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.
