Reading

A little while ago, the podcast Exploration Live hosted their second book club (the first of which was Pride and Prejudice last summer). This time around, the book of choice was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1970). The title had been on my to-read list for some time, and this was the push I needed to finally take the plunge.

Housekeeping has a reputation that precedes it; there is very little I could say here to fittingly underscore its well-documented power. It is a novel that transmits you to a dream state and often feels more poetic than prose. Robinson takes you out of the scene sometimes violently with her poetic interjections that often hit like a stake to the heart. There is grief, and memory, and family which all cut right to my core. And it is full of passages like this that make you want to put the pen down for good:

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

Since finishing the book, it’s only grown on me.

Also, the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Specifically “Romance” and “Nina’s Reply”

Watching

Like many people of a certain age (I am 30 now…) I have been dabbling in the joy of bird watching for a little while now. I am no expert, and hardly even a hobbyist. But, as many have noted throughout history in art of all kinds, birds kind of fucking rule. It’s remarkably easy to get lost just watching the little guys and learning a new species or recognizing a new call scratches the brain in a particularly satisfying way.

So, naturally, the algorithm that rules us all presented me with Owen Reiser’s Listers on YouTube. Listers is an independently-made immersive documentary that follows Reiser and his brother as they spend a year diving as deeply into birdwatching as they possibly can. The Reisers are amateurs like me, who got into birdwatching simply because they have eyes and hearts. They are also hockey boys™ to their core. Their humor, language, and general unseriousness about everything is remarkably charming, especially when the facade fades away and they find themselves, against all odds, genuinely giving a shit.

For all of the fun and goofiness of the doc, its also worth noting that Reiser has a great sense of the right questions to ask. He interrogates the subject of birdwatching and its community by uncovering the good, the bad, and the ugly of the hobby and its most extreme hobbyists. He also fills the two-hour doc with some truly beautiful nature photography. It’s very easy to be intimidated by new hobbies, and too often they become competitive pursuits that take us away from the simple pleasures they provide in the first place. Listers is a good reminder that the only reason you need to do anything is simply that you think it might be cool.

P.S. Why is Listers not on Letterboxd? I have been able to log some truly dumb stuff on that app. Why won’t they let me tell the world about this wonderful little movie?

Also: The Drama, which I hilariously saw with my fiance the night before we got engaged.

Listening

I am saving much of the music I’ve been listening to recently for longer pieces down the line. So, I will instead recommend an artist that I’m just now diving into that I don’t think I could ever find the words to write about. Please acquaint yourself with the wonderful Swamp Dogg if you have not had the pleasure:

Shot:

Chaser:

Also: “Plastic Bag” by X-Ray Spex

Talk soon!!

There are certain albums that are inextricably connected to the memory of an artist’s death. Oftentimes these are posthumous releases after particularly surprising and tragic deaths, as in the case of both Tupac with The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996) and The Notorious B.I.G. with Life After Death (1997). Sometimes, a “death album”, as I’ll term it, becomes such because the tragedy comes after its release, and the work is then a shrine to lost potential, like in the case of Jeff Buckley’s Grace (1994) or Nick Drake’s Pink Moon (1972). And while these works can be poignant, hinting at the tragedy to come, they weren’t made knowing death was near (even if some suspected).

There are, of course, a few exceptions. Johnny Cash recorded his entire series of American records in the 90s and 2000s knowing that it would be his final chapter. J Dilla, even more timely, released the monumental album Donuts (2006) just three days before he died of a cardiac arrest brought on by his illness. And again, ten years ago, David Bowie released his final album just two days before his own demise, well aware it was coming.

Bowie’s career was defined by mutations, and that continued right up until the end. The album he released two days before his death (on his 69th birthday), Blackstar, is a notable artistic recalibration in a career full of artistic recalibrations. There are a few remnants of his prior album – 2013’s The Next Day – in Blackstar’s instrumentation; but never had Bowie committed so thoroughly to the experimental jazz sound that defines his last album. Beyond just the new sonic texture Bowie was exploring, Blackstar announces itself as a darker, stranger, more ethereal album than Bowie had put out in decades, starting from the very first track.

The album kicks off with the eponymous track (stylized “★”), a 10-minute, three act story that sees Bowie playing different characters, marked by different voices, accompanied by discordant jazz drums and horns in the first half, and a bass and strings-heavy funk instrumental in the second half. The atmosphere of the song is otherworldly, and its lyrics make allusions to, among other things, Nordic mythology, occultism, and the fall of Lucifer. It is, obviously, dense. The song leaves itself open to vast interpretations; but fans have largely agreed on a read that tells the story of a man in conversation with the angel of death as he’s transitioning to the afterlife.

What’s less agreed upon is the meaning of the “black star” that the album and song refer to again and again. In gravitational theory, a black star is like a black hole, but it has no event horizon. Meaning, in overly simplistic terms, that though a star has died, its light has not vanished (as it would in a black hole). Metaphorically, this aligns with Blackstar as Bowie’s “death” album – the final remnants of a body of work that will long outlive him. There are lyrics in the song that lend themself to this clean interpretation as well: “something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter and stepped aside”; “how many times does an angel fall?”

Yet, the definition we get more directly in the song is more opaque. The repetitive backing vocals that persist through the second half of the song (sung by Bowie in a strained, alien-like voice) define the concept of a black star solely through negation:

I’m a blackstar

I’m not a gangster

I’m a blackstar

I’m not a filmstar

I’m a blackstar

I’m not a popstar

I’m a blackstar

I’m not a marvel star

The non-narrative point Bowie seems to be making, addressing the audience directly, is that he (and perhaps all people) are defined by the fact that they can’t be defined. It’s a mode of deception inherent to Bowie’s oeuvre. He enjoyed his unknowability, so it makes sense that he found truth in the idea of the gravitational black star: you can only have a theory of what someone is, never an understanding. In a career composed of many many masks, it’s a reminder that none of them quite told the real story.

The album is full of lyrics and full tracks that can be parsed for Bowie’s thoughts on his own demise. “Dollar Days”, the penultimate track on the album, feels again like Bowie speaking directly to his audience, offering a farewell, saying, “I’m falling down/Don’t believe for just one second I’m forgetting you” and ending with a repetitive refrain of “I’m trying to, I’m dying to.” Blackstar ends with “I Can’t Give Everything” away, another song in which Bowie takes time to address the audience directly, and one that now lives on as his very final statement. In the song’s lyrics, Bowie repeats the song’s title again and again “I can’t give everything away,” in a tone both reflective and sorrowful. Here, it’s easy to read this as Bowie bemoaning his inability to get all he needs out before his death, and perhaps, once again, playing the deceiver. “I can’t give everything away,” he says, refusing to give a straight answer to any of his work, leaving it for us to make sense of after he’s gone.

The discourse at the time of the album’s release was dominated, unavoidably, by Bowie’s illness and death, especially present on the lyrics of “★”, “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away”. In retrospect, however, for all of its weight, Blackstar feels less novel than it did at first. Many of the themes that felt distinctly tied to Bowie’s own journey toward death, are actually just the final sentence on a nearly career-long dialogue. The parallels can be found in yet another 10-minute intro track.

Forty years before Blackstar, Bowie released Station to Station, an album that began another, and perhaps the most important, artistic shift in his career. Like Blackstar, Station to Station begins with a 10-minute, genre bending, disorienting intro track. It was Bowie announcing a new era. Having fully transitioned from his glam-rock of the early 70s, Bowie released a comparatively uninspired record Young Americans in 1975 which, despite its hits, feels like Bowie merely imitating the sounds that inspired him, instead of finding himself in them. He himself referred to the record as “plastic soul” and later dismissed it as “the phoniest R&B I’ve ever heard.”

Station to Station was a far more actualized record. Bowie maintained some of the soul and funk of his previous record, but blended it with krautrock, electronic music, and his rock roots to create a true new path forward. Over the length of the song, Bowie transitions from a haunting, almost marching piano riff, mixed with bevy of sounds both musical and mechanical, to a more recognizable Bowie sound of rock and soul, albeit a panicked one, building to a pleading crescendo in which he repeats a refrain of “it’s too late - to be grateful/it’s too late - to be late again/it’s too late - to be hateful” again and again and again. The experimentation that defined Station to Station was inspired by, to that point, the darkest point in Bowie’s life. On that same opening track he explicitly says, multiple times, “it’s not the side-effects of the cocaine/I’m thinking that it must be love!” Bowie’s drug habit had reached its own desperate crescendo.

Bowie was living in Los Angeles while recording Station to Station and filming the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie plays an alien who has come to Earth and, notably, can not die. During this period he became intensely isolated, confining himself to his room for days, doing drugs, writing music, and having full fledged mental breakdowns. At its worst, Bowie’s diet consisted entirely of red and green peppers, milk, and cocaine for extended periods. He claimed to have hallucinations of bodies falling outside of his window and believed the Rolling Stones were sending him hidden messages in their music. He often went three or more days without sleeping. He was meant to record the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth; but, weighing just 80 pounds and high out of his mind, he collapsed in the studio during the Station to Station sessions. Either due to burnout, lack of creative control, or a scrambled psyche, he never finished the film’s score.

What followed the tumultuous end of the Station to Station phase of his career became the fundamental artistic shift in Bowie’s career. He left Los Angeles (a city he later referred to as “the most vile piss-pot in the world” and said it should be “wiped off the face of the Earth,”) and moved, first to France and then West Berlin with Iggy Pop of the Stooges. Both men were seeking isolation in a new place in an effort to kick the drug habits that they believed to be killing them.

Over the next three years, Bowie released three albums: Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), and Lodger (1979) in a run that is now famously known as “The Berlin Trilogy.” Even though Low was mostly recorded in France and Lodger was mostly recorded in Switzerland, it is widely understood that the three albums came out of Bowie’s recovery period in Berlin, while he was quite literally saving his own life. Through collaboration with Iggy Pop and Brian Eno during his time in Europe, Bowie threw away the Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke personas of his previous eras and re-introduced the world to David Bowie as himself, with a distinctly different energy and sound. While Station to Station contains the seeds of some of what was to come from Bowie’s music, the Berlin Trilogy is fully immersed in Bowie’s krautrock and ambient influences. The sounds are more varied, the structures more experimental, and the energy of the albums markedly different from the barely-contained psychosis of Station to Station. It is as if, song by song, album by album, you can sense Bowie reconstructing his mind and choosing a path forward as you work through each record. This doesn’t just reveal itself through Bowie’s tone, but explicitly in the lyrics of all three albums as well.

The “real” Bowie, crying for help, was able to break through the veneer of the Thin White Duke character that he sang as on Station to Station. Notably, “Word on a Wing”, the album’s third track, finds Bowie in conversation with God (a pretty un-Bowie thing to do at that point in his career). On that track, he says the following:

Just because I believe don’t mean I don’t think as well

Don’t have to question everything in Heaven or Hell

Lord, I kneel and offer you my word on a wing

And I’m trying hard to fit into your scheme of things

It’s safer than a strange land, but I still care for myself

And I don’t stand in my own light

Clearly, Bowie was aware, even if just subconsciously, that his life was unsustainable. There was a real sense of life and death in Bowie’s music on Station to Station, but only if you dig for it. In the Berlin trilogy, with no personas to hide behind, it became unavoidable.

