If you don’t like me for me, then I gotta live with it ‘cos I can’t be nobody but the Smash.
I confess to a disconnect with any sort of dubstep scene. The most obvious and popular is the mainstream, bass-heavy down and dirty dubstep that’s been crassly titled ‘brostep’ by purists - about the stupidest thing one can be among music - that’s captured the robot hearts of the era’s yoof. That’s more my younger sister’s bag. The other side of the coin is that which the purists are trying so hard to stake and preserve as “real” dubstep, like the earlier stuff from the likes of Burial, Skream et al., or, if you ask James Blake, James Blake. A friend of mine recently said that the success of dubstep is just the desire for the reemergence of the rave scene, which seems fine to me. I mean, I wasn’t there but I have watched some Charlie Brooker and my understanding is that a certain sect of people regard the 90s rave scene as the golden era of electronic music, and you can always tell who these people are because whenever somebody says ‘rave’ they become distant and sullen as they talk about the old days like a shellshocked vet. The loud noises, the effusive camaraderie; yeah, it’s a real neat comparison. So I don’t really know how to qualify dubstep except subjectively, at least when it’s presented on record, which I think might be an inadequate format because I suspect so much of what’s meaningful only comes out in a group setting. I didn’t really get Skrillex until I was riding in a friend’s car back to my place from this swanky soiree to pick up my ID - the novelty of getting carded has worn off - and sorting through a stack of burned CD’s, and he said, “Put on the Skrillex one.” Hesitant, I did anyway, because I was just thankful to get a lift although I did later give him the warm sixpack of CUB’s finest I’d been keeping in my room. Riding along the empty highway, the bass vibrating our masses, I got a glimpse of the good stuff the kids go for. We were one, our conscious and corporeal selves as wobbly as the bass. We weren’t just listening to dubstep; in that moment, we were dubstep.
As you can imagine, and as you’ve probably experience, this sort of transcendent revelation is hardly inspired by headphones and an iPod. You’ve really gotta feel it, with as many people in close proximity as possible. Otherwise it just sounds like so much noise. On that most righteous of notes, a couple weeks ago I was at one of the small, overcrowded clubs near my house that decidedly cater to the newly post-high school scene and the 30 year olds looking to pick them up, and the Skrillex remix of Benny Benassi’s “Cinema” comes on. As per the above, I’m unaware of any sort of ‘dubstep dance’ so I was shocked and excited to find myself not feeling self-conscious while vacillating between something like an acid-high ape at an 80s disco and an epileptic cyborg. Probably to the great embarrassment of everybody around me, but if you can adopt a mentality of solipsism when you hear that bass drop, the rest takes care of itself. This is absolutely the most necessary thing to have ever been written about Skrillex. This is the Skrillex review that needed to be written.
Four Year Strong - ”Wrecked ‘Em? Damn Near Killed ‘Em”
There are certain teenage artefacts that’ve been welcomed through the pearly gates of critical consensus which you can winkingly champion while being safe in the knowledge that you’re still cool or something. It’s the desire for this sort of acceptance that conjured the dread spectre of ironic appreciation and galvanised its rule in the mid-to-late aughts (or naughts, if you’re a glass half empty kinda gal) by attempting to justify the worth of pop culture ephemera by its mockability. There’s slightly more to it than that, but that’s essentially it, except that never truly satisfied because any conflicted self-regarding trendy spinning “See You Again” in 2007 still had to do it in secret because the struggle to reconcile its transparent conceit with how fucking good it sounds would inevitably show on the face of the one who put it on, resulting in immediate excommunication, although also awakening the same conflict in those fortunate (or unfortunate, given their previous self-assurance) enough to be within earshot. In the comic Phonogram there’s a group of antagonistic sorcerers called Retromancers and one day I’ll write the spiritual sequel penning Poptimists in a similarly analogical way, except they’ll be gallant knights ushering in a new era of glorious earnestness, but tune in next week for their fall from grace! So a group of critics come out of an outcast adolescence and battle through the post-adolescent gauntlet for a sense of identity by casting off everything that was previously meaningful and come out of it realising that scarcity and obscurity are basically irrelevant to something’s meaning, which is why putting on “Dammit” or “Killing In The Name” at any twentysomething party anywhere in the Western world will make you the most magnetic person there, but still doesn’t give an automatic pass to the rest of the music that appears on the same tangent. That is to say, it’s a shame Four Year Strong never made it through those gates, because this is one hell of a jam.
