53 LPs

For 53 weeks I listened to one (and only one) album a week, each chosen by a different person, and recorded my experience here.

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This Week on One Week // One Band

If you have any interest in the world of J-pop, this week I'm writing about budding Japanese pop superstar Kyary Pamyu Pamyu at One Week // One Band. She's strange, she's kawaii, and OWOB is all things Kyary all week long.

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Week __: The End

It’s over. The 53 weeks are up, finished, done. I admit to feeling relieved; the last six weeks were rough, my energies and patience spent. Relieved, but this morning feels empty, with no album to muse over, no nonsense to spout. And looking through all the music I haven’t listened to in a year, I find I don’t care if I listen to it or not—the only albums that catch my eye are the select 53, the ones that now feel like close friends, like army buddies, or comrades I got lost in the forest with, lost for a year, barely surviving, each day hanging on. Right now I don’t care if I ever listen to another new album; silence sounds beautiful, golden. The world makes such soft noises. The wind, the water, my own breath, they’re music enough for the moment. And the birds—god, the birds are wonderful. Spring birds singing the lights out.

Along the way I’ve turned parts of this blog into a few essays, and more are in the works. Check these out for a taste:

“We Are What We Here” at Coldfront Magazine.

“Choice and Its Opposite” at Unlikely Stories.

“Small Love Affairs Gone” at Gadfly.

And stay tuned—a new project is in the works, maybe something involving individual tracks, new tracks, hot tracks, cold tracks. None of this full-length album shit. Just tracks.

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Week 53, Day 6: Ready to Lose

I probably skewed my listening of Shaking the Habitual by going with the downloaded version of the album rather than the 2-disc physical copy. The CD versions end on two very different notes, the first with “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized,” the nineteen-minute ambient boiler-room feedback piece, and the second with “Ready to Lose,” which is perhaps one of the most traditionally-constructed songs on the album. It’s where these two tracks are coming from that marks the true split between the realization of the two halves of Shaking.

The title of “Old Dreams” was taken from a magazine article by the Swedish writer Nina Bjork, and refers to the ideas of great thinkers of the past (here in particular Karl Marx, I believe, though can’t confirm that), especially those who have considered deeply how we might best live with each other, how our communities might be constructed to encourage a more collective mindset, a social and economic togetherness rather than the individualism currently reducing our societies and earth to shambles. There is hope in “Old Dreams,” though it is a suspended hope, a hope mired in the void of inaction, of self-perpetuating cycles of greed and want. And yet it might spring free, might manifest, as hope will, as hope must.

If disc 1 closes with an ode to how past voices might preserve our future, the end of disc 2 abandons all hope, for hope is a thing of the past, and the truth is, Shaking seems to saying, we live in a time where we must be “Ready to Lose”: our possessions, our land, our blood histories, ourselves. Hope to preserve existence as we have grown accustomed to charts the quickest way to mass extinction, as Crake might argue.

In this instance abandoning hope is not an act of pessimism, however, for to abandon hope is not to give up, it is simply an admission that we are ready to enter the game, to play and fight to the end, regardless of the outcome. Right now we aren’t even in the vicinity of the ballpark, we are ignoring the fact that the game must be played, that it will be played whether we join in or not. Our fate will be decided without us present on the pitch. It is a simple truth, yet so hard to accept, that in order to win, you have to be ready to lose.

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Week 53, Day 5: A Handful of Elf Pee

“Without You My Life Would Be Boring” is one of the catchiest songs on Shaking the Habitual—its titular refrain has been on loop in my brain pretty much constantly this week, and was the only phrase I could definitely discern, Karin Deijer Andersson’s voice bending and mauling words into indefiniteness.

So, wanting to be able to sing along more, I read the lyrics. I barely got past the first verse. I mean, there’s nothing disgusting or offensive here, just strange: “A handful of elf pee/That’s my soul/Spray it all over/Fill the bowl.” What? So many questions: Elf pee? Why would anyone be holding elf pee in her hand? If the pee is a soul, and an elf is a mystical creature, does that make the soul mystical, or simply smelly and of small amount? Why would a person, save Voldemort, whose humanness we might question, want to spray her soul all over the place? And if the pee/soul is being sprayed all over, what’s filling the bowl? Why is elf pee green?