The first of those albums, Low, is a work clearly composed in the early days of recovery. As he returns to his right state of mind, we follow his path, reliving the worst of it, fighting through. On “Always Crashing in the Same Car” Bowie recounts a real incident from the height of his addiction in which he rammed his car repeatedly into a drug dealer’s car, then drove in circles for hours in an underground garage. On three different tracks he refers to isolating himself in his room. One of these is “Sound and Vision” – one of Bowie’s most famous songs, and the namesake of this Substack. He sings:

Pale blinds drawn all day

Nothing to read, nothing to say

Blue, blue

I will sit right down

Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Those lyrics have been enough to induce tears from me in the past. In my mind’s eye, Bowie was a man realizing how close death was, working to reclaim his mind, waiting for the joy of seeing the world clearly again. Low ends with five straight tracks that are purely instrumentals. The last of them, “Subterraneans” is a track Bowie finished for the score of The Man Who Fell to Earth – a final goodbye to that tumultuous period and what was lost.

“Heroes” features the song “Blackout” which can easily be understood as a song about Bowie’s repeated collapses during the worst of his drug use as he begs in the song “get me to a doctor!” and later repeats, “get me on my feet, get me off the street” as the song fades out. The last of the trilogy, Lodger, features another personal favorite Bowie track, “Move On”, in which Bowie reflects on his need to do as the title suggests and seek new experiences in new places, perhaps as a way to satiate his curiosity and creativity, perhaps as a way to protect himself from his worst habits. A later track, “Look Back in Anger” paints a picture of an angel visiting Bowie (recalling shades of “Word on a Wing”), telling him “it’s time we should be going.” Through all three albums, and even with Station to Station as a prelude, Bowie was working through a relationship with death that he very suddenly needed to consider.

The point being, for all of the death and philosophizing on Blackstar, Bowie had been here before. He’d looked over the edge into the abyss 40 years prior and, perhaps subconsciously, he re-accessed that part of his mind when it came time to peer into it again. There is the major sonic and tonal shift, and the opaque, death-ridden lyrics connecting Blackstar to the Berlin trilogy in Bowie’s discography. There is a feeling that Bowie is reconnecting with his old self, recognizing similar feelings and being drawn back to that time; and the connection is not always merely implicit but, at times, explicit. The aforementioned closing track on Blackstar, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” opens with a sample taken directly off of Low (the song “New Career in a New Town”). Here, there is no argument needed. Bowie himself creates the bridge between the two albums, the two eras, and the two states of mind.

Blackstar is Bowie’s death record. But you get the feeling that he made several “death records”, always leaving enough hints that this could be the end, always living somewhere between here and the next world, out in space. So many of those parts of Bowie are present on Blackstar because he was approaching death, yes, but also because he was seemingly always thinking about it. From the time he found himself on the floor of that recording studio in Los Angeles, Bowie painted with hues of death in the color palette of his work. In a 1995 interview, following the release of his concept album 1. Outside, Bowie said, “I love death, the more of it the better. I think it’s a good thing.” It was always there somewhere. Perhaps had Bowie died in the 70s, we would comb through Station to Station or any of the Berlin trilogy and find new meaning in their lyrics and sounds. But he didn’t. He lived another 40 years and, through them, always kept the line with death open, whenever it was ready.

The heart of Blackstar and the most poignant connection to Bowie’s previous near-death experience, is its third track, “Lazarus.” The song was originally composed for an off-broadway musical of the same name. The other songs in the show are all from Bowie’s catalog, and the story of the musical is a continuation of Bowie’s character from The Man Who Fell to Earth – the alien who can’t die and must make sense of life on our planet. “Lazarus”, which opens the show, starts with the lyrics “Look up here, man, I’m in heaven.” Despite having written it for the musical, it’s equally at home on Blackstar. Bowie toes the line between this world and the next throughout, until the track winds to a triumphant end, full of blaring horns as Bowie sings out:

Oh, I’ll be free

Just like that bluebird

Oh, I’ll be free

Ain’t that just like me?

It was just like him, and it had been for a very long time.

Here is what I’ve been into in the early days of 2026.

Reading

I just finished reading Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift (2019). It spans a century of Zambian history — from the days of Cecil Rhodes until 2024 — with flourishes of magical realism and science fiction akin to Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We witness this history through the lens of three families: one from a mix of Zambian and British origin, another from a mix of Indian and Italian origin, and another of just Zambian roots. The complicated identities of the generations that spring from these families reflect the cultural and political conflicts that have colored much of the history of post-colonial African countries in ways that are obviously far beyond my depth. The curious personal plights that these characters endure (one woman becomes a cult religious figure in her town for her nonstop, 24/7 crying; another woman has a condition that causes he hair to grow rapidly from every pore of her body, making her a Cousin Itt-like figure) add an even richer texture here that I can only scratch the surface of understanding. The point being this: it is dense. There is an army of characters whose histories weave in and out of each others’ over nearly 600 pages and the details become increasingly difficult to hold in your head as you read on (the family trees at the beginning of the book are essential).

The writing itself I found inconsistent. There are sections of this novel that really hum (namely: the first 100 pages or so and the entire “Sylvia” section) and bite with a language that matches the supreme expanse of the novel’s conceit. But, then there are portions where the writing becomes considerably less artful and engaging, and details begin to stack on top of each other, hedged by seemingly toothless similes that feel like they’re yearning more to be clever than they are useful. Some parts, especially in the final section, are certainly less satisfyingly plotted than others. As readers, we hardly have a moment to catch our breath with the names, details, and scenes being thrown at us in the final hundred pages. But, this is an ambition I admire and Serpell is provocative and enthralling in her best moments. I will certainly seek out more. I came to this book from an essay of hers called Critical Navel-Gazing that I fully recommend to all that are interested.

Also, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Tulips for you.

Watching

Having only seen his films from the 2010s and 2020s, I finally got around to seeing one of Jia Zhangke’s early films: 2000s Platform. It is the masterpiece that it has been rightly hailed as.

Jia has an unbelievable ability to show you everything, clear as day, and still leave you befuddled. There is a scene in Platform where one character, a member of a traveling theater troupe, dances the flamenco in a flowing red dress while an image of Mao looks on from the wall behind her. This scene takes place in the early days of China opening up after Mao’s death. In just 30 seconds, Jia tells a story of that period, captures the energy of its youth, and presents the heavy cultural considerations of post-Mao China as plainly as they can be presented in an image. And yet, as overt an image as it is, I leave it with less clarity than ever. The people, the time, and the country only grow more and more unknowable the longer Jia allows you to study them. He is one of the best we have.

Also, Alexander Mackendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). A sinister film that feels like a Safdie brothers bible.

Listening

Once again, I have returned to Sinead O’Connor’s 1987 album The Lion and the Cobra. While I still feel partial to “Troy” as the album’s best song, I have more recently been enamored with “Drink Before the War" — a song that apparently had a mini moment a few years ago when it appeared in Euphoria. I do not watch that show and I doubt very much that I would like it, but I hope more people found O’Connor’s music from it. What an immense talent she was.

Also, in preparation for new Mitski, I’ve been listening to some old Mitski and feeling like I’m 22 again.

Until next month!

(Note: I am trying to get back to writing at least once a month. This is a bit shorter, and none of the thoughts are so original, but I’m trying to get back in the habit and I love this song. Enjoy!)

The first time you hear “The Swimming Song”, there seems to be almost nothing to it. The simplicity of its title reflects the simplicity of its whole. From verse one, to two, to three we hear tales of a man swimming: at a public pool, at a reservoir; doing the backstroke and doing the butterfly; holding his breath, kicking his feet, and moving his arms. And that’s kind of it.

But, the song’s simplicity is deceptive. By the second listen, a few moments of melancholy jump out from the jovial banjo-picking and nostalgic scenes of summer that make up the song. These lines linger for a bit, dropping just a tinge of morose into the pool of joy. At just two minutes and 27 seconds, “The Swimming Song” is easily replayable. By the time you’ve breezed through it a handful of times, the drops of sorrow have broken containment. Every ripple in the song’s pool now glimmers with equal amounts of joy and despair. Like the water in the song, there is a deep, threatening recess beneath the surface-level shine of “The Swimming Song.”

After a light, bouncy buildup from Loudon Wainwright III’s banjo playing, his scratchy, tenor drawl breaks in cheerfully. But, immediately, he gives us the light and dark, budging against each other. “This summer I went swimming, this summer I might’ve drowned/” he sings. Despite the joy in his voice and the serenity of the scenes “The Swimming Song” evokes, the inherent danger of swimming is partnered with all of the joy it brings, inextricably. As soon as Wainwright thinks of swimming, joyful as he may be, he can’t help but acknowledge there’s always the chance of drowning.

The song brushes by that minor inconvenience, catchy as can be, walking us through the pleasant and mundane locations for swimming.

This summer I swam in the ocean/

And I swam in a swimming pool/

Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes/

I’m a self-destructive fool/

I’m a self-destructive fool/

And there it is again. With his tone adjusting ever so slightly, Wainwright gives us another glimpse at the murky depths. It’s the last one we’ll get, but these hints at self doubt and regret prick the ear and color the rest of the song. This is the genius of the song. Now, every mundane line is a possible signpost for us to decipher what Wainwright really means, ‘cause it can’t just be about swimming. In that same vein, each ensuing line is a Rorschach test. Whatever you see in the extended metaphor reveals more about you than Wainwright. He goes on:

This summer I did the backstroke/

And you know that that’s not all/

I did a breaststroke, and a butterfly/

And the old Australian crawl/

The old Australian crawl/

Backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, and crawl all mask some potentially deeper meaning. These could be substances (he’s a self described “self-destructive fool” after all), or less definable experiences of self-discovery. They could be coping mechanisms or even romantic partners. Or maybe they’re just swimming strokes.

The most revealing hint in the song comes in short three words, as Wainwright continues into the final verse:

This summer I did swan dives and jack knives for you all/

and once when you weren’t looking, I did a cannonball/

Again, these different dives Wainwright is performing lend themselves to a number of interpretations. Whatever you decided the strokes were could be extended to the dives. But what’s most noteworthy here is the acknowledgement of an audience. He’s not just doing these dives, he did them “for you all.” This small moment resonates as the saddest of them all, and confirms the song’s bleak undercurrent. No matter what the extended metaphor may really be about, this line captures a specific pain that comes with all of life’s struggles: the need to perform for others’ contentment. The final line and its delivery add another sinister level of mystery. “Once when you weren’t looking” could mean that this is a confession of something he’s been hiding, or perhaps a bit of disappointment that his greatest performance was missed. Either way, the stinging truth is that none of it is for his own enjoyment.

Since the central metaphor of “The Swimming Song” can be about almost anything, it ends up kind of being about everything. The song is a kaleidoscope, the more you turn the knobs of the simple image, the more it changes. You decide where it stops. The broadest interpretation can be pulled from that very first line of the first verse:

this summer I might’ve drowned/ but I held my breath and kicked my feet and moved my arms around/ I moved my arms around

Is that not just the experience of life itself? Thrown into the unknown, we just do what we can to stay afloat and figure it out.

