I want everything in my life to be in service to Purity Ring.
Hey! Let’s talk.
Ok, back in 2003 there was this band called Poison the Well. Right now we’d call them screamo, or ~post-hardcore~, or whatever, but in 2003 we called it emotional hardcore (which might be the actual worst, but screamo felt like a loaded word with super negative connotations in 2003–in fact, in my ~scene~ it was only used for derision).
So they released this album on Atlantic Records, and it was on the endcap at Target, and I bought it with my allowance, and I listened to it a lot. And here’s why it matters: it was produced by the same guy (Eskil Lövström) who produced all of those great Refused albums that are super influential on ~post-hardcore~ and other snobby forms of emo/punk/metal/whatever, and it’s got these superb, spacy interstitial bits that were unlike anything I had heard before and they rocked my Slipknot/Misfits-loving mall-goth heart.
Derek Miller from Poison the Well also went on to be 1/2 of Sleigh Bells, so that’s cool, too.
So, anyway, I was on Facebook this morning, and a high school friend reminded me of the Refused, which reminded me of this album, and I fell into a YouTube hole and thought I’d tell you about it. IDK, some of Poison the Well’s songs still sort of hold up… and at the very least they’re a good document of their time.
This has been fun! Let’s do it again soon.
TTYL. 
“I’m not a prophet or a stone age man, just a mortal with the potential of a superman. I’m living on.”
Is it not the way of the shaman to sing of things we cannot see? You put in headphones, retreat into a cave of sound and the visions are there. We hear him slip away. There can be no replacement, but our shaman has left us with a thousand incantations to bring him back, even if only for a few minutes at a time. Perhaps not all the villagers believed in his magic, but it was ubiquitous nonetheless.
David Bowie was the kind of man about whom prophecies are written. Whose coming was drawn onto cave walls in flickering firelight. We had decades with our shaman, his words echoing in all corners, sliding in and out of our consciousness. His words were prayers and salutations and his final prophecies revealed his end. He would be the black star, whisking away in the night. He will take the place of Polaris.
***
“Time may change me, but you can’t trace time.”
Art has no need for transparency. The translation changes. The drawings on the cave wall become the written word, become the song, the painting, the film. The shaman has no need and every need for these mediums. It is through art that we interpret the world around us and ideas of what else lurks beyond our understanding.
David Bowie breathed art. He let art become his very life right down to the persona, crafted yet so wholly true. Even when he was someone else he was himself. Perhaps that is the very definition of a shaman, one who can take different forms to be a medium between the real and what cannot be comprehended. The shaman is a messenger, is a rebel, is an ageless wonder whose existence is as transitory as it is permanent.
***
“I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”
Our shaman will be ours for eons to come. To share a time with his earthly life is to be unwittingly crafted and inspired by his existence. The shaman is fiction and nonfiction. Fantasy, science fiction, romance, and thriller. History, biography, and religion. How do you mourn the expanse of such a life?
David Bowie is singular, yet innumerable. A truth and a contradiction. To see him in his element, performing, practicing his art was like watching electricity form from thin air. There will be no second coming. We will shed our tears, beat our chests, and we will listen to his voice again and again.
We will look to the heavens, into the dark night, and we will see him there. He will be pointing us beyond North, beyond Earth. He will be pointing toward our souls and inviting us to go there.
- Joanna Newsom: “Goose Eggs” (from Divers)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTOREKA4DiA
2. Lana Del Rey: “Terrence Loves You” (from Honeymoon)
3. Grimes: “California” (from Art Angels)
4. FKA Twigs: “In Time” (from M3LL155X)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKKRfltntgA
5. Marina and the Diamonds: “I’m a Ruin” (from FROOT)
6. Blood Orange: “Sandra’s Smile”
7. Nicole Dollanganger: “Christian Woman” (Type O Negative cover)
8. Buffy Saint Marie: “Farm in the Middle of Nowhere” (from Power in the Blood)
9. Bjork: “Lionsong” (from Vulnicura)
10. Rihanna: “Bitch Better Have My Money”
So this week Billboard released a list of the top 10 best rappers of all time. All time. Obviously a lot of people had issue with this list. Snoop Dogg called it “disrespectful.” And I gotta say, I agree. This list is bullpoop. So here’s my own list. Straight from the Moosh.