Yes, elf pee is supposedly green, I learned on the interwebs. I also learned about Nosh, a rebellious, skateboarding Keebler elf who, in a fit of intoxicated midnight cookie baking, perished in a vat full of boiling fudge and elf piss. The piss, I’m guessing, his own. Then there is the Elfshot, the name given to the act of spraying or flinging urine at that person you really really dislike.

Are elves known for spraying pee all over the place? Are they like dogs, constantly marking their territory?

The last line of the song claims that “the piss is territorial,” so maybe so, maybe the soul is territorial, maybe we want to draw boundaries around our tenderest expanses, keep those who want to enter at bay, but that border dispute also excites, territory is conceded, territory is reclaimed, we are shaken from our ruts, time dissolves into a present that is infinite and transient, elves in the garden, elves in the attic.

I pray to avoid the dreaded Elfshot. I pray my soul green enough to fill the bowl. 

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Week 53, Day 4: Languaging

In the thirteen-minute promo “interview” The Knife released before Shaking the Habitual came out, which consists of the siblings speaking over images of swing sets and ravers dancing and ducks in canals and pigeons pecking and stairwells and lots of other mesmerizing and strange moments, Karin Deijer Andersson, speaking about they approached the new album, how they entered the mind-space of this music through books, reading, language, says, “We get our language back through the language of others.”

An idea worth tumbling around the brain for a while, but one I find particularly interesting when applied to the song “Networking.” To network. An action despised by many, abused by many, an action dependent on the exchange of meaningless language that later may accrue value and be cashed in. An action often engaged in online without the utterance of a single syllable.

“Networking” jitters and stutters, a nervous music, an anxious music filled with chattering beats and an insistent pulsing synth line. No words. No words, but a language is present. An infantile language of coos and gurgles and clacks and chirps, a tongue experimenting, discovering sound, developing ability, accruing value.

As children we learn our language through the language of others. We learn networking as play, as survival, as an unconscious data feed, bits and bytes that surge electrically through us in the form of our future selves.

This song is language, a language purposefully forgotten that it might be learned anew, toyed with, reinvigorated, an adult language turned gibberish, an iron heated molten, ready for pouring, stuck in the forge and heated hammering soft, ready to be reshaped. For after Karin Deijer Andersson offers the above wisdom, brother Olof says:

“And we played.” And Karin chimes back in:

“And we played, and we played.”

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Week 53, Day 3: Crake, Oryx

There are two tracks on Shaking the Habitual that clock in under a minute, which makes them barely visible blips on an album that features six tracks that clock in at over nine minutes, out of thirteen total. Both are creeky, groaning, whining, grating drones, the kind of song that, even though it might only be thirty-five seconds long, you can’t wait to have end. “Crake” and “Oryx” might seem toss offs, but their titles point us toward an important thematic reference, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake.

I read Oryx and Crake back when it first came out, so am hazy on the particulars but can fill you in on the generals. The bookimagines a future after a bioengineered apocalypse instigated by Crake, a brilliant geneticist turned mad-scientist who unleashes some sort of death-virus (or something like that) into the world, with the goal of killing off homo sapiens so that his genetically-engineered beings, the “Crakers,” can take over the world, with the rationale that intelligent life is being salvaged from a society plainly bent on destroying itself and the planet. The book is narrated from the viewpoint of Jimmy, Crake’s friend who Crake vaccinated against the virus so he could watch over the Crakers after all the shit goes down.

What’s most interesting about the Crakers is that they have been modified in ways to promote a peaceful existence with each other and with nature. They are herbivores, and are sustained on leaves and grass; they also only have sex during specific breeding times, in order to maintain strict control over their population. Crake’s vision makes you wonder if he is truly a bad person, or if he is the only truly rational person on the planet. Sure, destroying an entire species seems rather extreme, but for someone who grew up playing an online game called Extinctathon, a trivia game about extinct plants and animals, perhaps wiping out a species was a concept that seemed very in the ballpark of possibility. And given the world that they lived in pre-apocalypse, one that seems dominated by time online, spent watching live executions, the “Noodie News,” graphic surgeries, frog squashing and child pornography, mass extinct doesn’t sound so bad.

What’s scariest about Oryx and Crake is how plausible it all seems, how possible. Atwood herself said the book “doesn’t deal with things that haven’t been invented yet,” by which she means the technology is there to make this happen, or is on the path to make this happen, all we need is a few more years and somebody unhinged enough to do it. (The unhinged persons I’m sure will be readily available; the time might be harder to come by.)