The song ends with a continuation of that jumpy banjo picking, now sounding more wistful than anything, a triumphant holler, and a thunderous return of the drums and a deluge of strings. This ending could either be a pure celebration after making it through the struggle of swimming, still alive. Or, perhaps it’s yet another performance, pushing down the fear and worry in an effort to make it through. There’s nothing to worry about in the end. It’s just swimming after all.

Bob Fosse died on September 23, 1987 of a heart attack. He was 60 years old. Months earlier, he had finished directing the Tony-award winning revival of his first major Broadway hit, Sweet Charity. At the time, he was about to begin working on a film with Robert De Niro set to star. The film would never be made. Despite his relatively young age and still-active work life, Fosse’s demise was more than unsurprising. In fact, it followed his own script nearly exactly. Eight years earlier, Fosse wrote and directed All That Jazz, a film that (arguably purposely) predicted his own death nearly to a tee and serves as the definitive statement on the man and his work, perhaps even more than he realized.

While All That Jazz is not directly autobiographical – names are changed, the events are fictitious, and there are elements of fantasy – it is hard to imagine a film that reveals more about its creator. From start to finish the film is a direct reflection of Fosse’s psyche. It is not just the center of the work, it is the whole work. Even in the moments that the film tries to create a bit of distance between creator and art – a bit of ambiguity – Fosse inevitably tells on himself. He simply can not stop being Fosse.

The film’s main character, Joe Gideon, is a stage and film director who is simultaneously putting on a mega-budget Broadway musical and editing a major motion picture. Fosse himself wrote the screenplay based on his time producing the stage production of Chicago and directing the Lenny Bruce biopic Lenny. In All That Jazz, Gideon is directing a musical called “NY/LA” and editing a film titled “The Stand Up”. The parallels continue into Gideon’s personal life. His closest creative partner is his ex-wife, Audrey; in real life, Fosse’s closest creative collaborator was his estranged wife Gwen Verdon. While the real-life couple never officially divorced like the couple in the film, it was well known that the Fosse and Verdon partnership was solely professional by the ‘70s. There is Gideon’s new girlfriend, Kate, a young dancer who he frequently cheats on but chastises for her own transgressions. In the film’s most on-the-nose detail, Kate is played by Fosse’s then-girlfriend Ann Reinking. She essentially plays herself in all but name. Gideon’s daughter, Michelle, stands in for Fosse’s daughter Nicole (who appears briefly as a background dancer). The only major non-autobiographical aspect of the film is the fantasy frame story that depicts Gideon in conversation with the angel of death, played by Jessica Lange (more on this later). Other details from Fosse’s life are sprinkled throughout as vague facsimiles of real people with its main focus honing in on Gideon’s selfishness and the ways he makes life hell for these three women, both real and fictive.

Considering Fosse is at the helm of every part of All That Jazz, focusing the film on the ways his own behavior has made maintaining stable, loving relationships with him impossible should be a monumentally off-putting show of narcissism. It’s the type of admission and masturbatory display of ego that, in most cases, is repulsive. And it kind of is – there is no doubt that Gideon/Fosse is a toxic, manipulative, evil figure; but unlike other exercises of the sort in which the author might seek sympathy from a broader audience or some sort of understanding, Fosse does not. There are no apologies, he does not seek forgiveness. He is attempting to tell on himself by simply displaying what he knows to be true. There is no sense that he needs forgiveness as much as he just wants himself to be understood. Even when Gideon does show signs of remorse, they fade into quiet acceptance that he, his life, is the way he/it is. It’s easier to believe that Fosse truly can’t change because he makes no attempt to explain or defend himself. He portrays his flaws, and their consequences, as they are and only asks you to watch.

And still, for all of the open telling on himself Fosse does, there is still a feeling that we’ve maybe seen more than he even intended. Throughout its rote, repetitive sequences of Gideon’s morning routine — popping a concoction of pills while listening to Vivaldi — Fosse is acknowledging his self-destructive tendencies. Through his dialogues with the angel of death, he is admitting to his selfishness. And through his rampant infidelity and sex-obsessed artistic and social life, Fosse cops to his unhealthy dependency on sex and intimacy. And boy is there sex. For all of the drinking and pill popping, all of the narcissism and manipulation, Gideon’s, and in turn Fosse’s, most notable addiction and illness is sex.

While the film itself is not necessarily coated in sexuality, Gideon’s sexual perversion and obsessions are scattered throughout. One of the major set pieces of the film is Gideon’s big presentation of a bombastic number for the musical. It’s meant to be set on a plane and the dancers at his command are stewardesses and flight attendants. After exhausting himself trying to crack the code of the number, Gideon falls back on his old standby: pure sexuality. The number becomes an erotic display of every kind of sexual relationship and taboo of the time, capped by a full on strip tease and simulated sex between guys and girls, guys and guys, girls and girls, and every other combination of twos, threes, and fours. At the sceneMs conclusion, one of the producers of the musical says “always with the sex,” another replies “it’s a sickness.”

Gideon’s primary wedge in his relationship with his ex-wife, his current girlfriend, and even his daughter is his very open infidelity. In one of his conversations with the angel of death, he retells stories of his past in which we see that he not only got his start playing burlesque shows and hooking up with the older dancers, but that he also (very proudly) once had two live-in girlfriends at the same time. In describing his mother, he is unable to stop himself from noting that along with jolly, she was also “sexy.” And above and beyond everything else, the frame story driving the entirety of All That Jazz is Gideon’s conversation with the angel of death. The whole of their conversation is presented as nothing but foreplay for Gideon’s final sexual conquest, the angel herself. With Gideon as his avatar, Fosse set out to lay bare his deepest worries about his impending fate, and could only do so through sexual terms; a sickness indeed. And while hypersexuality is the disease that Fosse is willing to reckon with in the dialogue of the film, it’s another addiction that really imbues All That Jazz with a deeper sense of truth that elevates it beyond mere self-obsessed, masturbatory fantasy. That is Fosse’s utter need to put on a show.

There are moments where Fosse acknowledges this more pervasive addiction. He ends each aforementioned morning routine of pills with a look into the mirror and a declaration that “it’s show time!” exposing on some level that each addiction is as destructive to him as the others. But, this conscious winking at his dependence on performing (and theater in general) doesn’t nearly paint the whole picture. Any time this particular fault in Gideon’s personality comes up, he refers to it as “work.” In a conversation with the angel of death he remarks that work is “all there is.” Early on, he has to cancel time with his daughter to “work.” On his deathbed, work is listed among the “bullshit” in his life that would eventually kill him. But that’s not really it. Gideon and by extension Fosse are describing this particular addiction as an addiction to work, but what it really is is an addiction to performance that then became the work.

This is never clearer than in the film’s bloated climax. Having finally succumbed to all of his vices, Gideon lies unconscious on a hospital bed, hallucinating. In those hallucinations he sees his ex-wife, girlfriend, old hookups, and daughter perform elaborate musical numbers (which a separate hallucination of himself directs) about all of the ways that he has failed and hurt them. Gideon performs the final number himself, alongside a TV presenter he had mocked earlier in the film. The entire sequence goes on for more than 20 minutes, abruptly ending with Gideon’s corpse, back in the real world, being zipped up in a body bag. The deeper truth in these grandiose sequences comes from a realization that Fosse was making an earnest attempt at confronting his demons. This film was his honest to god best effort at confronting his demons, and having the hard conversations about the relationships he cared most about. But, he simply couldn’t. Fosse could only confront the world, and himself, through this type of performance, through musical theater. He can not make a film about his failings, he must make it a song and dance. He can not apologize to those he loves for the way he is, he has to entertain them instead. He can not let the curtain close on either his life or the film until he shows us just how good he is at putting on a show.

One of the final strikes that puts Gideon on that hospital bed, the one that was just too much to bear, is a poor review of his newly released film. Already in the hospital for a heart attack, Gideon catches a tv broadcast of a prominent film reviewer who pans the film. In her criticism she notes that Gideon falls “into his characteristic weakness of trying too hard to please, to entertain. Slickness obscures reality, the old razzle dazzle sometimes obliterates drama.” The critique works on more than just the art, but the man himself. All That Jazz is only as interesting of a text as it is because of this very same “characteristic weakness.” This sense of his own limitations in his art bothers Fosse far more than his limitations as a man. Fosse was a perfectionist, working tirelessly to achieve a singular vision only he can see; but ironically he is never able to make it meet his standards. The aforementioned film that was panned by the fictional critic is a prime example. We’re reminded often in the film’s first half that Gideon has gone months over schedule on his edit of the film. We see him laboring over the same five minute sequences again and again. His crew is exasperated every time he announces more edits need to be made. Yet, the film is shit. He knows it by the time he’s done editing, the critic’s review is only confirmation. All That Jazz, ironically, succeeds because of this indelible flaw. Fosse's very singular vision and perfectionism make it impossible for the art to breathe and, thus, become truly great. It must return to Fosse’s comforts, even at its darkest. It must play by Fosse’s rules to the very end. It must meet his standard for musical theater and thus, himself.

We’re increasingly aware as an audience that he simply can not color outside the lines and must find greatness within them. Gideon says in the film “when I see a rose, that’s perfect. I mean, that’s perfect. I want to look up at God and say ‘how the hell did you do that? And why the hell can’t I do it?’” This is the tortured mentality we’re clued into throughout the film. Fosse wants, so desperately, to make great art — by his and our estimation. He wants to love and be loved, genuinely. He wants to live, in the end. But his idea of art is so singular that he can’t comprehend the genius of something freer. This need to put on a show, even at the most inappropriate time, even when there is nothing left at stake, reveals itself to be Fosse’s true fatal flaw. Just before his death, while he’s roaming the hallways of the hospital in agony, Joe Gideon breaks the fourth wall and looks into the camera, saying pleadingly, “oh Jesus, don’t take me out now. What’s the matter? Don’t you like musical comedy?” Thereby equating himself with the form itself. There is no Joe Gideon, or Bob Fosse, there is only theater, and the show must go on.

Last month, I turned 29. It was fine. Most birthdays from the late 20s on are just fine; very few are eventful except the decade milestones. The rest, it seems, blend together. But 29 has a distinct feel to it. Turning 29 feels like setting a timer tracking the end of your 20s — the decade of college and the majority of child births and, still, the majority of marriages. By 30, there is a feeling, right or wrong, that you should have some major things figured out. 29 is the final warning. With all of that spinning in my head, I sat down and rewatched Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 film Old Joy.

The film centers around the two old friends taking a camping trip in the Oregon mountains. Kurt, a long-bearded, heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking drifter organizes the trip. Mark, whose wife Tania is pregnant with the couple’s first child, agrees to tag along. The unspoken occasion is, naturally, the impending birth of the child, and from the outset, there is tension. In the very first scene of the film, Tania hears Mark say that he needs to “run it by” her before he can confirm he can join. She says, frustratedly, to Mark, “we both know you’re going, so I don’t know why we have to go through this thing of me letting you off the hook.” The tone is set early on. There is change coming, and it probably already has.

This is also, we find, the first camping trip the two have taken in quite some time. Much of the first half hour of the film features the two coloring in the gap of time since they last saw each other with stories and updates. Mark talks matter-of-factly about the blood clots they found on his dad’s brain and his parents late-life divorce. Kurt tells Mark about a retreat he took to Ashland with another old friend of theirs. They ask each other vaguely about when their lives: homes, families, the usual. The responses are always as vague as the questions, and they almost never make eye contact when they talk to each other. One of them is always looking ahead – at a road, at a fire, at the ground. There is a stop-start nature to their conversations, rarely developing a flow. At times, glimpses of their old camaraderie break through – the two share a laugh about a stranger ranting at a gas station they stop at and playfully toss koozies back and forth at each other over the car – but, these moments are flashes in the pan.The majority of the time the two spend together is enveloped in silence, interrupted by one of the two occasionally throwing out a topic to spark conversation again.

Reichardt films these conversations, and most notably the silences, oscillating between a voyeuristic view and an intensely intimate one. We observe much of these conversations from a medium shot that shows us both men and their surroundings, whether it be the car, the campground, or somewhere else. Then, Reichardt mixes in extreme close-ups, focusing on Mark and Kurt’s eyes and brows, revealing much of what’s not being said.

This quiet tension slowly builds through the drive and even once the two have settled for the night, now filling the silences with sips of beer at a shoddy campsite. The night drags on, Kurt gets drunker and drunker. Here, we get the most poignant close-ups of the two. Both of their faces are distorted by the fire while Kurt drones on about the night classes he’s been taking, and how he actually understands the concepts of the class better than the other students and the teacher. His eyes are always either half or fully closed. Mark listens on, skeptically, and in his close-up, we see him side eye Kurt with a hint of disdain. Eventually, the pressure finally breaks.

Eyes closed, shaking his head, with the image of Mark blurry in the background, Kurt starts painfully moaning. Mark tries to ease the tension by laughing it off, assuming Kurt has just gotten too drunk. And then, Kurt speaks: “I miss you, Mark. I miss you real bad. I want us to be real friends again. There’s something between us, and I don’t like it. I want it to go away.” We stay on Mark’s face while Kurt talks. As soon as Kurt says “I miss you,” Mark’s expression hardens, his mouth curling into a scowl, his eyes looking somber. Once Kurt finishes, Mark puts on a happy face again. “What are you talking about? We’re fine!” Kurt snaps back, “are you serious? Do you really think that?” and Mark reassures him again “of course I do. We’re totally fine.” Mark is no longer trying to add kindling to keep the conversation going, he instead is dousing it with water. Kurt quickly obliges, snapping out of his sorrow, and quickly putting on a smile. He darts his eyes over to Mark – a split-second change we see again in a close up. I’m sorry. I’m just being crazy…don’t pay any attention to me, okay?”

When I was 19 years old, I was one of only two of my friends from high school that stayed home. For the two years after high school, I worked in a warehouse down the road from my house. The friend that also stayed home had decided, at the last minute, to abandon his plan to join the military. He worked a number of jobs over the following two years: delivering pizzas, selling cars, and working as a cook at a local Indian restaurant. With the rest of our friends between two and eight hours away, we spent every weekend together. Sometimes on those weekends we’d make trips to see friend’s in Cleveland, D.C., State College, PA. But, usually, it was just us at home.

Saturday after Saturday we would watch soccer in the mornings together. Weeknights, we’d drive around listening to whatever new music we were into at the time and talking. We made trips to Columbus and Brooklyn together to attend concerts. Neither of us had a true plan for our future and, with that, neither of us had expectations or debt or any real fear. There was an ever present, quiet comfort in being in the same exact place as someone else – one that drew us closer and closer together.

At 20 years old, I entered college. My friend had recently lost his job at the car dealership, so before leaving, I set him up to take over my position at the warehouse. While my schedule became more crowded, I still lived at home, commuting to school to save money. He remained my closest friend. On the weekends, following my shifts at the bookstore I now worked at, we would still get together, listen to records at his new apartment, and talk. Once we both turned 21 we would hang out at the bar down the block from his place. It was still, almost always, just us.

The details on the edges of Old Joy create the film’s disquieting effect. Reichardt’s camera does well to give us a sense of shape for the film’s landscape and atmosphere. Mark and Kurt are at the center, any diversion from them makes up the barriers around that center. Many of those diversions focus on the natural life in both the city and the mountains where they camp out. The film begins with the image of a lone bird sitting on the gutter of Mark’s home. Throughout the film more images of birds alone on wires, branches, and roofs appear in interludes between or in the midst of scenes. These birds have flown the nest, hacking it in the natural world by themselves. Mark and Kurt’s “nests” are both literal and figurative. They’ve each moved on from their old homes, but the heart of their disconnect lies in the relationship each has with their old lives that both provided and symbolized comfort. The silent breaks in Mark and Kurt’s conversations are filled with the distant chirping and cooing of birds, as well as the sounds of running water and wind-rustled leaves. These sounds immerse us in the ostensibly relaxing, natural environment; but, they have the opposite effect within the drama of the film. The more attuned to the sounds of nature we become, the more aware we are of the gaps in conversation between Kurt and Mark, of the tension stretching thinner and thinner in the space between them.

When Mark and Kurt finally do reach the hot spring they are in search of on the second day of their trip, these noises make up nearly all that we hear. The two silently open beers, strip off their clothes, and soak in the heated tubs, fueled by the natural spring. Once again, there are close ups of each. Kurt’s eyes are open with anxiety. Mark’s eyes are closed as he sinks into the hot tub. After a while, Kurt gets out of the tub, smokes a bowl, and begins to fill the silence with a rambling, inane story about his trip to buy a notebook at an office supply store. Mark makes no response. Then, in an attempt to maybe demand a response, Kurt gets up, stands above Mark in the tub, and begins to massage him. “Hey, what’s goin’ on?” Mark says nervously. “Just relax man,” Kurt responds. More silence. Then, we see Mark’s hand – wedding ring prominently displayed – slip from the side of the tub and relax into the water.

Over the next three and a half years, my friend and I each grew as much as people do between the ages of 20 and 23 – which is to say, a lot. There is a catalog of stories from these years where he or I would be called into action in support of the other. On what I still remember as the coldest morning I’ve ever experienced, my car would not start. My friend, an expert in such things, came over in minutes. He and I trudged in and out of my townhouse with buckets of hot water, dousing it on the hood of my frozen car to get it to open. After an hour in the frigid cold, we got the car to start. I missed my first class of the day, but got to campus in time for the other two.

I helped him move into his first apartment, and then his second. He and I both supported each other through crises and breakups, family dramas and personal failings. My schedule got busier and busier. I’d developed a whole new social life at school and split my time between two jobs — one as an editor at the school paper, and another on the weekends working at a bookstore. Still, he was my closest friend. Even as our hangouts became more and more protracted, reuniting was always easy and comfortable.

A few weeks before my graduation, we went to a party at a mutual friend’s house. It was, at that point, the drunkest I had ever been. He and I took the nearly-empty bus back to his apartment. The world was spinning around me throughout our drive home, and throughout the ride, all of my accumulating anxieties spilled out. I talked about a series of confused crushes I had, as well as my post-graduation anxiety. I expressed worries about my long-term outlook for a career and for a place to live. I don’t know how much sense any of it made in the moment. When we got to his place, he put on a movie (that I couldn’t comprehend as the whole screen was doubled and blurry to me), laid me down on the couch, brought out a jug of water, a bagel, and an orange. He would refill that jug two more times before I finally fell asleep. In the morning, I woke up with a hangover, but thanks to his emergency efforts, I was not completely comatose. Over coffee, I apologized to my friend for my emotional outburst. “I think you got to say a lot that you’ve needed to say for a long time,” he said.

The beginning and end of Old Joy mirror one another. As the opening credits roll, Mark is driving around town to go pick up Kurt. We hear a liberal talk radio station blaring from his car speakers, going over talking points that are hauntingly similar to today’s. In the end, after the spa, Mark and Kurt are dead silent on their drive home. There are no more attempts to break through the divide. Day turns to night around them, and Mark drops Kurt off at his house. “That was awesome, Kurt,” Mark says once they park. “I’ll call you soon, man,” Kurt replies. The film follows Mark as he drives home alone, the same liberal talk radio station playing in the background, filling the silence. It ends with Kurt, ambling around in a parking garage at night, then a storefront, down a nearly-empty city sidewalk – a bird in the wild, with nowhere to go.

At the beginning of 2020, my friend moved out to Colorado. At the end of 2020, I moved to Washington, D.C. Now, I live in Philadelphia. Naturally, we see each other less and less as the years go on. Similarly, even the fluid text chain has stopped. Now I hear from him once a month. Maybe less.

Three years ago, I visited him out in Colorado. Last year, he made his first visit out to me. I drove out alone to pick him up at the airport, wondering how our reunion would go this time. It was only my second time seeing him in three years. When I pulled up to the airport, he opened the back door, threw his bag in, then entered through the passenger door. Immediately, he threw his arms around me, and playfully gave me a kiss on the top of the head. I laughed at the over-the-top gesture, but I couldn’t escape that it also all felt a bit unnatural to me, a bit dishonest. I immediately felt bad for that feeling, but I couldn’t ignore that it was there. Throughout the weekend, I could feel myself pressing for more of a connection, or at least a different kind of connection. There was no conflict, it was a good visit. I wondered internally if it was just my anxiety, feeling a barrier that wasn’t really there.

When I first thought to rewatch Old Joy, I texted my friend. I told him I’d been reminiscing about our nights driving around listening to music, or hanging out at his apartment. I didn’t get a response back for two weeks. He apologized for the delay when he finally did respond. “No worries,” I sent back. And I meant it.

To make up for the lousy March, the hope is to have four essays in April. We’ll see. Otherwise, here’s what else has been kicking around that I didn’t get around to writing about.

Reading

I first read Sally Rooney’s Normal People when I was in college – at the height of its popularity – and I very loudly did not like it. A few months ago, I revisited it and enjoyed it quite a bit. With it being my introduction to Rooney, I was perhaps distracted and disappointed by the considerably simple prose. Knowing what I was getting into on a reread certainly helped elevate the better parts of the book.

This past month, I read my second Sally Rooney novel: 2024’s Intermezzo. I neither disliked it as much as I did Normal People on first read nor did I like it as much as I liked Normal People on second read. The prose is, now characteristically, tampered down and in this particular book, the flow of the language is often choppy. This is intentional – the two main characters are very openly struggling to address their own psyches and their internal dialogues often reflect that struggle – but it ends up creating a series of moments that kind of fall flat. Intermezzo never seems to find the crescendo its building towards, including in its ending. In an effort to not spoil the ending, I will say that it has a very Dickensian feel which, like a lot of Dickens, does bring some warm feelings. Also similarly to Dickens (who famously changed the ending of Great Expectations because of audience demand), Rooney is very very popular in her time. In reading Intermezzo, especially in some of its more “the times we live in” moments, I did find myself wondering if Rooney’s reputation in both the general popular lit scene and her high brow aspirations make for a combination that as of yet prevents her from writing a truly great novel.

