David DePriest

Category: Music

  • Literally just gushing about music I like (Feb 2024 Edition)

    Literally just gushing about music I like (Feb 2024 Edition)

    One of the things I love to do, both on this blog and in real life, is think about stuff entirely too much. I love to draw connections, analyze things through different frameworks, and play with the substance and implications of things.

    This is cool and all (sorry to anyone in my life who’s been bored or upset by me being a way about things), but sometimes it’s good to just like things. So today, in lieu of a post I was planning about sad music, empathy, and social expectation, I’m just going to gush about some music I really like. This is going to be kinda like the “What I’m Reading” post that I intended to turn into a series but never did.

    venturing, Ghostholding

    In that first post, I wrote about venturing, the alt-rock side project of independent musician/rapper/producer Jane Remover. venturing, once thought to be abandoned, now serves as the place where Jane puts their emo/alt-rock experiments while they take the main project back to its roots in internet rap/digicore. “Sister” was a potent refinement of the themes that Jane played with on Census Designated, and Ghostholding as a whole plays with a lot of the same ideas and dynamics.

    Most of these songs are about unrequited love, sex, religion, and connection. Often, the narrator in these songs is someone trying desperately to save a relationship that’s already slipping away (“Play my guitar”), the victim of an untenable situationship (“Something has to change,” “No sleep”), or the one left after a relationship’s ended (“Guesthouse”). One of Jane’s strengths as an artist (at least since Census Designated) has been their ability to write lyrics that punch you in the gut, and those kinds of lyrics are all across this record. A selection of my favorites:

    • “I’ve been feeling some pain for fun now/Didn’t even wanna let it show/I’ve been hiding all the details/Just hated feeling alone.” (“Play my guitar”)
    • “Cleveland, I cry profusely in a hotel room/And it’s been paid for two, but it’s all mine.” (“Guesthouse”)
    • “If it’s anything, then love me / Even if it’s softly, my life is a wet dream / I’m screaming, got my hands above me / You make me feel so lucky, if only that meant something.” (“Something has to change”).

    These lines are cutting and emotionally resonant. The pain of allowing oneself to suffer in an unfulfilling relationship because of fear of being alone; the disappointment when one tries to spend time with a purported lover, only to be left with the evidence of one’s effort; the jealousy that manifests when one is passed up for someone else, even after twisting oneself into impossible knots.

    Enriched by the sonic palette of Midwest emo, shoegaze, and 90’s indie rock, these are fundamentally torch songs. More than any of Remover’s prior records, the songs are conventional in their structures (there’s no 7 minute drone track like “Contingency Song” here). Despite the subject matter, this is perhaps the most accessible release Jane Remover’s made. At least until Revengeseekerz.

    This record has been ruining me emotionally for the past few weeks (dropping this on Valentines Day was a diabolical move), and I expect it will continue to do so.

    Kelela, In the Blue Light

    Kelela is, in my opinion, a near-singular artist. While it may have been easy for listeners and critics to lump her in with other Black women alt-R&B singers in the 2010s — a fact not helped by the the shared sonic palette (often provided by producers like Arca) that occurred across their records — I always felt that Kelela’s art was more tied to the lineage of Black music than the others. She may have been at the vanguard, but it was clear from the start that she had a rich appreciation for history.

    This appreciation is on display on In the Blue Light, a record that is indebted to Black jazz artists like Betty Carter, as well as to those like Joni Mitchell who spent their career embracing and engaging with Black art (albeit in complicated and oft problematic ways). Kelela covers both Carter (“30 Years”) and Mitchell (“Furry Sings the Blues”) here, and both covers speak to this purpose of honoring Black music and reckoning with the ways that it can evolve and interact with the broader pop zeitgeist.

    The “Furry” cover is particularly striking for an artist like Kelela, who has made the uplift and recognition of Black artistry core to her artistic project. “Furry” is, at core, a song about appropriation — Mitchell, as a jazz and blues dilettante, decamps to Nashville to learn from the greats, is rebuffed for her culture vulturism, and then proceeds to write a hit song about it and not pay the Black artists she’s arguably ripping off. For Kelela to cover the song (excellently) is, in some ways, the ultimate act of reclamation — a song about a white artist knowingly pilfering from Black artists is rendered out by a Black artist leaning heavily into her own rich connection to the jazz and blues lineage.

    Kelela, perched in Blue Note, is doing what Mitchell could never, even flanked by Herbie Hancock and Chaka Khan: she’s making a legitimate claim to living in the heartland of jazz.

    Putting aside the politics of the record, it’s worth noting that her original music has never sounded better. Her lyrics are peppered with detail and saturated with complicated emotions.

    In the original Take Me Apart versions of these songs, Kelela’s ear for production elevated the drama of the songs, but maybe detracted from the richness of the lyrics themselves. The high-drama of Bok Bok’s production on “Blue Light” partly overshadowed the drama of the encounter described. Kelela’s indebtedness to underground dance music could lull listeners into thinking that the lyrics (as in a lot of electronic music) were secondary to the beats.

    In the Blue Light, however, demonstrates that Kelela’s strengths have always been her acrobatic voice and her pen game. Re-interpreting songs mostly from her debut album Take Me Apart with looser, organic arrangements, she demonstrates stunning vocal ability and a true insight into the emotional core of her music. Taking songs like “Better” and “Waitin’” and turning them into soft ballads, complete with harp and heavenly harmonies, allows the song’s subject matter to soar. In “Better,” the story of a couple breaking up, trying again, and resolving to be friends is rendered in heartrending detail over a spare, melancholy arrangement. “Waitin’” swaps the original’s Janet Jackson style bounce for a tentative keys-led arrangement that conveys the song’s heady mix of anticipation and anxiety.

    After Raven, I was pretty convinced that Kelela was unlike anyone in popular music right now. But this record cements her in my mind not just as an excellent albums artist, but as someone whose voice and ear are basically unmatched. The other folks in R&B right now just don’t do it like her.

    Baths, Gut

    Recently, Ian Macartney of The Skinny wrote about how the music of Baths, one of the various projects of Will Wiesenfeld, had helped him to navigate his queerness, particularly his queer melancholy. I was so happy to read this because it expressed something that I’d felt for a long time but couldn’t quite identify.

    Songs like “Human Bog” had spoken to me; the relationship described in “Incompatible” haunted me; the anguished carnality of “No Eyes” hit me almost too hard. These thorny emotions — of guilt at being insufficiently flamboyant, of shame in being overly sexual, of resenting someone in a relationship while dragging it spitefully into the future — are all things that I at one point or another have dealt with. Hearing these emotions done up in gorgeous synth-pop has been rewarding.

    The freshly-released Gut, more than any prior Baths release, mines material from this messy mix of queer feeling. “Sea of Men,” “The Sound of A Blooming Flower,” “Homosexuals” and others explicitly explore how Wiesenfeld has been affected by his Christian upbringing, how the weight of the dogma has stunted and scarred him. “Chaos” details his feelings of inadequacy as he lives in the apps, moving from hook-up to hook-up as his friends settle down.

    I’m a cis bi man who, more often than not, passes for straight. I’ve not had to deal too much with explicit anti-gay sentiment. What I have had to deal with is skepticism from other queer people that I’m not truly like them, skepticism from lovers that I’m insufficiently committed to them (or to anyone), and that I’m not enough of anything to be worth loving. And as a lapsed Catholic, I regularly struggle with the propriety of my life and choices. In “The Sound of A Blooming Flower,” Wiesenfeld questions whether he can be loved because of the trauma of his upbringing, whether he’s beyond repair, whether he can withstand the beauty of connection. The song swells as he calls out to God, looking for answers. The album ends. There is no answer, we’re left knocking at the door of the Son of God, knowing full-well that he won’t answer.

  • It is no good bearing false witness

    It is no good bearing false witness

    I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message recently, and one thing that stuck out to me more than anything was the profound sense of obligation that he feels towards readers, his political allies, and the ancestors. His writing is less about him having great, illuminating truths to share and more about serving as a conduit through which other currents can flow. This self-effacing role for the writer — the one left once those who really drive history have done their work — is interesting to me as someone who thinks of writing not just as a a political, social act but an artistic one.

    Coates seems to imagine the role of the writer, the artist, as someone who discovers truth and remakes myth. Someone who “walks the land” in search of answers to tough questions and shares them with a world eager to hear them and willing to change in response. The writer is a combatant at the front lines of an epochal war over meaning in the world, their role is to not only defeat harmful established myths, but to establish new ones. This is a beautiful, albeit idealistic, way to cast the artist’s role. Put this way, the role of reporter or griot or poet or rapper or songwriter is deeply important sociopolitically — clarity on what the moment means comes not through elections or movements or violence, but through the pen.

    But what happens when this fundamental relationship between artist and audience breaks down? Can an artist truly move people if the people they’re trying to reach aren’t listening?