So is that the direction The Knife wants us to look with this album? Toward a world one mad scientist away from apocalypse? Or toward the lives we now live, filled with their vices and consumption and narcissism. Is humankind the real mad scientist, conducting a dangerous, irreversible experiment with the very earth we walk on?

No doubt about it. But amidst all the groan and creek of the drone, it’s the length of these songs that gets me. So short. It’s as if The Knife is spelling it out not in hours or minutes but seconds: Hey, they’re shouting, we don’t have much time left to get our shit together.

Shouting, but amidst the roar and buzz of the collapsing culture-hive, will anyone hear?

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Week 53, Day 2: Be People Together

You’ve got to love The Knife. I don’t know a whole lot about them at this point, but how many other groups can you name that have the audacity to include in their liner notes a four-page satirical comic titled “End Extreme Wealth”? The comic takes the form of a UN/World Bank/IMF Power Point, with the presenter inviting different experts to the podium to discuss their roles in the NEW MILLENIUM GOAL of ending extreme wealth by 2015.

The presenters are great. The first “studied people who live in extreme wealth for several years,” including time in a horse polo club and on a yacht, to which the moderator responds, “I can’t believe you actually lived side by side with these people! Were you never scared?” Her project takes the form of building schools for the wealthy in which they could be educated on subjects like “white privilege” and “surplus labor.”

The second presenter’s work is to challenge gender roles in the extremely wealthy, men in particular, since it is men who own a majority chunk of that wealth; his project, “A Small Candle of Hope,” helps them to break their habit of wanting stuff and more stuff, airplanes and helicopters and the like. The third presenter is my favorite. She runs a “micro-snatching” program, in which rich persons’ assets are “snatched” and used in a way to benefit the larger community: a mansion repurposed as living quarters for homeless persons; a private golf course converted into a collective public garden.

The final presenter is in charge of “the biggest and most important project”: planting fast-growing trees around the world’s financial districts and luxury shopping areas, to help stem their expansion and return those areas to forest land; the comic then ends with a group of musicians singing a “We Are the World” spinoff, only this time the call is to “Heal the Rich”: There are people dying! Because of capital accumulation . . .

As amusing as all of this is, its truths hit hard. The comic is not unlike The Knife; Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson have presented themselves to the world as characters from a comic of sorts, appearing in public in masks (Venetian, monsters, birds, Karin’s infamous “melting-face” mask), performing behind backlit screens, guising their humanness behind artistically cartoonish fashions. But with Shaking the Habitual you get the sense that they have turned a corner, appearing in photos and elsewhere bare-faced, unveiled; they are becoming more accessible as people even as their music breaks ever further away from the mainstream (though might be getting the better for it). It’s as if a line was crossed somewhere, and The Knife realized that if we truly are to heal our world, stem economic injustice, curb environmental destruction, then we have to be people together. We have to be able to see each other. No more hiding behind masks. No more hiding behind money. 

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Week 53, Day 1: "Shaking the Habitual" by The Knife: shaken

  Shaking the Habitual by The Knife

Tracklist: 1. A Tooth for an Eye 2. Full of Fire 3. A Cherry On Top 4. Without You My Life Would Be Boring 5. Wrap Your Arms Around Me 6. Crake 7. Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized 8. Raging Lung 9. Networking 10. Oryx 11. Stay Out Here 12. Fracking Fluid Injection 13. Ready to Lose

Chosen by: me, because it’s been a year since I got to pick, and it’s about time.

Damn. It’s the last week the project. How did that happen already? After a full year of other people’s music, I decided to choose the album for this tacked on week myself. Why exactly I picked The Knife, I’m not sure. Maybe I got caught up in the intrigue—it’s been seven years since their last release, and brother/sister duo is notoriously creepy and cryptic—who can pass on creepy and cryptic? But the real reason I chose this one, is I liked the album title. Shaking the Habitual felt like a perfect closer for this project, since shaking myself out of listening habits was the driving purpose behind it. After 52 weeks of shaking, I figured one last teeth-chattering, bone-blasting, muscle-mashing round couldn’t hurt.

I knew a few songs from Silent Shout, the album which catapulted The Knife to some degree of fame, but Silent Shout in no way prepared me for Shaking the Habitual. They weren’t joking. This album is strange. But good strange. Compellingly strange. Make-you-think strange. And this album will make you think, The Knife want to make sure of that. Just look at the track listing: we’ve got references to a Margaret Atwood (“Oryx” and “Crake”); corporate/environmental conflict (“Fracking Fluid Injection”); and ethical quandaries (“A Tooth for an Eye”). Throw in a comic in the liner notes about economic justice, lyrics about the falling Euro, and you can’t help but feel an attempt is being made to jar you into paying attention.

Then the music starts, and all that political hoo-hah is forgotten. Who else does industrial tribal experimental goth dance music like The Knife? Nobody, that’s who. Because when not engaged in crafting nineteen-minute ambient dreamscapes from sounds recorded in a boiler room, this stuff makes you move. But be warned: this album will move your body in unpredictable ways. Like the music, it will try to go in four directions at once, directions that all feel like the right direction, and while you’re wondering what is going on your body is just doing its thing, and after a few minutes you stop paying attention and let the music shake you something crazy.

“A Tooth for an Eye” got me moving in the living room, dragged me through the dining room and into the kitchen, where “Full of Fire” absolutely destroyed me next to the refrigerator. And that was only track 2.

Did I mention that Shaking the Habitual is 96 minutes long? Lordy. This week might shake me to pieces. 

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Week 52, Day 6: Moved and Moving

On Jeffrey Martin’s webpage there is a Q&A forum that at the moment leads off with this exchange:

Q: Who is your musical inspiration?

A: I don't know. That's so broad. My inspirations change all the time. I just know that when something moves me it moves me, and then I want to make things that move.

I sort of understand Martin’s shying away from giving a concrete answer here. Whenever someone asks me what writers have influenced me, a tremendous internal groan wells up inside. Every book I’ve ever read, would be the honest answer, but then the logical response to such an answer would be, Well, what books have you read? which is unanswerable. And how then to make the asker understand that all those books have lost their individuality within me, have become chapters in the great book of a reading life, some more memorable than others, but all necessary to the plot, the character development, the philosophy. So even though it feels like Martin is avoiding the question, his answer feels truer than simply listing three or four musicians or bands, instead focusing on the movement of music within his body and emotional vessel, the feeling of music as something that moves, as something one is moved by, shifted in body or consciousness or time. Displaced. Taken to a place other than where you are, given a doubled self, a reconfigured existence.

Maybe through music Martin’s perfected that trick all of us desire, to be two places at once, because the next Q&A entry is:

Q: Were you in Sheridan, OR yesterday?

A: nope

but I’m not sure I believe you anymore, Jeffrey. I think you might have been there, even if you didn’t realize it, moved and moving your way through, a voice in the air, a physical flicker whose presence was just enough to alter the time/space perception of the people of Sheridan, OR, who now dream in melodramatic fits scored by your sad choruses.

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Week 52, Day 5: Song In My Head

Jeffrey Martin’s “Song In My Head” got me thinking about the songs that most lodged themselves in my brain over the course of this project, the ones that I loved and hated in equal measure, loved because they were great songs and hated because they wouldn’t leave me alone. You know how it is, when a song keeps spinning through your head until you want to scream in frustration, only you’d be screaming at yourself and there’s no point in doing that, so you make up stupid games to try and make it go away, listen to the song again, listen to other really catchy songs, pinch yourself super hard, etc. Anyways, here’s a top ten list (in no particular order) of my favorite songs that drove me crazy from the 51 albums I’ve finished:

“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin: that voice. That Voice!

“Betty Wang” by Hospitality: cute and rough and perfectly poppy.

“Neighbor Song” by Lake Street Dive: both the original and the reprise. Yes.

“Thinkin Bout You” by Frank Ocean: falsetto for the Heavens.

“Manchester” by Kishi Bashi: “I haven’t felt this alive in a long time.”

“Christmas Unicorn” by Sufjan Stevens: unicorns + Santa: enough said.

“Tsukema Tsukeru” by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: putting on my falsies.

“Radio” by Lana Del Rey: vitamins, fame, and dreams on the airwaves

“Primera Estralla” by Javiera Mena: dance-anthem lullaby

“Life’s a Bitch” by Nas: if the man says so, it is.

There are more, but those were some of the most insidious, the ones that will still take my brain over at the slightest prodding. When this project is over I’ll go back and listen to them again and wonder what it was about them that drove me so crazy, then they’ll get stuck in my head again and drive me crazy all over again, and I’ll love and hate every second of it, because these days going crazy is my jam.

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Week 52, Day 4: Don't Go Chasing . . .

There’s a moment on Martin’s song “Old Good Friend,” right at the beginning of the chorus, when he sings “Don’t go chasing . . .” in such a way that I was sure he was going to follow it up with “waterfalls,” which, if he had, might have been one the most awesome moments in folk music ever. To bust out a TLC reference right there would have been perfect, especially as “Old Good Friend” and TLC’s “Waterfalls” have the same subject matter, to keep it locked down, don’t go searching out trouble, because trouble’s going to lick your ass, if you let it.

When I think of “Waterfalls” it’s the video that immediately comes to mind, the iconic image of Chili, T-Boz and Left Eye dancing on the water, Left Eye all hard and baby-faced, T-Boz looking (and sounding) like she could pound you into the ground at a moment’s notice, and Chili just being damn gorgeous. After watching the video and listening to Martin’s song again, it’s almost like he wrote it after watching the video; the lyrics are oddly in sync with the images of TLC’s verse narratives.

There wouldn’t have been anything too strange about Martin alluding to “Waterfalls”; it seems every way you turn these days some folk or folk-pop singer is covering a hip-hop or R&B track. Last summer I tagged along to a Shawn Colvin show, and for her encore she did a solo acoustic version of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” And just the other week I tagged along to a solo performance by Tylan (of the group Girlyman), and for her encore she sang Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.” I wasn’t expecting either, and both times had a kind of déjà vu experience, knowing I knew the song but not knowing the song, not in this form, this shape, this sound. And when they finally clicked it was like running into an old good friend with a radical new haircut, or face tattoo, or 50 pounds lighter, strange but good but strange, like she was living a life outside of her life, like she wasn’t the person I knew, or thought I knew, but knowing she was still, really, that person, that song, she was the same song she always had been.

So I was a bit disappointed that Martin didn’t take on TLC. It would have been even better than an outright cover, just a sly reference dropped into a song unlike anything TLC ever sang, just a shout out to that old good friend, that song. Despite TLC’s warning to not go hunting waterfalls, that’s one waterfall I wish Martin would have chased down.  

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Week 52, Day 3: Underthrust

“Livin’ in the city feels like crying in the rain / Until you learn how to scream everybody looks the same”

go the opening lines of Gold in the Water’s “Stolen From Them,” great opening lines for an album, most any album, could be folk could be hip-hop could be country, old-school country or pop-school country, could be jazz could be lounge, could be everybody, and it’s the “everybody” in that second line that gets me, because what is everybody doing, exactly, is everybody a static body being viewed by the speaker, “looks” meaning appearance, and the screaming signifies the shift in the narrator’s perception of the vast everybody, breaking open the prison of self-absorption in order to view humanity not as a hulking mass but as a billion brilliant shards, those things we call people, the city full of them, inescapable people all wearing the same face, all wearing the same shoes, all eating the same banana for breakfast, and our narrator feels so unique, so special,

so special but no one sees him, because “looks” is actually a verb, everybody looks the same, everybody sees with the same eyes, that is, nobody sees you unless you scream yourself into existence, fill your lungs and let go a full-on caterwaul direct in everybody’s ear-hole, shout your presence, scream your being, otherwise your tears will always be confused with the rain, no one will wrap arms around the chasm of your want, no one will applaud your smallness, no one will hear

your soft sad songs that resemble a scream with the volume turned way low, a scream masquerading as a lullaby, a strange kind of scream that, once everybody gleans its existence, once everybody comprehends this quiet underthrust, is impossible for them to ignore.

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Week 52, Day 2: Mouse Rat Rocks!

Jeffrey Martin is one of those guys who doesn’t look like you expect him to, especially if you first see him after hearing a few of his songs. The music paints a picture of a scrawny guy, sunken cheeks, hollow eyes half-hidden behind a pair of thick black-framed glasses, untucked dress shirt or hipster t-shirt over his long arms, long fingers flashing atop guitar strings, the intellectual-gone-wild folksinger just working for his whiskey.

In truth Martin resembles a lumberjack more than folk-poet, burly and bearded and often dressed in flannel. He’s the shaggy woodsman who you wouldn’t be surprised to find tearing raw meat from a coyote carcass with his teeth on the porch of his ramshackle cabin deep in the forest; he’s civilized enough to be embarrassed, but what you are doing at his cabin is the real question. You shouldn’t have come here. You really shouldn’t have come here.