Also, I’m continuing to work through the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. I need not promote the poetry of one of the best to ever do it, but a taste nonetheless:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

If I shouldn’t be alive

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

When the robins come,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Give the one in red cravat

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A memorial crumb.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

If I couldn’t thank you,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Being just asleep,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

You will know I’m trying

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

With my granite lip!

Watching

Originally, I had intended to write an entire essay on Carson Lund’s film Eephus (2024), but in the end I couldn’t make much of it. This may be because the film is best enjoyed with a less analytical approach.

It is an hour and 40 minutes that follows the course of one baseball game – the last one to ever be played at a community field that is set to be the construction site of a new school. Throughout the game, we get little moments of humor, anger, passion, and despair from each player on the field. It’s truly an ensemble film with no primary leads – a reflection of baseball’s ability to nullify the importance of a single star.

One could take the time to dive into the minutiae of the film, to consider the snippets of dialogue we hear in the foreground and the background, and to wonder at the greater meaning of everything we see on screen (and there is a lot). That would be worthwhile. I’m sure many have done it. But with a film like Eephus, it’s equally valuable to sit back and enjoy your time at the ballpark while you can.

Also, the films of Lucrecia Martel. The Headless Woman (2008), which I liked; and Zama (2017) which I really liked.

Listening

Like many of us, I was enchanted by The Chats’ viral hit “Smoko” in the Fall of 2017. It is an incredibly simple song that bleeds over with the rage and humor that can be found in the best of punk rock. It’s popularity, at least in the U.S., certainly came mostly from its humor, as well as the novelty of the pure Australianness of The Chats.

That’s all fine! The Chats are very funny and they mean to be. They’re also very Australian, and mean to be. But, they also make really invigorating rock music. Spotify notified me recently that I was in the top 1% of The Chats listeners last month. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time.

Like “Smoko”, which is about not wanting to be bothered during a smoke break, many Chats songs start with a simple premise, usually revealed right in the title. Their second biggest hit, “Pub Feed”, is about the joys of cheap bar food. A personal favorite, “The Price of Smokes”, is about, well, the price of smokes. Evidently, it is too high.

The formula may be a bit repetitive after a while (The Chats do, after all, openly idolize AC/DC); but, sometimes a Chats song perfectly expresses the joy or anger or despondency of everyday life. That is no mistake. Frontman Eamon Sandwith describes himself as “staunch left,” and those politics inform the angry half of The Chats equation. Something as simple as the price of smokes really is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you dig a little deeper, it’s pretty obviously worth yelling about.

Also, Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele. The number of nonsensical lyrics from this album that will be playing in my head until I die are many. I’ll leave you with this from “Nutmeg”:

Scotty watty cop it to me, big microphone hippie/

Hit Poughkeepsie crispy chicken verbs throw up a stone richie/

Chop the O, sprinkle little snow inside a Optimo/

Swing the John McEnroe, rap rock and roll/

It starts with a fiery, up-and-down guitar riff from Carrie Brownstein, then a brief pause, followed by a thunderous introductory pound on the drums from Janet Weiss, and finally Corin Tucker wails into the microphone: “Dig me OOUUT”. From the moment Tucker starts to sing, neither the song nor the album look back. “Dig Me Out”, the opening eponymous track to Sleater-Kinney’s 1997 album, is a staple track for the riot grrrl icons and an inflection point for the group. In under three minutes, it changed the trajectory of what would become one of the most important bands of the last 40 years. Both the song and the record were the firsts with Weiss on drums. As such, the one-by-one entries on the opening track end up acting as a formal reintroduction of the three-piece and their new construction. This trio – Brownstein, Weiss, and Tucker – would remain Sleater-Kinney’s lineup for the next 22 years and entrench themselves as iconic figures in modern rock. It all started with Dig Me Out; and revisiting the record in 2025 still provides a fresh thrill as well as a bit of melancholy as the record’s symbolic meaning has only grown since its release.

With Weiss in the mix, Dig Me Out is a cleaner, more inventive, and more emotionally cutting album than the band’s first two releases. Its more varied sonic palette along with the new melding of the band’s now “classic” lineup would set the table for the next two decades of evolution Sleater-Kinney would see. Sleater-Kinney’s first two albums – 1995’s self-titled debut and 1996’s Call the Doctor – are not bad entries into the band’s discography, but they are noticeably messy and far less cohesive. The debut record is dripping with the band’s influences, and its tracks tend to blend together. There are more than a few hints of Fugazi, Bikini Kill, and Sonic Youth coating the structures and sounds of the songs. And while the subjects of the songs change, the tones remain almost entirely similar. Everything is a shade of anger from the same pallet, and often the same brush. On both albums there is the rough, punk aesthetic and sound — less polished, less clean, tons of screaming, lots of noise. The musicianship reflects this raw, DIY energy, specifically original member Lora Macfarlane’s drumming, which is always just a bit ahead of the Brownstein and Tucker’s tempo. Call the Doctor offers much the same fare. The subjects continue to expand, and in turn the tones become more diverse, though still unmistakably angry. There is more melody and counter melody from Brownstein and Tucker, and songs like “Stay Where You Are” and “Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” do cover more emotional ground than their first album. But, if the difference between their first and second releases showed steps toward a higher plane, Dig Me Out was a rocket ship.

Even before the aforementioned opening track, Dig Me Out announces itself as a new frontier for the band with its cover. Like their first album, Dig Me Out features pictures of all three band members, with Weiss now in place of Macfarlane. This time, the composition is a direct recreation of The Kinks’ third album, Kinks Controversy. While perhaps just a nod to a similarly counter-culture band, the cover also signaled the melding of new influences into Sleater-Kinney’s music. Still infused with their now trademark edge, Dig Me Out is also full of an ironic humor in the same vein as the Kinks. Musically, there are traits of new wave acts and elements of surf rock, the latter of which came from Weiss’ background. And more than just new influences, Weiss’ addition adds an unmistakable order to Dig Me Out. Everything on the record is a bit cleaner, a bit tighter, a bit denser, while never sacrificing those prickly edges that are at the heart of the group and the riotgrrrl movement in general. All of the anger, all of the punch, all of the energy is still there, but now in a serum that injects effortlessly into the veins.

Weiss’ presence is an obvious driving force throughout, even on songs that are very clearly Brownstein and Tucker affairs, of which there are many. In her 2015 memoir, Brownstein wrote that almost every song on Dig Me Out is in some way written about her or Tucker’s future husband Lance Bangs. A few years prior to the release of Dig Me Out, Tucker and Brownstein had dated and at the time of the album’s recording, Tucker and Bangs were just starting to see each other. The most personal bits of the record are informed by this potentially exhausting dynamic. This is never more true than on the album’s second track, “One More Hour.” It is a disarmingly vulnerable song that’s slower and more somber than angry – at the time, a jarring departure for the band. It’s a quintessential break up record, and with Tucker and Brownstein both claiming vocal parts on it, there seems little room for Weiss to insert herself into its composition. And still, her anxious, rapid drum fills and marching cadence create a backbone for the song that feels as essential as Tucker’s desperate pleading lyrics and Brownstein’s matter of fact refrains of “it’s so hard for you to let it go.” Considering the insularity of Brownstein and Tucker’s dynamic, it’s a remarkable feat that the song not only avoids being a bit of an emotional mess, but that it actually stands as one of the band’s enduring classics.

As the record progresses, more new territory for the band is explored. Sleater-Kinney were never boring on their first two records, but Dig Me Out has a layer of playfulness that simply wasn’t there before. There’s “Little Babies”, a groovy, ironic diddy about men’s penchant for needing their partners to be their mothers. This is retread for Sleater-Kinney, continuing on the themes from “Be Yr Mama” from the band’s first record, but with a much lighter tone. The change of pace makes the message of the song that much more infantalizing and effectively cutting. Singing along to the ironically poppy hook, “dum dum dee dee, dum dum dee dum do/all the little babies go, oh, oh, I want to” hits like a nuclear bomb on the song’s intended targets. By the time Tucker is screaming “mama’s liiiittle helperrr”, It’s hard to imagine the subject of such a song being able to recover from the shame.

Then there’s the album’s penultimate track “Dance Song ‘97”. As the title suggests, the song has a slick groove, kicked off by Weiss’ knocking, disco-esque rhythm and driven by Brownstein and Tucker’s complementary riffs. Musically, it’s another departure for the group, pulling from new wave groups in its musical composition, structure, and performance (specially the B-52s, who Tucker emulates with her wavy vocals). But none of this feels like imitation. It all convincingly feels like an additional weapon for the group to now pull out. This growth was certainly already percolating before Weiss, and maybe we would’ve gotten a similar record from Tucker and Brownstein no matter who was on drums. But, it’s inconceivable that the result would’ve felt as cohesive, as dense, or as infectious as Dig Me Out was and remains.

The album is now universally recognized as a breakthrough for the band, and what followed was a run of four albums in eight years that continued to stretch the band’s limits and re-invent their sound while maintaining the razor sharp fury at the center of all of their music. One Beat, released in 2002, infused more bluesy elements and on one track a horn section to the equation. Coming on the heels of 9/11 and on the eve of the Iraq War, it has the unmistakable quality of a protest record through and through (including a track, similarly transparent to “Dance Song ‘97”, called “Combat Rock”). A few years later, in 2005, the group released The Woods — a record containing two of the band’s most somber cuts in “Jumpers”, and “Modern Girl”, and featuring perhaps Tucker’s most poetic and effusive songwriting in her entire discography.

Then came an extended break which Carrie Brownstein became, if not a household name, a considerably more recognizable star running a music blog on Pitchfork, writing and publishing a memoir, and most famously starring alongside Fred Armisen in the Peabody-winning sketch comedy series Portlandia. Surprisingly, in 2015, the group released their eighth album, No Cities to Love. By some miracle, considering the decade-long hiatus as well as Brownstein’s larger public image, the album met the standard of their previous work. While not as punchy as their previous records, it’s a solid rock record with some worthy entries into the Sleater-Kinney (“Surface Envy”, “Bury Our Friends”). At the time, there seemed to be no downside. This record might either be an unexpectedly strong farewell album, or possibly the beginning of a new late era for the trio. Either path was

What’s followed in the decade since has been bitterly disappointing. Sleater-Kinney followed up No Cities to Love with 2019’s The Center Won’t Hold. In the early stages of production, news broke that St. Vincent’s Annie Clark would be involved in crafting the record's sound. Clark, it was later revealed, was another one of Brownstein’s former partners and the initial speculation was that Brownstein had brought Clark in to aid in production. Brownstein refuted this, saying it was actually Weiss who most wanted to work with Clark. Either way, Clark’s inclusion created a creative imbalance that Sleater-Kinney hadn’t struggled with in more than two decades. Not only is The Center Won’t Hold a far more muted effort – feeling toothless at times and trying but failing to elicit the kind of raw emotion that previous records inspired effortlessly – but the roles within the band shifted too. On The Center Won’t Hold, when Weiss’ playing is present, she is relegated to time-keeper — clearly relegated to a second-tier member of the band. What was clear in the songs revealed itself to be true behind the scenes. Before the band was set to go on tour for the The Center Won’t Hold, Weiss announced on Instagram she would not be joining them and, furthermore, that she was no longer a part of Sleater-Kinney.