LMFAO - ”Party Rock Anthem”
I originally thought of this as dystopian but actually it perfectly encapsulates my vision for the New World Order.
Have you ever seen a bunch of people dance to dubstep?
Because I did last night and it is one of the funniest things I have EVER seen in my life
Yeah but the thing is, they were probably having a way better night than you. Really, I think making fun of people dancing is a crazy low thing to do yet it goes unpunished because everybody’s had a phase where they’ve stood in the corner of a dark room exhaling and rolling their eyes because they’re afraid of a non-existent consequence. It’s the domain of the insecure against those unashamed of self-expression, and if everybody just stopped doing it then there’d be nothing for anybody to be afraid of in the first place.
supcakes asked: I know you already know this, but you are Tom Haverford.
Yeah but I never get sick of hearing it.
Oh god. Why did she have to happen? Just when I was doing so well without her.
Trial by GIF is ON POINT:
6. Lana Del Rey - Video Games
The future of music journalism is not so bleak.
LADIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES
Because I am a white demon I sometimes superficially conflate racism and sexism, most recently in thinking about what’s worse: overt/’loud’ discrimination or insidious/’quiet’ discrimination? On the train up to see Das Racist I wrote down a little thing about the three most interesting acts at the festival I went to the day before (OFWGKTA, Das Racist, Kanye - ALL IN THE SAME DAY) and how they compared to each other in terms of misogynistic content and decided that the first two lie on opposite ends of the scale and that Kanye, not innocent but surely not as bad as Odd Future, is probably in between depending on the song. Then, talking to those two girls after the show, one of them rolled her eyes at how another friend of theirs was excited to see Kanye because to them misogyny is misogyny, and the distance on that scale between Kanye and Odd Future was relatively infinitesimal compared to the gulf between him and Das Racist in that sense. So to bring this into the realm of the relevant: if racism’s still alive / they just be concealin’ it then is Lana Del Rey’s anti-progressive portrayal of women (concealed in the guise of a female perspective) any better than the overt objectification and violent discrimination in Odd Future’s lyrics? This sounds pretty loaded so I just want to pre-empt responses by saying I’m coming from a place of naivete and I’ve just been chewing on this for a minute and I sort of suspect the answer is ‘they’re both as bad but in different ways.’
Also do you ever think about how much feminism affects the critical discourse on tumblr?
Listen to “Over My Dead Body” and tell me you can’t hear Drake rapping over an LDR sample.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Lakutis
—Death Shark [Prod. by Fonda]
Lakutis - “Death Shark”
I AM A DEATH SHARK / I AM A BLOOD EAGLE
I don’t sit around thinking about the album all day, although I do sometimes. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is just something I feel as if I’ll always like, love, and have for myself. It’s an album that I think presents a vast array of interesting problems and aesthetic pleasures — almost in equal turn. I really, emphatically love music. That’s such a teenager thing to say, and I’m almost thirty years old. But at no point in my life, I mean every single day going forward from yesterday to today to tomorrow, have I ever loved music more than I do at any given moment. Every day I love it more. There’s just nothing I’d rather do than listen to music, and nothing I like writing about more than music. It’s exactly as deep and thoughtful as you make it, and it’s always different and also always the same. It’s an extension of being, but it also helps form being’s parameters in that as an object, it helps you elucidate the form and limits of your own experience.
—
Something that’s sort of cool to me but probably nobody else is that a) Kanye was my gateway into hip-hop after Graduation came out and these days I consider him the greatest contemporary artist in popular culture, and b) B was the first writer on Tumblr I really liked and he’s still one of my favourite writers period, so him writing about Kanye was, y’know, pretty exciting. It’s not so much that he’s writing about Kanye but that his dogged and single-minded admiration produces uniquely insightful writing; nobody else could write about Kanye like B does because like he says earlier in the essay, they’ve probably no idea what they’re talking about (relative to him) but also because even if they were as close to the subject, it’s difficult to adopt a perspective that’s just detached enough to properly understand why it’s so resonant. All of his writing about Kanye manages an equilibrium between personal and analytical.
This might be why One Week / One Band is conceptually, if not always practically, my favourite website of all time. It’s invigorating to watch All My Friends document their personal affinity through a lens of critical analysis like an indie(-er) 33/3 series. Regardless of the artist at hand, the closeness of the writing and the optimism it inspires seems to remind everyone why we love music and that even though the whole exercise of writing about music can often feel cynical because the negative voices are typically the loudest, there is and always will be music to get excited about.