He actually reminds me a lot of Andy Dwyer, the fictional character on the sitcom Parks and Recreation played by Chris Pratt. Andy, a frustratingly lovable doofus, is also a musician, and fronts the band with the fantastic name, Mouse Rat. One of Mouse Rat’s defining characteristics, other than general badness, is that it gets a name change seemingly every other day, and has evolved through the following incarnations: A.D. and the D Bags, The Andy Andy Andies, Andy Dwyer Experience, Angelsnack, Crackfinger, Death of a Scam Artist, Department of Homeland Obscurity, Everything Rhymers with Orange, Fiveskin, Flames for Flames, Fourskin, Hand Grill Suicide, Jet Black Pope, Just the Tip, Malice In Chains, Muscle Confusion, Ninjadick, Nothing Rhymes with Blorange, Nothing Rhymes with Orange, Penis Pendulum, Possum Pendulum, Punch Face Champions, Puppy Pendulum, Rad Wagon, Razordick, Teddy Bear Suicide, Threeskin, Two Doors Down, Scarecrow Boat, and maybe a few others, who knows. Muscle Confusion: I would totally go see those guys.

Martin could benefit from a dose of Andy Dwyer’s goofiness; Gold In the Water is at moments too earnest, too searching, Though I long for touch of levity, the album benefits from brevity—at twenty-seven minutes it feels plenty long, perfectly short. Jeffrey Martin is the punk rocker of the folk world; the music doesn’t sound punk, but the punk ethos is there: intense, brief, rough on the outside, tender-hearted at its core, and who gives a damn we’re all gonna die.   

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Week 52, Day 1: "Gold In the Water" by Jeffrey Martin: Fragile Creature

Gold in the Water by Jeffrey Martin

Tracklist: 1. Stolen from Them 2. Why Can’t I 3. Gold in the Water 4. Stones 5. Change 6. Old Good Friend 7. Song in My Head 8. Winter Place 9. Hide

Chosen by: Tabitha Gingerich, nurse

Jeffrey Martin plays some stripped-down, rainy-day music. These nine songs feature just the man and his finger-picked guitar, and if it is raining outside (like it is right now, beating on the metal roof of my house in this pre-dawn dark) and you’re maybe feeling a twinge of malcontent, watch out, because these bad boys might make you feel like hell. I wouldn’t say they’re sad songs, but all are imbibed with an existential ache wide and deep enough you can’t help but wonder if Martin wrote these songs himself, or if he mucked them out of the Swamps of Sadness before those Fantasian wetlands sapped him of will and sucked him into their depths, before the Nothing arrived and erased him with its black void.

I’ve never understood why music like this makes me feel happy. Hanging out with friends I used to put on most sad-sweet stuff (Nick Drake, Elliot Smith), and everyone would groan about what a mood killer it was, so depressing, and I’d be loving it, my neck bobbing like the funkiest groove on earth was cutting up the speakers. Maybe I was just suffering some teenage hormonal imbalance, but the plaintive poetry of that music, its haunting solitude opened up a place of joy inside of me. Still does, some days.

What moves us—who understands that science? Why the antennae gets tuned to the station it does, why some voices cut through clear as a desert day and others blank in the static, to divine that is to startle the self—fragile creature, it darts from view. Better to watch from a distance, near enough to see, far enough for mystery.

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Week 51, Day 6: Kids, Time, Yellow Paper

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Dan. Dan from Colorado who I met in the wooded hills outside of N.Y. City. Dan with his portable CD player and headphones always spinning Tupac, Tribe, Nas too, probably. Handsome Dan who vibed older than his years, older than me he could buy drinks legally, hooked up with a girl named Julie. Dan who composed poetry, long hip-hop influenced pieces that spun the city into a web of shadowed snapshots, arachnid always a strand or two away, waiting on its prey.

Dan and I shared a cabin with six kids. Kids from Queensbridge, from the Bronx. Kids hoping to worm their way out of the rotten apple. Kids’d be grown men now, if they made this far. I think of Yusef, all bald cranium and skeletal frame, tough little Yusef who one evening tucked into bed told us all how his Dad was in prison for dealing crack and broke down in tears, tears that shocked us all, so strange in these kids quick with the fists and tight with the feelings. At home tears would likely get them an ass whupping.

