beforethebridge

[beforethebridge]

An example of my audio and an explanation for my lacking episode recordings!

[beforethebridge]

My Favorite Tracks of 2019

I had so much fun building this list and pouring over the mountain of great music I listened to this year. Every track on this list stunned, jazzed, or moved me in some type of way. I wrote a bit about each of my top 10 tracks below, and all 25 (+1!) are in the playlist linked above. And before you point out it’s glaring absence, Lizzo’s “Juice” was #26 😄.

25. Matt Berninger & Phoebe Bridgers – “Walking on a String”

24. Frank Ocean – “In My Room”

23. Anderson .Paak feat. Smokey Robinson – “Make it Better”

22. Mark Ronson feat. Angel Olsen – “True Blue”

21. Tyler, The Creator – “EARFQUAKE”

20. James Blake – “Don’t Miss It”

19. Lana Del Rey – “the greatest”

18. Carly Rae Jepsen – “Too Much”

17. Beck – “Uneventful Days”

16. FKA twigs – “sad day”

15. Brittany Howard – “Stay High”

14. Kevin Abstract – “Georgia”

13. Angel Olsen – “All Mirrors”

12. Bon Iver – “Hey, Ma”

11. Mannequin Pussy – “Who You Are”

10. Floating Points – “Last Bloom”

The hi-hat flourishes and stuttery triangle of “Last Bloom” are infectious. There’s enough blooming and evolving across this track’s near-6 minutes to carry a dancefloor to a euphoric release.

9. (Sandy) Alex G – “Hope”

“Hope” is chaotic good. The synth chords, nylon strings, and Alex G’s dreamy falsetto flow together for a driving, tense, and inspiring song about death and rememberance. House of Sugar’s “Gretel” is a similarly wild ride, but “Hope” is the standout for me here.

8. Charli XCX & Christine and the Queens – “Gone”

“Gone” is the best true pop song of the year. Charli and her powerhouse collaborators on this track and on the rest of Charli are defining industrial, dancey, glitchy pop for the new decade. Also shouts out to “1999” feat. Troye Sivan, which I’ve definitely yelled in the shower way too loud.

7. Bon Iver – “Salem”

The second drum kit, strings, and backing horns that kick in on the chorus of “Salem” elevate this track to Bon Iver Gospel Tier. It’s the best cut off of i,i and was a highlight of their incredible live show at the Schott this Fall.

6. PUP – “See You At Your Funeral”

An absolute ANTHEM. I saw PUP live here in Columbus and holy wow I’ve never been around a more energetic, enthusiastic, and kind crowd. The pit was swirling fast, but any time anyone fell or wanted out the whole pit just paused to help them out! That’s the energy of this band and of this song - communal mania.

5. Oso Oso – “basking in the glow”

My favorite track from the best new artist I discovered this year. Jade Lilitri writes Oso Oso songs with self-conscious intention, finding the sweet spot between self-blame and accountability.

These days, it feels like all I know is this phase

I hope I’m basking in the glow

4. Big Thief – “Not”

Adrianne Lenker is a once in a generation songwriter. “Not” speaks to the maddening experience of paralyzing aphashia. When I trust my gut and act based on my physical instincts, my decisions or conclusions may differ from where intellectual rationalization would lead. Here, Big Thief capture how difficult it can be to explain decisions to someone who lives outside your body and mind. I can feel confident and secure in my understanding about a situation, relationship, or big decision, but still find it easier to say what’s not leading to my conclusion rather than to articulate precisely what is.

Not the meat of your thigh

Nor your spine tattoo

Not your shimmery eye

Nor the wet of the dew

3. Vampire Weekend – “Harmony Hall”

“Harmony Hall” balances musical buoyancy and lyrical despondency as expertly as anywhere in the Vampire Weekend catalog. It’s a summer song to holler with the windows down, but it makes you question how you can just go about, like, making pancakes while surrounded by all the chaos.

2. Jamila Woods – “BETTY”

“BETTY” is the standout opening track from Jamila Woods’s fantastic new soul / R&B album LEGACY! LEGACY!. Woods’s sweet, swelling vocals and an insanely catchy hook meld into a stunning celebration of self-love, femininity, and independence. 

Running from myself, I come undone

I wait, I try

Falling for myself

It's taken time to know I'm mine

1. Sharon Van Etten – “Seventeen”

“Seventeen” rejects the idea that our younger selves would be better off “if we only knew then what we know now.” Throughout her discography, Van Etten views wisdom as a trait developed by more than just growing old and learning from others. It’s also a long process of discovering how to listen to your body and trust your own judgment. Van Etten reflects on her teenage years not with regret and shame but with compassion and patience. Here she longs for the carefree days when she thought she had it all figured out, embodying the rage her teenage self might feel if she knew how her life turned out.

While the pain she expresses in the explosive bridge of “Seventeen” is retroactive and cathartic, it also feels very current. Because Van Etten still is that same free, lonely teenager, both then and now. Our pasts selves are always with us. Learning to unlock and express our emotions and relate them to our own evolving idea of our personal legend is the mission of a lifespan. The lesson from Van Etten here is to be patient and compassionate with yourself along the way.

BONUS!

My favorite cover song of the year: Courtney Barnett - “So Long, Marianne”

I’ve been a cover music fan since discovering the Coverville podcast a few years ago. I couldn’t write about my favorite music of the year without mentioning this perfect Leonard Cohen cover from Courtney Barnett. Her voice brings Cohen’s prose a new level of emotional complexity. This cover will wreck you; you’ve been warned.

#best of 2019 #music list #music review #sharon van etten #jamila woods #vampire weekend #big thief #oso oso #PUP #charli xcx #(sandy) alex g #lana del rey #fka twigs #james blake #frank ocean #tyler the creator #angel olsen #bon iver

[beforethebridge]

Aligning Body and Mind Through Music 2K19

On January 1, 2019, I started developing what would become a list of 500+ albums that I planned to actively listen to throughout the year. I drew from favorites in my own music library, top-of-xxxx year album lists (from critics and aggregator sites), and friend suggestions, pulling together albums that I’ve either loved, knowingly disregarded, or that hold some apparent cultural importance/reverence that I haven’t yet appreciated. Some that I knew I wouldn’t really enjoy made it on the list, alongside others I knew would feel like ecstacy. Since then, the list has grown as I’ve added albums I just completely overlooked and exciting albums that are released throughout 2019. I’m aiming to give an active, full-attention listen to each album, filling in my knowledge gaps about the artists and their careers by reading up on album reviews and wikipedia pages after listening. 

Music influences my mood and helps me achieve a feeling I’m seeking when clicking on the songs and albums. More importantly, though, music also to help me access the physical manifestations of the emotions driving me toward that particular artist/genre/album in the first place. 

While I’m usually able to recognize and examine my moods and emotions in a sort of objective, factual manner, I often struggle to physically feel and externalize those emotions. I can feel locked up, disjointed, misaligned, and removed from my emotions in a aggravatingly perpetual way. Music helps me work through this frustration. With the right hook, beat, vocal strain, vulnerable expression, or harmony, an artist can identify and unearth the physical reaction that I'm craving in the moment, helping me process my mood and align my body with my mind. 

As I listen to and follow the lyrics of each album on this list, I’m paying close attention to my physical reactions to the music and lyrics. I track my head bops, corner smiles, ability to focus, breathing patterns, and tears. Sometimes I’m feeling empathy for the artists, but more often I’m internalizing what they’re externalizing... picking up what they’re putting down, I guess. Once I’m finished with the album, I select my favorite tracks (adding some to my top track of all time list), assign arbitrary genres, a loose 1-10 rating (more like 5-10), and, most importantly, categorize my emotional and physical reactions to the album with mood descriptors. 

As I fill in the excel bubbles I’m using to track all of this, I’m building a musical fleet of soldiers, therapists, best friends, lovers, and uppers that I will know I can always call up when I need to match my body to my mood. The end goal here is to pull albums together in Spotify by mood category, so when I pull up spotify and know I want to feel angry, or happy-yell in the car, or process through a loner mood, I’ll have entire lists ready to glue me together or pull me apart.

At this point, I’m far behind pace to reach 500 listens by the end of the year, but it doesn’t matter. I’m loving the time I’m spending investing real, purposeful attention to the art. In the process, I’m discovering new favorites and coming to love old music that I’ve neglected. I’ve also been learning what it really means to pay attention to myself as I listen. One thing has become very apparent - the nun character in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is spot on when she questions, “Don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love and attention?” 

#music #music review #list #new years resolution #self reflection #lady bird #thom yorke #mitski #tyler the creator #courtney barnett #jeff rosenstock #grizzly bear #music as therapy #music therapy

[beforethebridge]

Better Oblivion Community Center (Phoebe Bridgers & Conor Oberst) - “Didn’t Know What I Was in For”

One of my favorite new tracks of 2019 so far. Phoebe and Conor performing this song off of their new collaborative album, Better Oblivion Community Center.

I didn’t know what I was in for When I laid out in the sun We get burned for being honest I've really never done anything, for anyone

This song captures the tension between an era of heightened social awareness  and the reality that we’ll only ever commit as much time, money, and attention, to social activism as we’re willing to take away from ourselves and our indulgences.

The song’s focus on purpose and meaning evokes Vitkor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a must-read for anyone seeking self-reflection. Frankl writes about the value of suffering and grief in bringing us to understand how, in order to survive, we need to have something ahead of us to which we can aspire or through which we find hope. Phoebe and Conor here are aware of this. They are reckoning with the fact that we can only be present and available for others if we recognize how charity, empathy, and friendship each can serve our our own pride.

#track review #conor oberst #phoebe bridgers #better oblivion community center #indie rock #folk rock #boygenius #dead oceans #lyrics #pax am #viktor frankl #man's search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy #man's search for meaning

[beforethebridge]

Book Review: Chuck Klosterman – But What If We’re Wrong?

Chuck Klosterman – But What If We’re Wrong?

5/20/2019

“It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.” – Chuck Klosterman

One of my final mental inhibitors to getting a tattoo in an exposed area of my body is reaching a comfortable place about how I’ll explain its meaning to the different types of people in my life. The not-too-personal two sentence explanation for co-workers, the way-too-personal description for my best friends, and the messy, always evolving reality behind the decision that I’ll mostly keep to myself. In explaining my new forearm tattoo to a co-worker, I landed on a quick catalog of associations: philosophical skepticism, Anthony Bourdain, and suspending judgment (“epoché”). My standard quick description, added to the borrowed line “all I know is that I know nothing, and I’m not even sure about that,” struck a chord – he lent me his Chuck Klosterman book about questioning everything, the nature of history, and what the view of today will look like from tomorrow.

I burned through Chuck Klosterman’s But What if We’re Wrong? on a beach vacation (wrecking it with ocean water, sand, and blood somehow?), enjoying his commentary on how a range of core scientific principles and pop culture mainstays will be viewed in later decades and centuries. He prefers to think about big questions on the nature of history through the practical lens of personal conversation. Indeed, reading the book at times felt like a somewhat suffocating bar conversation with someone determined to prove themselves. But some sharp editing and self-restraint by the author seems to have distilled this book down to the most absorbing parts.

Klosterman’s strength is writing about how academic understanding of the collective, subjective societal significance attributed to pop culture evolves over time. Klosterman writes:

“Our sense of subjective reality is simultaneously based on an acceptance of abstract fallibility (“Who is to say what constitutes good art?”) and a casual certitude that we’re right about exclusive assertions that feel like facts (“The Wire represents the apex of television”).”

I found this tone in his analysis of subjective realities particularly attractive, jiving well with my recent embrace of the “epoché” lifestyle. Essentially, Klosterman argues that while the public tends to recognize that movies, television, music, and other forms of art and entertainment can subsist and thrive within their distinct audiences without having to take on some wider cultural relevance, critics and commentators often resort to superlatives to stimulate interest, conversation, and clicks. This contributes to an individual and societal pressure to conform to absorbing the entertainment highlighted by empowered voices (celebrities of various statures, Twitter trends and their curators, and critics published on influential publications and sites), or otherwise risk the cultural moment leaving you behind. Content is published at an alarming and overwhelming rate in 2019, incentivizing entertainment customers to distil their choices through their trusted filters. But how does this translate to future-historical understanding of what culture matters to us right now?

Klosterman wonders what entertainment will be presented by college lecturers centuries from now as emblematic of our current time period. For example, he settles on Chuck Berry (for “rock & roll” music) and Rosanne (for television sitcoms) as two emblems of 20th century culture, failing of course to predict or consider our current reexamination of Berry’s place in history in light of his documented abuse of underage girls and Rosanne Barr’s racist rantings (both fitting developments to follow a book conscious of the fallibility of predicting the future).

 For what it’s worth, a Google search for “rock and roll music” on 5/20/2019 results in a YouTube video of Chuck Berry performing “Rock & Roll Music,” along with a suggested search for The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and Queen. A search for “television sitcoms” currently yields a list of shows like Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, How I Met Your Mother, and, indeed, Roseanne, among a few dozen others. Klosterman asserts his choices because someone must, he argues, and because it makes for fun bar conversation (he seems self-aware about how parts of his book might remind some readers of their more eye-rolling dates). He’s not wrong, but maybe there’s an alternative to individual persuasion in rolling-up culture for future dissection. 