More and more details came out over the following months. In November of 2019, Weiss gave an interview to the Trap Set with Joe Wong. In the interview, she revealed that she, Brownstein, and Tucker had gone to counseling to try to work out their creative differences while working on The Center Won’t Hold; but in the end, those differences were insurmountable. “They’re not evil people, I just think the two of them are so connected and they really agree on almost everything, they just thought, ‘We’re gonna take this band somewhere and we want to be in charge of that, the two of us,’” she said. “I think I was a threat to where they wanted the band to go, and who I am, and that felt bad to me.” She went on to explain that Brownstein and Tucker eventually admitted that they saw her as just the drummer, and that they would lead the band’s creative direction going forward. She said in the same interview, “It’s a lot to walk away from. It’s my sisters, my family. But I couldn’t be in that band and have it not be equal, especially with what it represents to me. It represents equality… How can we be fighting for equality and not have it in our band; it just became a disconnect.”

Since then, Brownstein and Tucker have released two more Sleater-Kinney records as a duo — 2021’s Path of Wellness and last year’s Little Rope. Both fail to meet the standard set in what can now firmly be considered their “golden era” with Weiss on drums. Path of Wellness was the band’s worst received release since their breakthrough. While St. Vincent did not helm production, the synth-heavy influence of her music is still clear in the album’s production, and does much to blunt the edge that Sleater-Kinney had used so pointedly in records past. Little Rope is only a small improvement. At many points, it’s a fine rock record (largely leaning on the interplay between the Brownstein and Tucker’s guitars with more grandiose production behind them). But, it’s all a bit too clean, lacking a jolt of life that the old records teemed with. The record’s lead single, “Hell”, goes its first minute with no drums to be heard. When they finally burst in on the chorus, they only serve to remind you of what used to be a constant. Through the rest of the record, the drums parts are mostly simple, relegated to background noise.

The alternative reality is unknowable. Sleater-Kinney is, after all, a punk group and youth is inextricable from the punk scene. The edges may have softened even with Weiss in the fold. But Dig Me Out still hasn’t gone stale, even nearly 30 years later. It’s still fresh, still sharp, still bursting with energy. Each relisten inspires fantasies of a world in which No Cities to Love was the group’s last record; or, at the very least, the band ageing into their late period with the classic lineup intact. For now, it seems as if Sleater-Kinney will continue to make new music and create even more distance from the years with Weiss. If anything, this surprising late period for the band has solidified the story of Sleater-Kinney, even if that story has turned a bit disappointing. We can unquestionably point to that period and that lineup as the band’s legacy. Everything that’s come after and may still come only further solidifies it.

“Jenny”, the closing track on Dig Me Out, hits fresher than ever with all of this in mind, as Tucker echoes herself saying “didn’t we almost have it/Almost have it, almost?” For 20 years, we did have it. That’s probably more than we could’ve ever hoped for.

(P.S. If anyone would like, feel free to email me anything YOU have been listening to, reading, or watching. It is something I am genuinely always interested in. The line is open: soundandvision888@gmail.com)

Reading

Every year I try to revisit a “great book” that I read either too young to reckon with or at a radically different time in my life (and therefore need a new perspective). This year’s book was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). I technically “read” this book when I was 18. But, it was by assignment in the waning months of my high school career and also aligned with the construction of my senior project. So, I have always felt as if I was essentially robbed of the experience of this, decidedly, primary text.

I have hardly gone all in on the Russians, and Dostoyevsky’s heady, straightforward prose perhaps kept me away from revisiting this one in years past. But, and this is controversial, this is a very good book. It is a deeply religious book and Dostoyevsky himself was a man who seemed to be pretty terrified at what the implications of the scientific revolution would be. But, there is so much to be gleaned using Dostoyevsky’s own religious anxiety about the future and applying it more broadly to the secular development of society. We are all always negotiating when to let go of the past and when to embrace the future (change is, famously, scary). And while Dostoyevsky’s anxieties and perspective are influenced by his religiosity, you can really feel him laboring on the page, trying in earnest to understand the psychology of others. Each character gets an opportunity to bare their philosophy and ethos on the page. This may not always make for the most beautiful prose, but it gets the point across. Crime and Punishment maintains its relevance because, like all great art, its primary ideas are unmistakably human. This excerpt features one of the characters, Razumikhin (perhaps the closest analog to Dostoyevsky’s real thinking) bursting forth with his philosophy:

“‘The fact that I am in error shows that I am human. You will not attain to one single truth until you have produced at least fourteen false theories, and perhaps a hundred and fourteen, and this is honorable enough in its fashion; but we can’t even produce our errors out of our own heads. You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me, and if it is your own, I will embrace you! It is almost better to tell you own lies than somebody else’s truth; in the first case you are a man, in the second you are no better than a parrot! Truth remains; but life can be choked up; there have been instances. Well, what are we now? We are all, without exception, children in the kindergarten, in respect of science, progress, thought, invention, ideals, desires, liberalism, judgement, experience, and everything, everything, everything, everything! We have been content to rub along on other people’s ideas — we have rusted away! That is so isn’t it? What I say is true, isn’t it?’ exclaimed Razumikhin, shaking and squeezing both ladies’ hands. ‘Isn’t it?’”

That is a a nice microcosm of the experience of the novel. Feeling a need to develop a concrete philosophy in response to the terrifying modern world, proclaiming it boldly, and doubting it the whole time.

Also, this essay from Miriam Gordis.

Watching

This post is unintentionally focusing on old (relative) religious art; but a few weeks ago I watched F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). The only other Murnau I’ve seen was Nosferatu, and I wasn’t so blown away by it. The same can not be said for Faust. This is a seismic film. Murnau spends most of its run time inventing most modern special effects, and putting them to better use than most artists that came after him. The images that are super-imposed onto the film (specifically Faust’s elderly face, pushing through into the present in key moments) offer a haunting reminder of our life’s choices following us. These images and the classically German Expressionist acting adds tremendous visual element to a centuries-old religious myth. Truly an instance of the form expanding the material. And again, in visiting older religious art, you feel a true sense of struggle with the moral ideas at play. This is not saying we need more religious art today, merely to point out that those that peddle religious ideas in modern society are just very clearly applying these ideas at their most bastardized.

Also, Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984). A filthy, disgusting movie (complimentary).

Listening

Two months into 2025 and I’ve still been spending time with Hurray For the Riff Raff’s The Past is Still Alive from last year. Specifically “Ogallala”. The more I listen, the more I feel this is an album that, like Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising (2019), really captures all of the anxieties of Millenial conceptions of the future. Maybe I’ll write about this soon, and someone may have already written this, but I think this is meant to be a concept album in a desolate America, post-climate crisis. It’s western aesthetic and poignant title lull you into to thinking this is a piece of retrospective Americana. The revelation that we’re the era it’s reflecting on hits like a twist in a horror film.

Also, the songs of Townes Van Zandt. Specifically, 1969’s Townes Van Zandt and “Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel”.

On a velvet beach far beneath the reach
Of those that come to pry and preach
The natural man that tried to stand is fallin'
Well, how long will it be before he sees
You own his legs, but his mind is free?
Only you can tell, Miss Carousel
How long will he be crawling?

What he said.

Every day is full of increasingly terrifying news. The wealthy are in power. Vital public goods are being eradicated. Tech billionaires are increasingly unregulated and running rampant. The future is unrelentingly terrifying. But, at 62 Wallaby Way in the north of England, the story is much different. There lives a man who believes the future is not terrifying, but exciting and full of possibilities; that we are always on the precipice of the next great invention. This is the home of Wallace and Gromit, the claymation inventor and his silent, sophisticated dog. For nearly four decades now, they’ve been toiling away on new projects that seem to, regardless of era, acutely reflect the complicated feelings that come with technological “progress”.

In 2024, Wallace and Gromit returned (this time on Netflix) for their first full length feature since 2005 and their first adventure of any length since 2008. The new film, A Vengeance Most Fowl, is the narrative successor to 1993’s The Wrong Trousers (the zenith of Wallace and Gromit films). In The Wrong Trouser, it’s Gromit’s birthday, and as a “gift” Wallace invents self-walking trousers for Gromit to take himself on walks. Without a sound uttered, we see and feel Gromit’s disappointment that Wallace doesn’t understand the joy that comes from their walks and has now invented them into extinction. In an effort to fend off towering bill payments that he’s fallen behind on due to his excessive spending on inventing, Wallace also rents out Gromit’s room. The lodger turns out to be the nefarious penguin named Feathers McGraw who ends up co-opting Wallace’s newly invented pants to help him steal the “famous” blue diamond and frame Wallace for the crime. In the end, Gromit saves the day by rewiring the trousers, wresting them from Feathers’ control, and capturing Feathers for his arrest.

The new film follows the same beats. This time, Wallace invents a robotic gardening gnome so that Gromit doesn’t have to do “all of those tedious gardening tasks”. Gromit is nonplussed — devastated that another one of his favorite hobbies is being usurped by the “progress” of technology. From prison (read: the zoo), Feathers is able to hack into the microchips that control the gnomes and use them to aid his own jailbreak. Tellingly, all Feathers has to do to gain control of the machine is change its setting from “good” to “evil”. The stakes are the same now as they were then for Wallace and Gromit. Feathers is once again after the “blue diamond”, and his primary tool is Wallace’s own over-reliance on technology. This is always the central conflict of Wallace and Gromit films. Wallace invents with abandon, Gromit and the rest of us are left with the consequences. The resolution comes from some necessary compromise.

The classic man and dog pair make for a neatly constructed allegory. Wallace is the foolhardy acceleration of human progress. Gromit — who is both comedically and poignantly always silent — is the unsuspecting natural world being dragged along into the chaos. Both films, like the rest of the W&G catalog, attempt to find the center of the tech debate through the pairs’ competing desires. They communicate the logical stance that technology is not inherently bad, but its consequences rely on our restraint and its morality lies in the hands of its user. While seemingly an obvious proposition, this new film comes at a time when an outsized amount of power is being concentrated into the hands of those at the forefront of tech and the regulation of new technology is seemingly on the chopping block, no doubt for their benefit.

In the post-industrial age, this has been endless debate. When is enough? What is too much? It’s the primary question of the Wallace and Gromit filmography and the key reason they have just as much to say about today as they did 30 years ago. In our own world, the stakes aren’t exactly the same, but certainly comparable to the world of 30 years ago. In 1993, the internet boom was in its infancy and the new technology of the digital age was creating new ways to communicate, entertain yourself, and relegate daily tasks. And things were changing quickly; five years prior, in 1988, only about 40,000 households worldwide had internet access. By 1993, that number had risen to over a million. The rapid development of new technology was changing the very nature of our social existence and there was both tremendous excitement and palpable fear and confusion in response. Sound familiar? The internet continues to change the way we experience and interact with the world — from our relationships with each other to our relationships with information — and today, AI technology is the latest frontier promising to wildly reshape the ensuing decades. In the new film, the robotic gnomes quickly turn off the television when a movie about robots taking over plays. The two main camps of thought – those in tech that fully embrace AI and those on the outside that are wary of its unknown capabilities – continue to be at odds. The machines have changed, the questions have not.