I think of the twins, names forgotten, who would tell us crazy versions of the Three Little Pigs, or Little Bo Peep, or any other tales they knew. We’d drop a pretend quarter in one of their ears and off they would go: Once upon a time there were three pigs and mean old wolf. The pigs were soooooo fat . . . I recall one version of the story ending with the wolf eating all three pigs and getting so fat himself that he floated into the middle of a lake and got stuck there, eventually turning into an island where one day a farmer built a farm and kept his pigs there. (An intriguing twist, though I was confused about what kind of world this was, where one group of pigs builds houses and lives freely, and another is farmed and fattened, destined for the butcher’s block.)

Dan who wrote poems. He read one of them for us, his soft voice hard-edged and brittle while he recited the long lines, spooled out the scene, streetlamps and sidewalk cracks, forest crickets his accompaniment, kids drifting off to dreams, Dan’s headlamp the only visible light.

At summer’s end he gave me one of his poems, handwritten in blue ink on three sheets of yellow legal-pad paper. I read it on the bus home, folded the papers together and tucked them in my bag. A decade ago—could have been last week. Time’s illmatic, Nas would say. What to do with this life, the way it flows—do it like Nas, like when at the beginning of “N.Y. State of Mind” he mumbles “I don’t know how to start this shit,” then goes at with all he's got.  

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Week 51, Day 5: Poet

I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading lyrics, as I have with Illmatic’s. Shit, I can’t remember the last time I so enjoyed reading “poetry,” even the kind you find in a book. It’s one thing to enjoy listening to rap— when you’ve got the beat, the samples, the rhythmicized vocalizations to guide you—and a whole other story when a rap hold its own on the page, solo. Nas just kills it both ways, with the tongue and the pen.

Take the first stanza from “Memory Lane (Sittin In Da Park).” Hell, I’ll just quote it in full:

I rap for listeners, blunt heads, fly ladies and prisoners Henessey holders and old school niggas, then I be dissin' a Unofficial that smoke woolie thai I dropped out of Kooley High, gassed up by a coke head cutie pie Jungle survivor, fuck who's the liver My man put the battery in my back, a difference from Energizer Sentence begins indented, with formality My duration's infinite, money wise or physiology Poetry, that's a part of me, retardedly bop I drop the ancient manifested hip-hop, straight off the block

These ten lines are brilliant—from the couplets cut through with thick internal rhymes to the metrics that dance in and around iambic pentameter; from the language that slips from street slang to cultural reference to holy incantation to self-referentiality and back in the blink of an eye; from recognition of traditions past to claiming said traditions as one’s own in contemporary form—here a Poet announces himself in a sort of holy trinity, as beholden to his people, to God, and, most of all, to his medium, the word.  

[53lps]

Week 51, Day 4: It Ain't Hard to Tell

Oo, I know that song, who sings that one, it’s, Michael Jackson, that’s right, it’s that pretty little synth line from “Human Nature,” great fucking song, but what about the chorus break, that trumpet might be from, no, it’s not that, or maybe from, nope, not that either. Damn, it’s hard to tell.

I listened to “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” five or six times in a row, like Jay-Z and Kanye running through “Niggas In Paris” nine times at concert’s end, it getting better each time, but apart from the MJ sample I couldn’t pick out anything else familiar. The intro/chorus is especially confusing—the cascading “da-da-da-da” undercut with the raw wail of a saxophone riff, and behind all that somebody screaming “yeah!” like James Brown on steroids. I had the thought that it might all be Michael Jackson, but that lasted as long as clean clothes on a toddler—no way were all those pieces from Michael. But who? Shit. I couldn’t tell.

So I looked it up. Turns out “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” features a crapload of samples. Deep breath: “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson; “N.T.” by Kool & the Gang; “Long Red” by Mountain; “Why Can’t People Be Colors Too?” by Whatnauts; “Slow Dance” by Stanley Clarke; “What Do You Want From Me Woman” by The Blue Jays; “Sorcerer of Isis” by Power of Zeus. That’s some Girl Talk kind of sampling going on, the kind of song list you look at and think No way all those are going to fit together, but then they do, and it’s insanely perfect, recognizable and mysterious and danceable and sonically adventurous—guess producer Large Professor got his name for a reason.

It’s a bit inhuman, all of it together, the way it grinds and slides and stutters and flows, then throw Nas’ rhythmic tautness into the mix and it turns into some next-level shit, some you-just-saved-the-princess-secret-level shit. And of course Nas himself nails it in the first verse, throwing down the boast that he’s “half man, half amazing.” It ain’t hard to tell.