- Dr. Moosh
- Tumoosh
- Mooshie Smalls
- Moosh Dogg
- Emimoosh
- Ice Moosh
- Mooshy Elliot
- Moosh-Z
- Lil Moosh
- Steak
Love starved backwood teaser farm girl hot eyed bride
Stone cold blonder a quivering menace atomic wallop wholesale murder
We want out
We fish at night
Sex in Heaven
A tough town
A cruel touchSailors leave
Sirens screaming
Lap of luxury
A show of violenceTake off your mask
Lay off my brother
Kiss my fist
Stop at nothingA steaming swamp
And a troubled heart
The sky is red
And I cant stop runningHer baby stares
The secrets there
So help us God
Ill swing at your funeralThe stubborn air
The killer Mob
A red bone woman
A double crossBig fake bitter love underbelly freezing jungle
One step more hell stir your senses
Scratch your surface and nail your headMurded Angels
Bodies in bedlam
A women scorned
You cant hang meI Tied to my job a blast scene alibi
Tied to a tree in a blind alleyNothing before
A big fear
Dont get caught
By her fathers friendsSwamp girl faded
The tigers wife
A frenzied love
Hot climateA twisted passions
Flesh parade
Dead ahead
A world so wideBig river love camp
The house boy and hill girl
The agony columnDont crowd me
Its time for crime
Strange breed river girls misery indexInside my head my dogs a bear
She’s significant
Im insane
– selected by Nicholas Rhys.
#VERYSCARY: For the month of October, we are featuring your favorite scary passages, lines from poems, horror lyrics, creepy writings, etc. Send your favorite to janice@entropymag.org.
Less than a week (four days to be exact) until Divers is released and tensions are high. Two-minute clips of each song from the record briefly surfaced (and then disappeared) last week; I listened to them twice and then put them away, sating my impatience but unwilling to spend much time with only a portion of the far surperior whole. Meanwhile, more interviews keep popping up online as Oct. 23rd approaches; The Guardian, Stereogum, and Rolling Stone both feature pretty great ones.
The P.T. Anderson-directed music video for the title track, “Divers,” is playing at independent movie theaters around the country through the 22nd; I’ve seen it twice already at my local indie movie theater Ciné and plan on at least one more viewing; truly gorgeous and spooky, the video features Newsom immersed in the surrealist pastoral artwork of Kim Keever, whose art is featured on the cover of the record.
Life keeps fumbling blissfully towards death, as Newsom sang on Ys, and as such here are some reviews of the record for those who like to read before they listen: Pitchfork, The New Yorker, The Times, NME, Chicago Tribune, The L.A. Times, NPR, (by the great critic Ann Powers, who co-wrote Tori Amos’ Piece by Piece), The Line of Best Fit, and Loud and Quiet.
Bonus: a bingo sheet for the often lazy/sexist music journalism created by Joseph Harmer just for reviews of Divers.
Because sometimes the sadness is tucked into so many crevices of life, and just the running of fingers along a windowsill or a glance at clouds can trigger the heaviness of it all, because there are so many moments of joy and so many beautiful things in the world like leaves falling from a tree and the un-blueness of sky and rain, because there is cold that is deep and dark and treacherous, because there is warmth that is undying and invisible and light, because there are places you have never yet seen and feelings you have never yet experienced, because there is sadness and then there is touch, because there is love, because there is light.
Frankie teardrop/Twenty year old Frankie/He’s married he’s got a kid/And he’s working in a factory
He’s working from seven to five/He’s just trying to survive/Well lets hear it for Frankie
Well Frankie can’t make it/’Cause things are just too hard/Frankie can’t make enough money/Frankie can’t buy enough food
And Frankie’s getting evicted/Oh let’s hear it for Frankie
Frankie is so desperate/He’s gonna kill his wife and kids/Frankie’s gonna kill his kid/Frankie picked up a gun
Pointed at the six month old in the crib/Oh Frankie/Frankie looked at his wife
Shot her/”Oh what have I done?”/Let’s hear it for Frankie
Frankie teardrop/Frankie put the gun to his head/Frankie’s dead
Frankie’s lying in hell
We’re all Frankies
We’re all lying in hell
– selected by Nicholas Rhys.
#VERYSCARY: For the month of October, we are featuring your favorite scary passages, lines from poems, horror lyrics, creepy writings, etc. Send your favorite to janice@entropymag.org.
Still from the video for the title track “Divers,” (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Joanna Newsom just announced the first round of her U.S. tour dates! Rejoice, rejoice, all of us who can make it to one of these shows. If you’ve ever seen Newsom live (I’ve seen her seven times and would follow her like a Deadhead if I could) you know it is transformative, magical (not like witches or fairies but like Emily Dickinson or the best dreams), heart aching, and joyful. Feelings-church to the max. In addition to these tour dates, there will be theatrical-only screenings of the video for the album’s title track, “Divers.” Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed the video for “Sapokanikan,” directs this one as well, with art/landscapes by Kim Keever, whose art is featured on the cover of the record. Dates for those screenings below as well; information gleaned from Brooklyn Vegan.
U.S. tour dates:
12-06 Boston, MA – Orpheum Theatre *
12-07 Brooklyn, NY – Kings Theatre *
12-09 Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer *
12-10 Washington, DC – Lincoln Theatre *
12-12 Munhall, PA – Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall *
12-13 Buffalo, NY – Asbury Hall – Babeville *
12-14 Toronto, Ontario – Queen Elizabeth Theatre *
12-15 Royal Oak, MI – Royal Oak Music Theatre *
12-16 Chicago, IL – Chicago Theatre *
12-17 St. Paul, MN – The Fitzgerald Theater *
12-18 Madison, WI – Orpheum Theatre *
*=Ryan Francesconi & Alela Diane opening
“Divers” video screenings:
OCTOBER 16-22
New York, NY @ IFC Center
Yonkers, NY@ Alamo Drafthouse Yonkers
Huntington, NY@ Cinema Arts Centre
Los Angeles, CA @ The Cinefamily
Los Angeles, CA @ Ahrya Fine Arts
Pasadena, CA @ Laemmie Playouse 7
San Jose, CA @ Camera Cinemas
San Francisco, CA @ Castro Theatre
San Luis Obispo, CA @ Palm Theatre
Grass Valley, CA @ Sutton Cinema
Grass Valley, CA @ Sierra Cinemas
Grass Valley, CA @ Del Oro Theatre
Nevada City, CA @ Magic Theatrea
Tucson, AZ @ Loft Cinema
Denver, CO @ Alamo Drafthouse Littleton
Boulder, CO @ International Film Series, UC Boulder
Miami, FL @ O-Cinema
Boston, MA @ Coolidge Corner
Seattle, WA @ SIFF – Egyptian Theater
Bellingham, WA @ Pickford Film Center[INFO]
Portland, OR @ Cinema 21
Eugene, OR @ Bijou Cinemas
Pittsburgh, PA @ Regency Square Theater
Ashburn, VA @ Alamo Drafthouse One Loudon
Winchester, VA @ Alamo Drafthouse Winchester
Austin, TX@ Alamo Drafthouse Ritz
Austin, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Lakeline
Austin, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Village
Austin, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane
Austin, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar
Dallas, TX @ Texas Theatre
Dallas, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Richardson
Houston, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park
Houston, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Vintage Park
Laredo, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Laredo
Lubbock, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Lubbock
New Braunfels, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Marketplace
San Antonio, TX@ Alamo Drafthouse Westlakes
San Antonio, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Park North
San Antonio, TX @ Alamo Drafthouse Stone Oak
Kansas City, MO @ Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet
Ann Arbor, MI @ Michigan Theater
Kalamazoo, MI @Alamo Drafthouse Kalamazoo
Columbia, SC @Nickelodeon Theatre
Nashville, TN @ Belcourt Theatre
Salt Lake City, UT @Salt Lake Film Society[INFO]
Tulsa, OK @ Circle Cinema
Scottsbluff, NE @ Midwest Theater
Raleigh, NC @ Colony Theater
Winston-Salem, NC @ a/perture Cinema
Columbus, OH @ Gateway Film Center
Chicago, IL @ Music Box Theatre
Champaign, IL @ Art Theatre Co-Op
Paducah, KY @ Maiden Alley Cinema
Arhus, Denmark @ Øst For Paradis
London, UK @ Rio Cinema
Munich, Germany @ Monopol
OCTOBER 27
London, UK @ Clapham Picturehouse
London, UK @ East Dulwich Picturehouse and Cafe
London, UK @Greenwich Picturehouse
London, UK @ Hackney Picturehouse
London, UK @ Picturehouse Central
London, UK @ Ritzy Brixton
London, UK @ Stratford East Picturehouse
Bath, UK @ The Little Theatre Cinema
Bradford, UK @ Picturehouse at National Media Museum
Brighton, UK @ Duke’s at Komedia
Edinburgh, UK @ Cameo
Exeter, UK @ Exeter Picturehouse
Henley, UK @ Regal Picturehouse
Norwich, UK @ Cinema City
Liverpool, UK @ Picturehouse at FACT
Oxford, UK @ Phoenix Picturehouse
Southampton, UK @ Harbour Lights Picturehouse
Stratford-upon-Avon, UK @ Stratford-Upon-Avon Picturehouse
York, UK @ City Screen
– selected by Eddy Rathke.
#VERYSCARY: For the month of October, we are featuring your favorite scary passages, lines from poems, horror lyrics, creepy writings, etc. Send your favorite to janice@entropymag.org.
Ya’ll, I’m super #LatetotheParty but this Blank Banshee album is just so superb.
In 2010 Joanna Newsom gave us Have One On Me, and it was glorious. Three discs of baroque, meticulous tunes, all but one of which are now permanent residents of my bloodstream (“No Provenance”, your time will come eventually, I suspect). Newsom fans have been waiting ardently for a new record for five years, and in 26 days that record, Divers, will begin its public life and quick entry into my already-crowded (yet never crowded enough!) veins. I. CAN’T. WAIT.
In the weeks leading up to the record’s release I will be posting tidbits here so I can vent some of my excitement in a public forum and not drive everyone in my life crazy. If you follow me on social media, though, I am 26 days away from being insufferably obsessed with Divers for the forseeable future. In the meantime, here are some live performances of songs that will be on the record:
Hey Enclave community, now you can download Meow the Jewels. Really.
If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, this is is: last year, Killer Mike and El-P, two hard as fuck rappers who came together to form the duo Run the Jewels, sent out a mass email to their fans announcing their latest record. As Run the Jewels’s lasted record was a free product available to anyone for free downloading, Killer Mike and El-P also mentioned various merchandising options that you could choose to purchase, vinyl, t-shirts, CDs, etc.
At the bottom of this email they also included wholly fictitious “bonus” packages that could be purchased for large sums of money ($20,000 and up). They were obvious jokes, like Killer Mike would come to your kid’s school and beat up a bully of his or her choice, and anyway, no one would have the kind of money to drop on one of them.
One of the bonus packages was Meow the Jewels, a cat-sounds-based remix of the entire Run the Jewels album. This one went for $50,000. Well, some enterprising Jewel Runner went and started a Kickstarter for this remix. It got a very, very, very strong response. Pretty soon Killer Mike and El-P got involved, using their social media and recruiting high profile rap producers to push the project along. And so, it got funded.
And, actually, it’s not that bad. Download it.
It’s just about fall (if you’re in the south, this is a GODSEND, at least in terms of weather). If you’re in school or teach, the shit is just starting to hit the fan. The empire is crumbling. What will soundtrack this special moment in your/our life(s)? Here’s an annotated playlist to address all your dystopian needs! Click here to listen to the mix.
- “Sapokanikan” by Joanna Newsom: A song about temporality, love, the end of the empire, staying despite the constant-crumble, looking for the blurry remains of the past on top the ever-shifting present, and living in spite of and because of all this. Thanks, Joanna. Did I mention that it sounds like a belle epoque ragtime waltz?
- “Terrence Loves You” by Lana Del Rey: Possibly the saddest LDR song yet, and if you listen to the woman you know this is a big time statement. Stuck between wanting to listen to it endlessly because it’s so beautiful– those melodies and sad saxes!– and wanting to shut it off because it makes you want to get majorly fetal with tears.
- “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues” by Sam Cooke: Cooke covering Billie Holiday means that this entire record is a dream. I picked this song so I wouldn’t be bumming you out too hard at the top of the mix. It’s a song about feeling blue but also demands your right to sing/feel the blues, with big horns and Cooke’s simultaneously joyful/melancholy phrasings.
- “Ha Howa Ha Howa” by Sexwitch: Natasha Khan’s new side project is covering Middle Eastern traditional songs in a psychedelic howling haze. This bass line grooves really hard and Khan lets loose with her voice in a way she’s never done with Bat for Lashes. A song to do mushrooms to; hypnotic chanting musculature.
- “Cheyenne” by Jason Derulo: Did I ever think I would be madly in love with any Derulo songs? Um, no. Not that past songs were bad, just a little “eh.” But the two singles he’s released from his new record are KILLER; all ’80s new wave plus R&B vocal lines and big, driving energy. This song is a little goth, like how Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” is goth.
- “The Hills” by The Weeknd: Another goth pop song. Dark, weird, and drunk on its own scuzz. Maybe the weirdest radio hit I’ve heard in awhile. Slow, sinister, cruel, sad, and enigmatic.
- “Coke White Starlight” by Mykki Blanco: This sounds like early/mid- ’90s NIN gone excellently wild: queer hip hop/electronica gone ballistic. The beats will get in your bloodstream quick so come prepared to receive it.
- “Gingerbread Coffin” by Rasputina: A sweet doll burial narrative full of soft-tinkering, Melora Creager’s signature wavering melodies, and those wistful, strong cellos lines. This song has always felt like autumn to me; I see the colors of changing leaves in it.
- “Strange Fruit” by Siouxsie & the Banshees: This cover of the iconic lynching-protest song burns like a dead star under the waves of Siouxsie Sioux’s gorgeous, huge, weeping/sweeping vocals. The instrumentation– mostly strings, until a foray into sad, slow New Orleans-style brass band appears mid-way through– foregrounds the fact that this song is a dirge; an eternal funeral-song for America’s eternal-racisms.
- “Dolly” by Blatz: Blatz’s punk chaos feels apt right after “Strange Fruit,” if only because America is the dolly you constantly “don’t wanna play with anymore,” at least not in its current/past form. What do we do when there’s no shelf to put it away on? (That shelf burned down long ago).
- “Close Your Eyes (and Count to Fuck)” by Run the Jewels feat. Zach de la Rocha: I first heard Run the Jewels in a car ride from Athens, GA to Tuscaloosa, AL with Sade Murphy. We were going to do a reading and had a four hour drive there one day, four hours back the next. While our drive was soundtracked by many artists important to me– Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj– my memory of RTJ on that car ride remains fiery. These songs sounded like the soundtrack to an ecstasy of rage, the energy you need to keep burning through days simultaneously filled with sorrow and joy.
- “Munchies for Your Love” by Bootsy Collins: Cuz we all gotta eat and there’s no better jam for it than a Bootsy jam.
- “La La Means I Love You” by The Delfonics: William Hart’s vocals are both classic and too weird to be so. The Delfonics’ hits are perfect top 40s gems: catchy as hell, beautifully arranged, creating their own insular kind of nostalgia that makes me pine for some time that has never existed.
- “Occident” by Joanna Newsom: Anyone who knows me knows that I am a sick Newsom fangirl, hence the bookending of this playlist with her tunes. Her new record, Divers, comes out 10/23, and you can expect me to be adequately insufferable in its wake for six months at the LEAST. (The first song on this mix is from the forthcoming album). This song, from her 2010 record Have One On Me, was a grower– not one that initially grabbed me and held me close. But these lyrics, once you fasten to them, are undeniable: “To leave your home and your family/for some distortion of property/well, darling I can’t go, but you may stay/here with me.” And so, as we are here on earth for the time being, thank you for staying a moment in these songs, with me.