The same can not be said, however, in Wallace and Gromit’s fictional unnamed northern English town. Everything in the world of technology remains the same today as it was 30 years ago. Technological development seems to have stagnated in the world of Wallace and Gromit. The TVs resemble 1970s television models – small boxes with the dials on the front sides. The phones are mostly rotary home phones (not a cell phone in sight). And the computers are the original hefty beige boxes that can only muster up pixelated, glitchy webpages. This is some sort of fantasy, in which the progress of different technologies stopped right at the point they historically began to considerably diminish our relationship with the tangible world. And so, the plasticine citizens of this animated world still read physical newspapers, use analog alarm clocks, and shop exclusively at physical stores. In both narrative and setting, there is a balance between enthusiasm for the new, and a respect for the old ways.

Plasticine – the putty-like material that Wallace, Gromit, and the rest are made out of – is itself an argument in favor of old, practical, tactile modes of creation. While the world of animation is increasingly visually homogeneous from film to film and studio to studio1, Aardman, the production team behind Wallace and Gromit, are stubbornly committed to the most strenuous, time-consuming, and tedious style of animation. The marks of the animator's labor are visibly present on the characters in some shots of the films. You can clearly see fingerprints on characters’ bodies in close up shots. From the opening shot of any Aardman feature, it’s clear that there is a reverence for the old ways. But this too must give way to new technology. In A Vengeance Most Fowl, there are moments in which, for the first time in W&G history, computer animation is employed. It is a bit jarring when it happens, because it is notably out of place; but these moments of computer-aided animation concede to the Wallace side of the debate that technology does have its benefits and is unavoidable in the modern world. Aardman have considered the question of technology enough to know it is equally as foolish to ignore new tech as it is to unquestioningly embrace it.

These factors together – the dynamic between Wallace and Gromit, the antiquated world they live in, and the material they are made out of – both differentiate Aardman’s W&G adventures from other modern animation and refine the central ideas of the films themselves. By inviting us into this fantasy world, Aardman inherently makes the case for the pleasures of the old world and its dated technology. It’s a case reflected further in the disparate personalities of the characters. While Wallace lives in the aforementioned world of anachronisms, his obsession with inventing sees him constantly rejecting it in favor of what he sees as unbridled progress (“Yes, tech; that’s the thing!” he proudly proclaims to Gromit in the new film). In the asides we get of Gromit, we see the poor pooch desperately trying to escape into the joys of the old modes of mental and personal enrichment. One of the recurring gags of Wallace and Gromit are the pun-filled titles of the high-brow art he’s reading and listening to. In The Wrong Trousers he sits at the breakfast table reading The Republic by Pluto; in A Vengeance Most Fowl he sits in bed reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia “Woof”2. He’s been shown to have albums by Bark (Bach) and Poochini (Puccini) in his classical music collection. These are just Easter eggs, yes, and good enough to get a chuckle. But we routinely see Gromit frustratedly putting his book down, distracted by the inventions Wallace has foisted upon him. Like most universities, the assumed prevalence of the STEM fields has pushed the humanities to the side.

In these moments, we are undoubtedly meant to be more sympathetic toward Gromit who, as a dog, is ironically far more in touch with his humanity than Wallace. It hurts the heart to see Wallace so flippantly cast aside the simple pleasures Gromit clings to in favor of technology. We automatically recognize the value of the things Wallace eschews and Gromit yearns for every time we see them being replaced. This almost always leads to some cathartic payoff. In A Vengeance Most Fowl, Gromit looks longingly at the old teapot he and Wallace used to use — now relegated to collecting dust in the decades since Wallace invented a machine to make tea for them. Later in the film, there is a gag in which Wallace is unable to remember how to use the simple teapot since it has been so long and he decides it is “broken”. In the film’s twist, we learn that Feathers McGraw actually hid the diamond in the unused teapot before being escorted away by the police all those years ago. Wallace’s blind dependence on technology has in effect allowed him to be set up. It’s another reminder that the more we cede to technology the more we cede to those that control it. The results inevitably leave us playing the part of the fool.

As always, there is a moment of clarity that allows Wallace and Gromit to overcome the unforeseen consequences of new technology. The two team up to one by one reprogram the robot gnomes back to the side of good and, in the end, are able to once again foil Feathers McGraw’s plot. After being helped, then saved by the robot gnomes, Gromit gives one a hug prompting Wallace to exclaim “I knew you’d embrace technology!” As always, no matter how many times the lesson must be learned, Wallace can only see the good of technology and ignore the vitally important context surrounding it. As such, I’m sure there will be more trouble for the duo to get into and more Wallace and Gromit films to come. When they do, their world will certainly look even more different from ours. We can only hope that we have learned our lessons a bit quicker than Wallace.

This is the first in what I intend to make a series of articles focused solely on the examination of a single song. These will sometimes be about older songs, sometimes newer songs. I reserve the right to change the name of the series if I think of something better. I trust the 20 or so of you here from day one to never call me on it.

Last year marked the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest years by a single artist in rap music history. In 2004, MF DOOM released the Madlib-produced Madvillainy and the self-produced MM..Food within eight months of each other. Both albums have long been regarded as classics and were major works that both elevated DOOM’s visibility in the rap landscape (though still inarguably with non-commercial markets) and allowed him to exhibit the distinct primary modes of his songwriting: fluctuating between playful, sophomoric character work and sharp cultural critique.

DOOM, sadly, did not live to see the 20th anniversaries of his two greatest works. He passed away in 2020 from angiodema. But his old label, Stones Throw Records, did mark the occasion with two new releases in 2024. First, came a re-release of MM..Food featuring a number of remixes to the original tracks and a full disc of interviewer with DOOM from the album’s initial release. Then came a release of the Madvillainy demos — a collection of early versions of the songs that offer insight into DOOM’s process and a peak into the playfulness, already prevalent on so many of his previously released songs, that informed his process.

Unfortunately missing from these demos is “Curls”, a cut from the middle of the original album that feels more like an interlude than a fully developed song on first listen. But, despite its brevity, it’s a primary DOOM track for me and many others; one that manages to display all facets of his writing in tone, style, and structure. “Curls” sees DOOM at his most dynamic, mixing moments of humor with an unmistakable sadness. In it, he fluctuates between letting his mind flow freely in a stream of consciousness and crafting a condensed, mysterious narrative of a life that very well may have been his own. “Curls” is quintessential DOOM, throwing more at you in a minute and a half than you could process in 20 years.

In one of the interviews on the aforementioned MM..Food 20th anniversary release, DOOM talks about writer’s block. “The English language is so vast, not to mention the different dialects and slang that’s involved,” he says. “Plus, when you get other languages mixed with English and their dialects and slangs that came from…people migrating into America…There’s no way you’re gonna run out of stupid shit to say.”

This is a man in love with language, determined to dig into its crevices and extract whatever fun he can out of it (and not in an Eminem summa-lumma dooma-lumma way). From the opening, “Curls” announces that intent.

Villain get the money like curls

They just tryna get a nut like squirrels, in his mad world

Land of milk and honey with the swirls

where reckless naked girls get necklaces and pearls

You get the idea that this may have been a first draft, simply finding every initial rhyme off of the top of his head, from which the rest of the song could unfurl. It very well may have been, as this kind of stream of consciousness is a hallmark of many DOOM songs – one that draws you in by letting his mouth find the sounds that will linger in the minds of listeners. Once you’re in, however, the ideas behind the soft images we’re presented with begin to take shape. This quality in his lyrics is essential to the entire DOOM project – one that was always extracting the breadth of emotions and meanings out of ostensibly simple ideas. DOOM personified his ideals in his public life as well. He only appeared in public wearing a mask. He famously, on occasion, sent doppelgangers to perform live shows. It was a commitment he saw through even in death. It took two months for his passing to become public knowledge. DOOM’s greatest skill as a songwriter, just as his masked exterior suggests, was his ability to deceive. On first listen, the simplicity of his rhymes and the pure pleasure of their syllabic combinations stand out with their nursery-rhyme-like repeatability. On second, and third, and hundredth, it’s the nearly endless lanes of interpretation behind these simple images and sounds that keep the mind whirring.

On the microphone known as the Crown Ruler

Never lied to mom when we said we found the moolah

‘Five-hundred something dollars sitting right there in the street

Huh, now let’s try and get something to eat’

Just a few lines later we’ve shifted from the opening string of images that set the table, to a narrative of two boys “finding” money in the street with aims of putting something on the table. The delivery here is key. DOOM’s nonchalant “five-hundred something dollars sitting right here in the street” hints at some missing piece of the story. Found money, or stolen? Importantly, the narrative presents these children explaining their newfound riches to their mother. It’s a small detail in this delivery that imbues an important question to inform our thinking through the rest of the song. What follows is a string of lines that tell the rest of the story of this boy’s hedonistic youth. There’s mention of a “rhyming klepto who can’t go up in the store no more” and references to smoking weed at age seven as well as “showing up to class with Moet in a flask.” Tracing back to those opening lines, they are no longer just words and images stacked on top of one another. The ideas they presented us with take on deeper meaning as the quickly unfolding narrative of our faceless character develops. “Tryna get a nut like squirrels in this mad world” now refers to the pursuit of both pleasure and survival of whoever we’re following. “Land or milk and honey with the swirls where reckless naked girls get necklaces and pearls” are the escapist havens found in these pursuits.

Some of the details of these slices of life are hard to believe. DOOM’s delivery is, again, the guide. When he says “when he turned four he started flowing to the poor,” and later tells of asking a teacher to leave class so he can hook up with his girl, we’re supposed to laugh at the absurdity. These are punchlines. DOOM himself admitted so much of his process was finding “stupid shit to say.” But in these quick scenes, there are more than just jokes; there is a throughline being developed. The character we’re presented with bears a psychology that’s constantly seeking its next escape, whether it be through sex, drugs, or the thrill of another score. DOOM, in this case, admits to the embellishment of the scenes saying, “his life is like a folklore legend/Why you so stiff, you need to smoke more brethren.” But, don’t folktales and legends get passed down for the lessons within them?

