December 18 2015

2015 Music

As anyone who listened to the last episode of the podcast or who know me personally, I cannot stand mediocrity in art. The role of artists is to push humanity into greater awareness about itself, into challenging itself and the status quo, and in so doing trying to make the world a better place. People make excuses for Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Adele and the whole lot of pop musicians by saying that it is merely “pop music”, but that’s just a cop out. During the 80s, Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson used pop to help transform culture and take it to a new place. The pop stars now are merely derivative at best ready to wallow in the acceptance of the masses. Madonna made the masses come to her. Taylor Swift is merely happy enough to join the masses. Being an artist is tough, and below are some musicians who did their best to move the masses and move my ass. Arca - Mutant

Spotify | YouTube Arca – Mutant. I’ll admit that I only caught this album a few days ago in someone’s best-of-2015 list, and it was the cover art that captured my attention rather than whatever words were written down below it. I have a haunting suspicion that most of the 5 people who will come upon this particular list will do the same thing. Irregardless, I was transfixed and hypnotized to the sounds that came from this record. Sure it sounds EDM, but gone is the pervasive bro-ness about the music. It’s more as if the Future Sounds of London fucked EDM and this is what came out. Bjork - Vulnicura

Spotify | YouTube Björk – Vulnicura. It turns out that Arca aided Björk in producing this album. She mourns the disintegration of her relationship with Matthew Barney (to which I say good riddance, he’s a dickhead cunt anyhow), but doesn’t do it in any way we have heard before. FKA twigs - M3LL155X

Spotify | YouTube FKA twigs – M3LL133X. Grimes was too afraid of going this far, but Ms. Twigs just don’t give a shit. She took it this far, the fragility, the horror, the vulnerability, the anger and it’s exhilarating. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly

Spotify | YouTube Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly. Holy shit. What D’Angelo did with last year’s Black Messiah, Kendrick Lamar took one step further. Listening to this takes me back to the Native Tongues and Neo Soul of Tribe Called Quest and Black Sheep and Common while keeping Compton in the forefront. Pure motherfucking genius here. Peaches - Rub

Spotify | YouTube Peaches – Rub. Tits, tranny dicks and Kim Gordon. I love sexual perversion, and this is the perfect soundtrack to an orgy while getting dirty, pissed on, fisted while spewing cum like a firehose all over the place. Anything and everything goes here, and it’s so much fucking fun. Sleater-Kinney - No Cities to Love

Spotify | YouTube Sleater-Kinney – No Cities to Love. It’s good to be wary music bands make when they reunite. Take the Pixies for example. But here Sleater-Kinney came and rather than make a nostalgia-laced rehash of Dig Me Out, they made an album that would have fit had they never taken a hiatus in the first place. Hell, they made one of the few rock records of note this year. I don’t know whether I should put Coil’s Backwards here since it was recorded back in the 1990s and a remixed version of these tracks were released back in 2008 as The New Backwards. I’ll just make a note of it here and leave it at that.

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What Do I Have to Do?

It was summer 1996 right before my senior year of high school back when my curfew was 10. I spent a Saturday with C who was at a UCLA summer camp. While hanging out in her dorm room and traipsing around Westwood Village, I ended up buying a used copy of Stabbing Westward’s Wither, Blister, Burn and Peel at the Wherehouse. “What Do I Have to Do” was played quite a bit on KROQ, and while I thought it was NIN-lite, I couldn’t deny how catchy and good it is.

I got home a bit late, around 10:30, and that was when I had the worst fight with my mom. She had gone to bed early and woke up when I went to the bathroom. Naturally she asked where I was and didn’t believe me when I said where I was or what I was doing. I kept telling her that I was just spending the day with C at UCLA, and she insisted that I wasn’t. I could only imagine what she thought I was doing. I wondered what I did to make her not trust me — I didn’t drink or use drugs; I was a good student in AP classes. At this point I had only started smoking cigarettes for several months. I listened to dark music. I liked to hang out at coffeeshops with my friends. I had horrible self-esteem. I was loud and angry with role models being Howard Stern and Roseanne. I knew I wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t think I was off the rails.

