All in Music
The release of Apple’s fifth album could not be more timely. The scourge of the ongoing pandemic, the depressing lockdown, and the augmenting repression by populist fascists around the world, Fetch The Bolt Cutters accompanies us to face the brutal realities of these strange times with a refreshing tenderness—the tenderness of serious artistry and the guiding presence of feminine endurance.
All of the party anxiety, all the introversion, all the desperate desire to appear cool, it just goes out the window. And we almost certainly do not look cool to anyone witnessing this. But there is a freedom in not caring at all what the rest of the world thinks of you. It’s a feeling that I aspire to daily, but rarely achieve.
That was what I wanted. I loathed melodrama. I wanted my writing to be about normal, boring people doing normal, boring things. So I wrote stories about people making relationship decisions that seem inconsequential but actually meant everything; about an unhappy couple having a daylong fight; about a little boy who wants to take a ride in his aunt’s fancy car.
At the end of the day, no song, or book, or poem, will make covid understandable. We can never really ascribe meaning to tragedy that occurs without explanation and without reason.
For years after the Yardbirds he appeared to be a frustrated musician. This brought back recollections of the Yardbirds in Antoniono’s 1966 movie Blow Up where Beck’s Vox amp keeps feeding back, so he slams the head of his guitar against it, again and again, and then throw the guitar to the stage and destroys it with his hands and feet.
There’s a story being told in “True Faith” about the past, the present, and the future. It’s not quite clear what the story is, it’s certainly not linear, but the song evokes an unhappy past, a sudden awareness of now, and an ambivalence about tomorrow.
Their bows held correctly (almost), their fingers wiggling their vibratos to beat the band, and their faces showing just the correct amount of emotional ecstasy. However, when the sound reached my ears, I literally started laughing aloud. It was the cheesy sound of a keyboard synthesizer. It was like being promised expensive dark chocolate chips only to discover they were really carob chips.
Two twisted souls dressed up as divine lovers who complete each other without knowing it, and yet they keep their emotions back because they cannot bear to admit their co-dependence. Is it cultural differences that sacrifice our love in the end? Is it the scorn that one is invited to inflict upon the other person?
Given the butterfly effect of time and history, it is not a stretch to say that if LMFAO had not announced their indefinite hiatus, Donald Trump may never have been elected president. The COVID-19 pandemic may never have settled its jaws over our great nation. We could honestly be, rather than working from home in our sweatpants, out on the dance floor, shuffling to whatever genius music LMFAO released in this alternate timeline.
The issue at hand is that those who object to this track and its accompanying video cannot look past the mythology of the female body’s fertile soil. With ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, the Prodigy created a work of satire that exudes a belief system that opposes or blinds those who wrongly interpret its perception, whether lyrically or visually.
In many ways, Discovery was an album meant for people like me, fascinated with life outside my small rural town, willing to imagine fantasy worlds and ready to taste all that music had to offer, not just rock sounds but something dancier, sexier, more animal like disco, and at the same time, more robotic and artificial.
I don’t know why my first thought when someone died was about something I did. I don’t know how to handle death. Maybe trying to find meaning and comfort in associating things that seem unrelated, but personally resonate, makes sense. Maybe that’s all I’m doing now.
As the country was swept into a national fervor and roughly ⅔ of the country supported a full invasion of Iraq the generation infamous for not doing anything was now literally going to war and the mainstream media was ready to turn it into a reality tv show.
Everywhere there are teens dressed in KISS costumes holding their tickets and getting into lines. Lines are the only reality here and they rule everything and everywhere. If you are not already in a line, you’re walking to get into a line.
I discovered Rush when he went to the hospital. Songs like “Marathon,” “Closer to the Heart” and “Prime Mover” found space in my A-List Playlist, along with “Limelight” (all-time fave), “Subdivisions,” “Tom Sawyer.” If you know the first few seconds of any of these, then you know. You know what good music is and maybe you’ll rejoice with me when you hear them.
“Boys like girls,” he read out loud from the driver’s seat of his Chevy Impala as we sat together in the lot at Evergreen Park, waiting for my little brother to wrap up an activity like a baseball practice or a friend’s birthday party in the pavilion. “Are these boys who are attracted to girls or boys who are similar to girls?”
Earlier societies could look both ways to escape the suffocating present — they could enjoy an idealized past but also imagine and play with what an idealized future might look like. It was fantasy but somewhat healthy, perhaps necessary and very human. We do not get that option. We can only mine the past.
Our picks for Best Music of 2018