Luckily for those lecturers and their students, the Internet has enabled an industry of entertainment opinion amalgamation through ratings aggregator websites across popular artforms. I imagine archived versions of these websites might simplify the process of determining what entertainment is revered in its time, with necessary demographic bracketing of user populations per each site. For example, in music, users on RateYourMusic.com currently hold Radiohead’s OK Computer as the top-rated album of all time, while SputnikMusic.com users lend that honor to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (I don’t know much about the comparative userbases of these sites, but I would suspect them both to skew young, white, and male.) Earlier this year, I found Reddit posts where users sorted through ratings websites like these to form amalgamated rankings of 2018’s best music releases, and I’m sure this has been done across all different brackets of time, genre, and format, as well as across all other popular forms of entertainment (including ratings of those ratings websites themselves, in a sort of fivethirtyeight.com meta-analysis).

Letterboxd.com is an example site for movies, or rather for film watchers who find their identity in film viewing (and in calling it “film”) enough to rate and track their views, where Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), Planet Earth II (2016), and The Godfather (1972) currently hold the top ratings spots. This perhaps highlights the utility of nuanced categorization when considering these questions (what constitutes a feature film, a short film, a television show, a documentary, etc., and how should they be compared?). Critical opinions are widely aggregated as well, often compared alongside user ratings, as with sites like MetaCritic.com.

Do these opinion aggregators represent the best resources for those seeking to understand what entertainment connected with or represented most thoroughly our society in our time? Whose opinions are being aggregated, and whose are being left out of these ratings sites and their aggregators? Do these sites undervalue certain demographics (elderly, poor, those otherwise not “extremely online”) in ways that would create blind spots for our future assessors? Do these ratings reveal more about society than sheer viewership volume numbers, like Nielson ratings, Billboard charts, and other audience measurements? I don’t have the cultural awareness or critical experience to dive too deeply into these questions, but Klosterman’s But What if We’re Wrong? suggests ways of thinking that might help sort through the overwhelming entertainment of the present. I wouldn’t suggest to sociologists how to pursue their research, but if there are academics out there thinking and writing about opinion aggregators, I’d love to read up.

“The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that for us, too.” 

#book review #chuck klosterman #books #movies #film #film criticism #music #music criticism #sociology #But what if we're wrong #klosterman #television #tv #tv criticism #chuck berry #roseanne #pink floyd #the beatles #the rolling stones #parks and recreation #modern family #twin peaks #planet earth #the godfather

[beforethebridge]

Title Track: Future Islands - “Before the Bridge”

5/16/2019

In the music video for the Future Islands song “Before the Bridge,” a woman wearing a deep violet dress dances in front of a grandfather clock and around broken window blinds. The low-budget video cuts rapidly between shots of the woman and scenes around a rural North Carolina town, disorienting the viewer with bright light, rotated points of view, and close-ups that prevent a firm development of our setting and story. Rather, the video depicts the narrator’s experience sorting through disparate and scattered memories of his lost relationship. Over these scenes, Sam Herring, the band’s sentimental ironman and charming frontman, sings about love, regret, memory, and how they intersect: 

“For to forget a love is to regret

And what is love is regret”

It’s a bit bleak sounding at first, sure, but by the end of the song, Herring drops the “love is regret” line, just leaving “to forget a love is to regret.” I chose this song as the title of my tumblr because it brings me home. It reminds me of a time when I was just starting to figure out who I was and what I cared about. It helped me get through a tough break up, and to realize that our experience of the present is a constantly evolving interpretation of everything that has led up to now. It’s also one of the most musically diverse songs in Future Islands’ catalog and a tone-setter for On the Water, my favorite of their albums. Around the 0:30 mark, marimba sounds kick in, reminding me of my struggle to learn a four-mallet technique for a tricky part I played in my high school percussion ensemble. 

I’ve seen Future Islands three times so far, each in very different settings and at very different times in my life. Every time this song plays, though, and each time Sam pours his heart into the audience (along with a gallon or two of sweat - he moves like a fish on stage), I’m so enraptured that I’m moved to tears. In the bridge, Sam points to audience members as he asks “Do you believe in love? Do you believe in love?” (as seen in the photo above - Columbus, OH 8/28/2018). He asks like he’s looking for hope from the audience. At least at every show I’ve attended, the audience has always shouted back with enthusiastic yes’s and head nods. 

#futureislands #future islands #firstpost #music #indiepop #newwave #music video #beforethebridge #lyrics #sam herring #song review #track review #live music #onthewater #indie music