How do you communicate this to a mother with just as bad of a temper as you and who refuses to believe you?

It was getting late, and I wanted to go to bed. My mom didn’t want to end the argument. As a 17-year old, I didn’t know what she wanted from me. I knew I was hiding something big, and I had no intention of ever telling her. But my mom kept yelling at me saying I wasn’t telling the truth. Then I blurted it out.

“I’m gay.”

Fuck. As those words came out, I knew it was a fucking mistake. I knew nothing good was going to come out of this and that this argument was not going to come to an end anytime soon. Predictably, my mom went even more berserk perfecting every melodramatic beat from Korean dramas.

I knew I had to just stand there and take it. Then she said it.

“If you ever bring this up again, I will shoot you and shoot myself.”

Everything blurred after that. I knew I was never going to get my mother’s love, that no one was going to be there for me. It definitely explains the relationship I have with my mom, and it probably explains why I have never been in a relationship or see myself ever being in one.

Since then whenever I listen to Stabbing Westward I think about this night.

All of this to say that I did go see them Friday night as they promoted their re-recording of Wither to celebrate its 30th anniversary along with PIG, Acumen Nation (celebrating the 30th anniversary of Territory=Universe) and 16Volt (celebrating the 30th anniversary of LetDownCrush) as a part of Cold Waves LA. It was a great show of reliving the 90s guitar industrial metal and seeing bands I didn’t get to see back in the day. Hell, PIG even played “Juke Joint Jezebel” which I guess you could call a KMFDM cover even though Raymond Watts was the original featured vocalist.

As I cursed my aching 47-year old feet and back standing for hours at the Pacific Electric, I did think back to that argument 30 years ago and wonder what other climatic moments the people around me had. What traumas are the guy next to me exorcising as he is screaming out the lyrics very much off key?

Around 1 am they finished the set with “Save Yourself,” and the house lights turned up. Sure, I’m still carrying all of that baggage, but at least I got to shake my ass a little and enjoy myself a little, pain be damned.

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This is 47

The only reason I really look forward to my birthday is that I get time off from work and that I usually rent an Airbnb out in the middle of the desert in the Joshua Tree vicinity with a pool, hot tub, and no one around for 5 acres. So here I am in Landers (or a bit away from it really) whose claim to fame was that it was the epicenter of a 7.3 earthquake in 1992 just hours before a separate 6.5 earthquake centered in Big Bear hit on a Sunday morning. Wild stuff.

I arrived here yesterday, and on the way had to stop to get gas. Since this stupid fucking illegal war with Iran has driven gas prices sky high again, I’ve mostly been back on public transit again because, fuck that. There I was at the Arco station jaw agape as the $30 went to $40 and on up until it landed at $72 for 13 gallons of gas. Yes, the “cheap” gas.

I’m going to be spending most of the time in or around the pool trying to finish Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. I’m at around page 604, so I have about 400 more pages to go. I’ll be honest — I have no fucking clue what’s going on in the book. It’s a slow, slow read and demands your attention but not in a painstaking way. It’s a very enjoyable read, but I honestly don’t know how we get from one part to the next. Instead of trying to make sense of it, I’m just riding the wave, going where it’s taking me and try to make sense of it later.

I’ve started working on a couple of things with myself and hope to get better at as I begin my 48th year on this planet: I have started to journal more. It’s the most mundane scatterbrained thing. I hope it doesn’t cause someone’s head to explode when they go through my journals after I’m dead. (How cute. I think I have any importance that people will actually read what I write rather than just dispose it like they should.)

I need to curb my YouTube addiction. I don’t watch tv shows. I don’t watch sports all that much. I don’t use TikTok. I only doomscroll through Facebook at 3 am after I have woken up to take a piss. I am no longer perpetually online. But I will sit down and waste hours upon hours watching YouTube videos. I really need to get that in check.

That’s all I’ve got. Overall, I’m not happy, but I’m not completely depressed. Let’s just call it nonplussed. For someone who feels like a stranger in his own country, I guess that’s about as good as we can hope for.

Here’s a picture of the desert sunset: