don't really look at it as appropriating a particular sound, but more an abstract idea. the base it's building off of is an old, strict, deeply formalist kind of spirituality that seems fairly universal to a lot of different cultures. that's something that seems very much out of time, very much not fashion-forward in a way that a lot of the sexy dystopian, warping electronica of the 2010's sounds. at least not until it starts getting amped up.

Eventually all the warm-ups for the first 3 minutes bring us to a squawking, angelic melodic voice that forms the baseline of the rest of the track. the voice sounds vaguely still feminine, but it's distorted and warped now: the cut-and-dry femininity of the chamber music voices is being messed with and interrogated. the amped up, super hyper poly-rhythms are pushing it much farther and in a much different direction than it was ever meant to go, and it's trying to keep up with it in vain. it feels almost as if it's being crushed. there's something that feels a bit wrong and deeply grotesque about it - which of course, makes it feel more disarming, and more exciting.

the track, like much of the album, coasts on a subversion of expectations: you don't expect all this manic energy to be coming from such old and stiff, formalist book of sounds. things are amped up to a degree of intensity that feels almost inappropriate. its initial surface of stiff formalism give way to an increasingly complex and interlocking series of shapes and patterns. a portal to the future that exists from within some sort of imagined past reconstructed from old, fading books and pieces of art. it's a new feeling, but a sort of newness that still feels like it could only come straight from the distant past, something that we just collectively forgot.

and so you're coming from a place and a direction you didn't expect to be coming from at all. there is also a really strong positivity about the track that is disarming, even when compared to the rest of the album. i think in abstract "Paplu (Love That Moves The Sun)" is about the inevitable evolution and complication of time. the simple squawking voice is unchanging, like a heartbeat - like it's from a much more primitive era and was never built to be transposed in the midst of all this industrial machinery that threatens to bury it or underwrite it. and yet the voice continues to stay afloat, and all these other processes are being lead behind it - they only underscore it or comment in reaction to it. something about the speed of the pace of technological change of the past several centuries is deeply frightening and alienating when you think about how new it is. everything moves so fast, maybe too fast. but the fundamentals of life stay the same. and we forget so much so quickly.

i've been thinking a lot lately of artists like the Iranian-born Ash Koosha who is translating textures and ideas from traditional and classic music (in his case, Iranian classic music) to something more plugged-in, contemporary, and exciting. it reminds me of (famous Hungarian composer) Béla Bartók and his attempts to study Eastern European folk music and translate it to something more ambitious and contemporary. it's allowing a lot of ideas that weren't given the chance to live outside a particular context to grow and evolve - and to also complicate them. as a socialist this concept obviously appeals to me. in the case of Ash Koosha it's also a way to non-Westernize music in a way that's attempting to be both respectful to the traditional music he grew up with and while also still trying to push the envelope as sonic experimentation.

Vessel has no such concrete goals to unearth one particular tradition, and yet the need to translate the old into something new and complicate it feels very deeply a part of this music. considering the original dubstep context of Vessel it's easy to just expect that it'll just be music that's "good for the scene it comes from" but doesn't stand as much outside of that. but that's why it's truly exciting for me to see these kinds of artistic leaps being taken by artists i didn't have much of an expectation for before that happened. who really knows where the artists who are going to push us into a new, more adventurous future of music are? i can only hope those artists are given the resources and encouragement and ability to move in that direction and this doesn't just become the province of artists from London on very hip, gatekeepery record labels owned by rich art kids though (this is a call-out post about Tri Angle Records, i'm sorry). anyway - i can only hope!

Top 25 tracks of the 2010's: #25 Kanye West - All of the Lights

hi folks! this is the beginning of my writing a list of my top 25 musical tracks of the 2010's. this is the first of the list. more will be coming, bit-by-bit, as i write them. think of this as sort of a longer term writing project. i hope you enjoy it!

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#25: Kanye West (featuring Rihanna, Kid Cudi, Elton John, Fergie, Alicia Keys, Drake, and a small army of arrangers and producers) - All Of The Lights

it's pretty much impossible to say anything new or interesting about Kanye West or his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but i'll give it a shot. MBDTF is a maximalist pop spectacle of strings and horns and endless features and tracks that go well over 5 minutes. it launched a decade of enshrining pop stars as larger than life, all-encompassing cultural figures who garnered increasing critical attention and adulation. in other words, it's one of the prime crown jewels of the age of everyone's favorite term: poptimism.

it's also the sign that mainstream rap music was starting to take on the high-concept ideas that had traditionally been the realm of rock music for many decades. by the end of the 00's mainstream rock had been puttering out for awhile as it failed to evolve or transform in interesting ways and continued to recede into the background of pop culture. "indie music" had had a big moment in the mid to late 00's but quickly withered away in popularity and broader cultural attention due to the platforms that empowered those artists dying or artists themselves burning out. enter artists like Kanye West, ready to scoop up some of those ideas and bring it into his own work. i remember many users on the rock music forums i frequented seeing MBDTF and, specifically, Kanye's sampling of King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" as half-hearted attempt to steal clout and cultural signifiers from rock culture. they were angry! it seems like a silly and kind of bigoted response in retrospect (which it kinda is, yeah), but also: maybe there's truth there too! but that's one of the many complicated questions about Kanye West: is he empowering black artists and other rappers through re-contextualizing music and traditions that originally stole from black artists and then mostly kept them out of its history as part of Kanye's ongoing narrative of struggle as a black artist, or his complete absorption of various kinds of other culture into the Kanye West Brand a mostly self-serving enterprise? the answer to both questions is yes.

anyway, if there's such a thing as a "prog rap" album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy would be its poster child. instead of endless guitar noodling we have endless high-profile features and production techniques, enshrining various characters in the ongoing self-immortalizing narratives of famous people as part of their own storybook. Kanye West was a "producer" by a much more traditional definition at one point, but that definition shifted to mean "the guy who brings everyone together into one room". tracks on MBDTF include a massive list of different artist, arrangement, production, and engineering credits in ways that can only draw comparisons to the pipeline of production around Hollywood movies. and really: this is Hollywood maximalism in it's most straightforward and real sense. everything is too big, too long, too much. there's nothing subtle about this album, and that lack of subtlety is as American as... not paying taxes.