People seem to spend more time talking about things looking phallic than things looking vaginal. You don’t need to guess why, but I’m lately pleased with how often my eye has been catching on everyday objects/sights that are flower-paintings-level of pussy representation. This photo is something I must’ve initially seen on Tumblr:
I spent a lot of 2002 and 2003 deep in Christina Aguilera’s Stripped. I was capital-F Feeling It in a deep and worshipful way. It was her attitude that brought me into that particular church: a bratty, angry-as-fuck lashing out done as only a pop star, young and rich, can do it. She posed nude on the cover of Rolling Stone (strategically holding a guitar that she couldn’t play; Xtina says who fuckin’ cares dude?), wore chaps and bikinis as daywear, and fluctuated in body size while the public watched (and criticized). It was all a big, artless movie musical with real people and their mysterious intentions jumbled up inside of it. The music was good though, and sometimes great, marked skillfully by Linda Perry’s big-dyke stamp of a style. “Beautiful” was, you know, gay, because it was about suffering and loneliness and enduring in the face of all that. The way pop music turns endlessly complex life experiences into a quick, showy display of capitalist fireworks never ceases to make me feel both appreciative and horrified, mostly at my easy complicity in consuming what the business men and CEOs of the pop music industry want me and you to consume (that is, emotional triggers that cost money). At the end of the day I still love Christina. I want her to be happy, whatever it is that she’s doing. I love her armpit vagina. I guess it’s supposed to be humiliating but I can’t help thinking of it as just fucking cool, like, whatever man, she did it on purpose/she doesn’t care. She’s good with it, smiling in her high femme drag.
I’ve long found the artist Rachel Feinstein and her artwork compelling, but what I was really dying to see, for a long time– what I felt was the defining summary of her spirit/self, politics, art, and aesthetic– was a tattoo, located in her armpit and therefore absent in most photos: “I have a tattoo of my vagina in my armpit, that I did when I was going to Columbia University…there’s ants that are coming out of it and killing a dragonfly, and I did it when I was eighteen.” I love so much that it’s her vagina, not just some mystery cunt, a representation of her specific experience of cuntiness. When I found video footage in which I could see the glorious inked cunt I actually took screenshots of it because it made me so happy.
It’s easy for me to be enticed by Feinstein’s white-girlness: an ethereal redhead with a funny face (a funny face this is particularly beautiful, to me), big eyes, big romantic sculptures that reference the classics while being sharply toned with a very contemporary terror and sense of infinite mortality. I see what I’m drawn to and have to acknowledge what has charmed me and why. I can’t stop thinking that I am both a unique abstraction of a person and a perfectly-drawn example of racist, misogynist, heteroaffirmative late-capitalism packaged in Jewish white girl particular.
Feinstein on being a young artist:
“I ended up getting really obsessed with merkins and I made my own and thought that I was going to be able to sell them. And I applied to Yale for the MFA department wearing a see-through plastic skirt and a tiny little pair of underwear that had a big fake black pubic merkin underneath coming out of the underwear, that you could see…and I didn’t get into Yale.” And then in a different interview, on the same part of her life: “[The professor] accused me of being a third-wave feminist. He said I was a woman who forces her sexuality on men. He thought I was doing this for theoretical reasons, that I was trying to affront him with my girlhood. He tried to get me to defend myself. Needless to say, I didn’t go to Yale.”
And all that while, this tiny cunt hiding in her armpit, devouring or birthing little insects. What goes in one hole can come out the same hole, or disappear completely. What goes in your holes, and what comes out? Who or what do you consume, what sustains or feeds you, and what do you splooge out through the other side?
Today is Father’s Day, and what better way to celebrate than by running down 11 songs by a musician who epitomizes pretty much everything that fatherhood is not about: El-P. So here we go, a Father’s Day El-P Megamixxx for you all to listen to with your beloved father and/or progeny. Enjoy!
1. Fantastic Damage. Title song off of El-P’s first album, and a great way to get started. I love the scratching that happens at the beginning of this track and El-P’s pitch-perfect ad libbing “shut up.” Sets the tone for what’s to come.
2. The Full Retard. This is pretty much what El-P is about. Just screwing around, saying the most outlandish things possible, and totally mocking the balanced/healthy lifestyle in the most egregious ways imaginable. Don’t miss the video.
3. Flyentology. Per Rap Genius, “the whole song is about turning to God, after a life of disbelief, when a plane is about to crash.” Maaaaybe—if so, it’s a consummately El-P gesture. For sure El-P is at his worst here, and this song has got one of the best hooks I’ve ever heard.
4. Dear Sirs. El-P made this track back in those glorious days when torture-loving war criminals occupied the White House and we were all going to turn the Middle East into a subsidiary of Haliburton. This whole song is basically El-P saying all of the impossible things that will happen before he ever shoots a gun in a war for George W. Bush.
5. Tougher Colder Killer. And speaking of war, this is probably my favorite El-P joint ever. The first verse is just fire, El-P rapping in the voice of a veteran who has come back from war and seen the truth: no matter how bad you think you are, there’s a tougher colder killer out there who will destroy you. (You’re welcome to try and interpret just what that “tougher colder killer” is.) Killer Mike and Despot kill their guest spots here.
6. Stepfather Factory. One of the greatest concept tracks in the history of hip hop. El-P raps in the voice of a entrepreneur who has decided to manufacture mechanical stepfathers. Of course, this decision has very personal roots that El-P investigates for us . . .
7. The Overly Dramatic Truth. El-P shows his softer side, rapping about a relationship that just wouldn’t work.
8. Tasmanian Pain Coaster. Starts with a fantastic interlude from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Also includes one of the best El-P hooks ever: “this is the sound of what you don’t know killing you / this is the sound of what you don’t believe still true / this is the sound of what you don’t want still in you.”
9. For My Upstairs Neighbor (Mum’s the Word). Just try to get El-P to turn stool pigeon and this is what happens . . .
10. T.O.J. Another love joint from El-P. Apparently he’s got a lot of women in his past that he just can’t let go of, undoubtedly adding to the massive pain of being El-P and making for some good music.
11. $4 Vic/Nothing But You+Me (FTL). A great way to end, one of those extra-long, extra-obscure tracks that El-P tends to end his albums with. You can think about this one for days.
In this series, writers share their favorite music videos.
Pelle at 2:38
“Hate To Say I Told You So” by The Hives came out the same year I stopped parking myself in front of the TV to flip endlessly between Vh1 and MTV and MuchMusic for music videos, and started parking myself in front of the internet to do pretty much the same thing. With the internet, though, I could obsessively watch my favorite videos over and over.
Many times, I tried to pause “Hate To Say I Told You So” at 2:38, but because YouTube wasn’t a thing yet and whatever sad music video platform I was using didn’t have great pausing capability, stopping at 2:38 was very difficult, and the few times I was able to do it I saw nothing more than a blurry smear of face. There was something about Pelle’s scream, which comes right after his bratty mid-song speech about rejecting authority and which climaxes at 2:38, that made me hornier and more fundamentally desperate than I even knew was possible.
If you told me at that time that I could be anyone in the world, I would have said Pelle, because this was also the year that I began conflating sexual desire with wanting to leave my own body and crawl into someone else’s skin with them. It didn’t even occur to me to desire to be the type of woman that Pelle might be attracted to. I made jokes about being a gay man trapped in a girl’s body, but I knew that wasn’t quite right. Despite my horniness, I didn’t feel particularly sexual. My horniness didn’t equate to wanting to have sex, gay or straight, with Pelle or anyone else. More than sex, I wanted to become that which I lusted for. I wanted to leave the trappings of my physicality and personality for something else, something better, something… I mean, I don’t know… maybe something sweaty and Swedish, who would stomp around like a hyperactive child, and who could scream like the exact guttural translation of the lust my body felt for the very object doing the screaming.
Despite exhaustive attempts to stop the video at just the right moment, 2:38 only ever yielded a fuzzy, unsatisfying image that didn’t match my feelings for what it should be. Pelle was always clouded over by some kind of beautiful but annoying lighting effect, the edge of his profile vanishing into the background.
Maybe this was an important metaphor for my wildly incorrect projections about what romantic relationships would be like, or what my place within them would entail. Or maybe I knew, somehow, that 2:38, and all that it represented, was forever unattainable, and that the act of trying to catch that feeling was symbolic of the sexual desire itself, as good or better than any end result.
–Chelsea Martin is the author of Everything Was Fine Until Whatever (Future Tense, 2009), The Really Funny Thing About Apathy (Sunnyoutside, 2010), and Even Though I Don’t Miss You (Short Flight/Long Drive, 2013). She lives in Michigan.
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