    This question has been swirling in my mind a lot in relation to Ethel Cain’s new album/EP/project Perverts. At first billed as her sophomore album and then recursively cast as an EP, a side project, or whatever else, the record is at turns horrifying and beautiful. It’s a record not just about Cain’s stable of trusted hurts — God and religion, shame, punishment — but also about the ways in which our relationship with the world shapes us. It very well may be the best record of the year.

    A lot of ink has been spilled about Cain’s frustration with the reductive way that critics, fans treat her art. Cain wrote on her Tumblr that she was frustrated that fans seem to treat her work more as a joke or a product than as something that’s worth considering intellectually and emotionally. There’s no discourse about her work, she contends, just memes.

    Perverts has been mostly considered as a response to this concern. It is almost hilariously antagonistic to modern pop sensibility — the first couple of tracks are minimalist drones meant more to evoke dread or anxiety than sublimity, the few traditional singer-songwriter songs (“Punish,” “Vacillator,” “Amber Waves”) undercut themselves with titanic length and uncomfortable subject matter.

    But I think this reading of Perverts is too reductive. Like Coates, I think Cain sees the role of the artist as a combatant who seeks to upset the audience’s pre-established narratives about the world. It seems to me that the aim of Perverts, more than some adolescent antagonism, is to force listeners to confront the ideas that they hold about the world and themselves.

    The characters populating Perverts, rendered minimally, are exactly what’s described on the tin, and their neuroses fill the album with an odd eroticism. This isn’t shock jock horrorcore, these are lovely rendered portraits meant to demonstrate the strange and haunting similarities between the listener and the ostensibly “bad” people populating these tracks.

    Coates writes that “[a]ll our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this–to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.” He does this by writing explicitly political tracts that speak directly to history — the essays of The Message challenge the right-wing effort to censor anti-racist books, the near-century long ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and how his trip to Senegal reshaped his thinking on Blackness. Cain similarly does this by excavating the darkest corners of her heart, using composite characters and allegory to force discussions about our proclivities. One cannot listen to Perverts, a record filled with divine condemnation, sexual repression, and body horror, and not be haunted.

    This process, Coates notes, is difficult not only because it involves confronting the world, but also confronting oneself. It involves reckoning with the narratives that one has internalized and interrogating them. Coates does this constantly throughout The Message — he challenges his internalized anti-Blackness in Senegal, his cosmopolitanism when he decamps to South Carolina, and his tacit acceptance of Zionist lies when he visits Occupied Palestine. In each essay, he revels in his own initial ignorance, he’s almost gleeful in revealing how wrong he was.

    Cain, by contrast, seems to delight in playing the opposite role. She renders deeply unsympathetic characters in sympathetic hues, forcing the listener to sit with how much of themselves is reflected back in these portraits. Take a song like “Onanist,” which sketches out the character rejecting religious dogma in order to pursue sexual pleasure. There’s a lot here: there’s the seductive pull, the attendant shame, the climax. It’s pretty heavy. Through it’s nearly 7 minute runtime, we’re made to sit with that weight. Like Coates, Cain seems to revel in the confrontation between what we’re made to believe and what is.

    “Housofpsychoticwomn” sketches out the one-sided love that a woman has with an abusive partner (heavily implied to be God Himself). This track is wild in a lot of ways — it’s 14 minutes long of mantric repetition — but this central perversion of the traditional relationship between God and believer is so interesting. God in this song breadcrumbs our protagonist, promising again and again magnificent, fantastic love and never delivering. There’s hints of Genesis and Eden here, as well, which complicates the whole thing even further: a woman pleading with a God that’s rejected her for love. The core subversion here is a powerful idea: God as manipulator, as abusive partner. It challenges the listener to play with received ideas about the beneficence of the divine, and the overt sexuality of the dynamic calls into question the line between the sacred and the profane. All of this is couched in the language of perversion and obsession — nothing here is as it should be, nothing here is pure.

    I don’t want to draw too much blood from this stone: Coates’ book, like his previous masterwork Between the World and Me, is soulful and resonant in ways that Perverts isn’t and arguably doesn’t try to be. While both seek to dislodge socially constructed narratives and challenge their audiences, they do so for different reasons and in largely different ways. But it struck me in engaging with them both the strange affinities between them, and I felt the need to tease them out here. At core, both of them view the artist as a provocateur, someone who has a duty to challenge the audience and society at large. This duty is what the artist owes their audience, and we as an audience have a duty to engage.