Though Kanye West is one of our biggest cultural characters, it's always hard to know with his work how much he  wants you to really like him or identify with him or not. in many ways the character of Kanye in MBDTF plays the Jordan Belfort-like role of someone who thrives in absolute excess and is totally unlikable but exhilarating to be in the orbit of. but also Kanye never really fully commits to the bit - in other ways you might feel sorry with him and the way he's treated by the industry as a black artist... that is until his relationships flames out and he goes on about being the most persecuted human alive, or that he brags about the various ways he's abused women throughout the album. this part sadly is probably way more true to life than anyone wants to believe, and the Gil Scott Heron sampling in "Who Will Survive In America" weakly and abruptly concludes the whole album without really shedding more light on any of these things.

However, most great concept albums never really held together as narratives anyway. Besides: "All of the Lights" is a glorious success as a piece of music. it captures the only Kanye we know as fans: the Kanye as a spectacle, a part of a larger romanticized narrative that we tell ourselves about celebrity and the people who occupy that space. it's an existence that is always under the microscope of popular culture but can never exist outside of it. it's always blown out, coked up, and beautifully burning in the most colorful fashion for everyone to see. even the ugliest and pettiest moments captured by the lyrics are always soundtracked by beautiful blazing horns and luxurious strings that are drawn out in the most romantic, Wagnerian way possible. the beats aggressively skitter ahead like strobing lights. multiple different voices (including Rihanna) interject with the line "turn up the lights in here baby, extra bright - i want y'all to see this". Kid Cudi (Ohio pride!) also appears as a guiding angel and tells Kanye to get his life on track and let stuff go. the video cuts out a verse featuring Fergie as another character who is spinning out of control due to excess. Elton John is also on this song (!!), and is there to futilely attempt to warn Kanye to take a step back from killing himself and his career. there's no half-assing in this life.

celebrity here is a collective unconscious, something universal we need because we need a deeply sensory experience to keep us alive: something overwhelming and awe-inspiring to break us out of our own broken dreams and mundanity. the strobing, seizure-inducing video with its glorious neon text definitely also """''"'reminds""'''"" me of the Gaspar Noé film Enter The Void's famous intro. it's music that *sounds* expensive, and that's because it literally is extremely expensive.

and yet as this full surround-sound Hollywood bliss doesn't seem to reach the Kanye of this song, who appears to be in drugged out haze and paranoid that his girlfriend, who he went to prison for beating up, is sleeping with another guy (which she was, so he beats the guy up). he's weighted down by both money struggles and this child custody battle and his masculinity is humiliated by fighting for custody and having to meet at mundane shopping mall stores like Borders. this is an issue that comes back at multiple points in his lyrics, where he frames family court struggles seem like an ultimate form of oppression on his freedom and masculinity (and is unsurprising given his reactionary affiliations). but also, charitably, he's trying to make a case for the cycle to not repeat itself over again and for his child to not grow up in the conditions he did and make the same mistakes. so is the Kanye West character of this song actually Kanye or just an exaggerated archetype meant to capture the attitudes and struggles of rappers like him as celebrities? that dissonance clearly fuels the album, but is also a question that became more depressing to ask as the decade wore on.

the thing i can't stop thinking about with "All of The Lights" is how sexy and glorious it makes a total flame-out look. Kanye's lines do little to damper the extreme gloss and momentum of the song's arrangement. this kind of celebrity disaster is not something we can ever look away from as a culture. especially not as our favs like Rihanna and Elton John wade into the mess.

but it has to be said that as much as this song captures some sort of deep romanticized collective cultural desire, it's still built on a lie: even the biggest celebrity coke-fueled manias end at some point, and those people have to face the cold light of reality (if they don't die first). of course there's always genuine heartbreak there, and real passion and feelings and real pain that fuels the art and fuels the figures we see. many different generations of artists who came from struggle ultimately become victims of their own success in various different ways that fascinate and disturb us.... and also break our hearts. but also: the music industry loves to romanticize this process, thereby enshrining it as a permanent and unchangeable institution that's woven into the fabric of popular culture. it makes a whole lot of bank off it. and so we end up believing there's nothing else, because there can't be anything else.

years later, the glossy self-destruction of high-concept Kanye West would be embraced by a younger audience of Soundcloud artists with far less irony and self-awareness behind it. and now the gloss seems faded out and all that's left is starker, more nihilistic, and far more brutal to the artists themselves and those around them. there's no Elton John or Rihanna or Kid Cudi guardian angels here to guest feature and tell us that everything's going to be okay. it's just a trail of abused girlfriends and drugs, and young artists who failed to even be close to reaching their full potential before dying in their early 20's.

there's no one more American than Kanye West: an aspirational egotist with big dreams, big talent, a big persecution complex, and a need to have everything all of the time even when it's clearly a danger to himself and everyone around him. and all of us are working for (and living in the shadow of) artists like Kanye West, whether we really want to be or not.