This acknowledgment emphasizes a more symbolic than literal meaning to the images presented to us, and in them we’re introduced to another DOOM staple: the use of third person. This is yet another layer of the performance constantly at play in DOOM’s work – one that keeps you at arms length from the truth. Rap is, mostly but not exclusively, a genre of first-person narrative. It is assumed that anything said on the microphone is confessional, a reflection of personal experience. When that’s not the case, non-first person narrative raps usually announce themselves clearly. DOOM, however, developed an entire gallery of characters and personas that he would either use as protagonists or play himself on his songs. Across projects and sometimes within the same song, DOOM could be himself, or he could be any of his many aliases including Viktor Vaughm, King Geedorah, and JJ Doom. Starting with MM..Food and Madvillainy and continuing through the rest of his career, DOOM referred to the actors in his songs almost exclusively in the third person. On MM..Food’s “Beef Rap”, it’s not “I wear a mask to cover the raw flesh,” it’s “he wears a mask to cover the raw flesh”; on Madvillainy’s “All Caps” it’s not “just remember all caps when you spell my name” it’s “just remember all caps when you spell the man name.” It’s fair to assume, in some instances more than others, that DOOM was at times referring to himself, but he was very deliberately never answering the question definitively. There was a constant blur created by the performance that covered the truth far more than just his mask. In this, he found a freedom to play with ideas in a way he could separate himself from unlike, say, Nas or Jay-Z who were only ever rapping as Nas and Jay-Z. Mythmaking was essential to the man and his work. “Curls” is another mythical tale in the discography, spun from stories that seem to be based in a truth, either lived or observed, but are purposely obfuscated. This open fictionalizing allows DOOM to mine his lines for all of their emotional potential: not just the sorrow, but the humor that comes through as well. Not just the man, but the mask.

The series of hedonistic snippets end in a flurry that mimics the repetition of the opening lines:

Known to smoke a whole mountain of hash to the ash

Boom-bash leave the room with the stash

Assume it’s in a smash, DOOM get the cash

Then, just as quickly as it began, “Curls” ends with its disarmingly light instrumental fading out to blaring organ chords. In just a minute and a half, it’s over, barely giving you enough time to gather all that’s just been laid down. It could very believably have been freestyled — true free association. DOOM himself recognized his brain worked in this way. From the same interview as before:

“It’s just a matter of not thinking too hard about it. And I gotta keep a pen and pad around me for when I get those little stupid thoughts…it’s like a never ending stream of it…even now, it’s like, I don’t know what I’m gonna say on the next album, but I know that I’ll catch enough good ones.”

Like the songs that spawn from it, DOOM presents his process as deceptively simple. He was just looking to “catch enough good ones.” But digging a bit deeper reveals just how much was beneath the surface of every minute and a half long string of thoughts — enough that 20 years later, we still haven’t caught all the good ones.

Seventeen. That is the number of publications that named Charli XCX’s BRAT as the “best” album of 2024. Across the same 17 publications at the end of 2023, there were 14 different albums in the #1 spot. In 2022, you’d find 12 different answers. And so on. It is exceedingly rare to get this level of uniformity of opinion on anything, let alone something as subjective as music. These 17 publications serve, in theory, 17 different readerships, with some overlap, but not so much that they are ever likely to be in agreement across the board (even in the age of poptimism). In those 2022 and 2023 lists you’ll find artists ranging from Beyonce, to Sufjan Stevens, to Gangs of Youth. That’s a breadth that ranges from the epitome of pop, to indie folk, to Australian alt rock. And yet, in 2024, they all landed on BRAT.

The answer to the mystery of how these publications became so aligned in 2024 is not one that can be solved by the music alone. BRAT’s ubiquity is reflective of something even almost entirely separated from its music. It is a testament to the overwhelming force the idea of “brat” was in 2024, so much more than the songs of BRAT that ,regardless of their historical taste, so many outlets all found themselves reorienting themselves in its orbit. Something that ostensibly appeals to such a wide swath of the listening public is seemingly the platonic goal of “pop music.” This is poptimism manifest; and, for Charli, it’s the achievement of a vision at least a decade in the making. Not just a great “pop” album, but pop art that pushes the idea of the album itself.

In the buildup to the release of her 2022 album Crash, Charli made it clear that the album would be going for more traditional pop sounds and, in turn, she would play the role of a more traditional “pop artist”. Not party girl, not icon, not Charli, just a “pop star” – up for reader interpretation. In an interview with NPR Crash’s release, Charli said, “Pop is supposed to be a fantasy, right? I feel that sometimes people are so caught up in this idea of being real and authentic, particularly now. I feel like now it's almost a necessity for the validity of an artist for them to be considered real or genuine or down to earth. You know, ‘Well, she's a real artist because she writes her own songs.’ All this stuff which feels very sort of Bob Dylan to me, which I don't really care about personally.” Crash was, in theory, a performance in the hollowness of pop stardom and a lack of authenticity that brought into question the existence of authenticity itself. In practice? The approach was met pretty flatly by fans; and the music, while not bad, does lack a certain punch that Charli’s previous three albums were loaded with. By hedging her own personality in the album’s construction, Charli perhaps proved the exact opposite of her theory to be true by falling into the same pits of a “sell out” album that she was trying to wink at. Pop as an idea isn’t enough, there does indeed need to be a personality and purpose behind it. Crash both (lightly) alienated her legions of fans who’d ridden the wave with her for a decade, and failed to make a significant mark on the broader music landscape. While it did end up being Charli’s first silver record, Crash was only a meager step forward in terms of sales and visibility at a time when Charli was expected to take a major leap. The album, in its rejection of Charli’s authorial voice, is a sort of anti-art exhibition that laid bare the true hallmark of pop stardom lies in the star themselves. BRAT, in turn, sold itself only as “brat”: a word, image, and now brand that organically birthed the kind of mass pop commentary that Crash was so strategically designed to. BRAT is the equal and opposite reaction to Crash as an album that creates an entire ecosystem from Charli’s personality, taste, and artistry instead of taking those out of the equation to make a statement about “pop”. The result is, ironically, a nearly singular example of the power of “pop” that has officially allowed Charli to make that major leap.

The album’s success, obviously, is largely because of the music. It’s good! Better than Crash, but not quite as cutting as 2020’s how i’m feeling now. Its best tracks (360, Sympathy is a knife, Von Dutch, Apple) are some of the best in Charli’s discography. Tonally, it is a fluid mixture of pop fantasy and brutal reality – a more balanced formula and a paradox that makes Brat more resonant than some of her previous work. But when we look back on BRAT in five, 10, 20 years, its legacy may be more about the pieces that surround the music than the music itself. It’s these pieces that are the true feat of Brat and the real success of Charli’s artistic project.

With Charli, aesthetics are always half of the equation. She is, like Bob Dylan who she brushed off in her quote, an artist who believes in the performance of the art beyond the art itself. The image, the persona, and the flashes of personal life that we do get are all a part of it. “Music alone is not giving me the world, I need an artist to create the world,” she said in a promotional interview for BRAT, “a great artist to me is more than the songs; it’s the entire culture and space they inhabit.” So, naturally, Brat’s aesthetic quality was as calculated as anything; and while maybe not so explicitly aiming for a critique of the idea of the mega popstar, Brat does offer just that. Its cover purposely features no image of the star herself (a trend Charli said she found increasingly “boring”). It took an internal team of designers five months to settle on the specific shade of green that would be used for its background fill. The choice between Arial or Verdana for the font was a similarly agonizing one. It is an image of three pieces: green, black, and the word “brat”. But, so considered were the decisions that led to each piece, that the total image was able to suggest the abrasiveness and messiness of the music behind it, and serve as a hotbed for what was to come.

Now, iconic album covers have been a part of the equation of albums for decades. Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and Nirvana’s Nevermind are all covers that have recognizability and cultural currency that extend beyond the songs they precede. BRAT’s cover will certainly join those on many future listicles of “best” or “most iconic” album covers of all time. But, while these other album’s covers are undoubtedly a part of their respective album’s mystiques, none of them spawned an aesthetic around the album itself in the same way BRAT and its cover have. The three aforementioned artists were more well-known at their peaks, certainly, but their artistry was contained more in the artists themselves or a part of broader artistic movements. More simply, it was and is harder to identify something as being “thriller” or “born in the U.S.A.” than it is to identify something as “brat”. You can dress like Bruce Springsteen as he appeared on the cover of Born in the U.S.A. or like Michael Jackson on the cover of or as he appeared in any of the music videos associated with Thriller. But, your look wouldn’t be “born in the U.S.A.” or “thriller”, you’d just be dressing like Springsteen or Jackson. As for Nevermind, it has since become a symbol of grunge and 90s culture in general. Its provocative cover automatically signals so much of what both of those things were about just as Brat’s cover hints at what’s to come. But, even that importance is more as a piece of a certain era and ethos than it is the hot bed from which the culture propagated. Brat, on the other hand, from its cover to its name to its music, has taken elements of the subcultures Charli has often infused into her music and writing (rave, queer, punk, hyperpop) and created something new. Something that has altered how we perceive the word for which the album is named and goes beyond just a reference to Charli and her music.

So, what is brat? It’s become a bit of a meta-joke to understand the true meaning of the word itself – most notably when former presidential candidate Kamala Harris was referenced in a tweet by Charli that simply read “kamala IS brat.” A confusion took hold of those out of the loop as Charli’s fans applied the word to describe an ever-increasing variety of things, like club-hopping, SSRI-dependent smurfs. The use of the word outside of the context of the album created an interesting paradox. The closer one gets to a definition of “brat” the murkier that definition becomes. And that is precisely because the use of “brat” in this context is impressionistic. The brat is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. The conversation around it has been so communal, that it has achieved something of an external ecosystem beyond the album itself. This is where BRAT, as a project, is truly singular. More successfully than any album before, BRAT has expanded the possibilities of an album’s artistic reach. The decisions made to produce an album’s songs, track order, cover and videos have been a part of how we consume and analyze albums for decades. But, how many albums have roped language and lifestyle into their sphere? There was instantly an in-the-know appeal to BRAT. Those who got it, got it immediately; those who didn’t labored to understand. From this, we renamed a season and something as milquetoast as the Today Show covered the phrase “brat summer.” Not just Billboard, but RIFF magazine recognized BRAT’s achievement. Not just the Forty-Five, but The Washington Post. BRAT became such a topic of conversation outside of the music that it started to shape a cultural moment for many people who had never heard a song on the album.

This is because BRAT works on so many levels beyond the music in a way that introduces new ideas into what an album can contain as a single work of art. Sure, there have been extensions of albums in the past. Music videos roll out on the heels every album and are, theoretically, an extension of those albums. But, these are so often more associated with the specific song they’re made for than the album. Their true legacy is tied to a four minute YouTube video to play in college dorms for eternity. Artists have tried in the past, concertedly, to create albums that contain their own artistic worlds and ecosystems. Primary examples include the Beatles and Prince – both artists created full-length films to go with their albums. But these secondary works, while expanding the experiences of the albums, act more as addendums than added layers to the album itself. In creating a second location for the ideas of the albums to go, these artists actually limited the expanse that the original work could achieve. Charli, wisely, let the album breathe and color in its world naturally with questions about language and its meaning, mass culture, subculture, and the password to her Google Drive.

BRAT’s greatest achievement, then, is that one can claim it as the “best” album of 2024 for reasons outside of the music – something these publications would likely never consider doing before and maybe didn’t consciously consider this time around. Charli was able to create an album with an extra visual and tactile element never before realized on this grand of a scale. The cultural moment of BRAT and “brat summer” and Charli’s 2024, are a part of history now and a part of musical history that has a distinct feel and look, even if we can’t find the perfect language for it. Taste became secondary, because BRAT forced its audience to consider an album as so much more than its music, but as a living, breathing work of art in our culture. As Charli has for so long tried to prove, music is only part of the equation. The rest is all brat.