thejonzone

[thejonzone]

Judee Sill Will Always Be Better Than The Eagles

I had an (in hindsight) bleak, year-long obsession with The History of the Eagles. The two-part documentary, a Greek Tragedy-level case study in hubris, explains the rise and fiery crash of country-rock megastars The Eagles. What my brain fixated on, during this obsession, is that The Eagles, empirically one of the most successful bands in American music history, aren’t very good. This group has album sales on the same order of magnitude as Michal Jackson and Elvis Presley, yet band leaders Glenn Frey and Don Henley don’t seem much smarter than any other two guys you might happen to find somewhere. Sure, the Eagles have hits, but watching the doc, it feels as though the math just isn’t fully there.

This isn’t an essay about the Eagles. They are, however, one of the most recognizable music groups that rose to fame in the 1960s-70s from Los Angeles’ increasingly mythologized Laurel Canyon neighborhood. It would seem there is a limitless demand for the nostalgia of that era. With a growing list of documentaries that center Laurel Canyon, SoCal’s soft rock salad days are buoyed as much by songs as celebrity.

I’m always waiting around for a song to save me. And two Laurel Canyon-era albums do that for me.

I first listened to Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the City of New Orleans train, leaving Chicago on a summer night, slow roll pushing past the industrial rail yards and bridges southward toward the Mississippi. She sang “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling” and in that moment, I didn’t need anything else. Maybe I’ve spent the past five years fumbling toward explaining how that album lifted my guts up, breathed life into me. I’ll never fully get there.

Earlier this year, a round of retrospectives came out celebrating the 50th anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Mitchell is a legend, of course-- the greatest Canadian songwriter, she defined pop and folk music for decades. And Blue is a masterpiece, a moon shot.

With hindsight, it is clear that, when defining Laurel Canyon’s most important work, Blue is joined by another 1971 release-- the lesser-known Judee Sill’s self-titled debut. Judee Sill and Blue are earth-shattering travelogues, tracing uncertainty from California across the globe and out into the cosmic universe. I clutch on to songwriters who write about how lost and helpless they feel. These two albums are the clear-eyed transmissions that, 50 years after their respective releases, still matter.

While Joni Mitchell will get New York Times write-ups, Judee Sill won’t, and the conversation suffers for it. Sill was born in Studio City, California, and had a tumultuous childhood: a contentious and violent relationship with her stepfather, and a series of armed robberies with a boyfriend landing her at reform school. As she endearingly recounts in a live recording, she was the church organist at her reform school and learned “a lot of pentecostal licks” in the process. Her first album (Sill was the first artist signed to David Geffen’s then-fledgling Asylum Records) is a phenomenal mix of gospel, baroque, and folk.

Sill’s religious songwriting is fascinating because it runs counter to many of Laurel Canyon’s canonized musicians, who tended toward the secular, especially during and in the aftermath of the 60s. Joni was “looking for something / what could it be”, and Judee was on a similar traveling search, but with an apocalyptic angle. In the opener “Crayon Angels”, she sings “nothing’s happened but I think it will soon / so I sit here waiting for God / and a train / to the astral plane”. It’s worth noting that Judee Sill struggled with addiction, and died far too young of a heroin overdose.

Sill is able to intertwine the redemptive story of Christ with her own fight to find a new day. Take “The Lamb Ran Away With the Crown”, a bonkers song where Sill narrates a biblical battle, with talking serpents, sacred opals, and cardinals so big they’re ridden on like dragons. While the subject might be strange, the emotion is clear-- it is a song about light finally winning over darkness. As Sill sings in the round at the end, it’s so clear that it’s possible, that we can defeat the demons within us. The song is timeless, a celebratory shout of life from the bloody corner of the battlefield.

Flying is a theme on both albums-- desire and regret materialze in travel. Mitchell’s “This Flight Tonight” tells the story of an airplane trip and her regret of leaving, asking the pilot to “turn this crazy bird around”. In Sill’s “Enchanted Sky Machines”, she fantasizes about God’s vehicles that will transport humans during the rapture: “Until the enchanted sky machines take all the gentle home”. On “Loping Through the Cosmos” (and a warning: this song is really fucking sad), Sill, lost and searching, reflects “I’m hoping so hard for a kiss from God / I miss the sweet love of the air.”

It’s all about love, isn’t it? Visions of the end of the world or of big parties in Europe, both women wrote songs on their ‘71 records looking for transcendence through love. On “The Last Time I Saw Richard” Mitchell narrates an interaction with the titular fellow, a pessimistic man whose light has gone out and is chastising Mitchell for her romantic notions. It’s the album’s final song, and it is devastating.

“Jesus was a Crossmaker”, perhaps Sill’s best-known song, was written about longtime Eagles songwriting collaborator J.D. Souther, who dated Sill for a time. Life isn’t a game with a score kept, but Sill’s song is certainly more impressive than anything Souther wrote with the Eagles. As she reflects on the live album Songs of Rapture and Redemption, Sill wrote the song to make sense of her relationship with Souther (“I knew that wretched bastard was not beyond redemption”) but more so to make sense of herself (“it saved me, this song. It was this song or suicide.”).

It’s really worth listening to Sill’s live album, if only to hear her asides and charming anecdotes as she introduces her songs. She is so funny-- describing her song “The Archetypal Man”, she says “I really wrote this for an old boyfriend who had a lot of passion in his dishonesty.”

I love these albums because their emotions are truthful and transparent while still being hopeful. When Mitchell sings “and sometimes / there’ll be sorrow”, on “Little Green” it is unflinching. When Judee sings ‘Though I’m sitting in the grit and grime / the spark of hope is in me strong” on “The Phantom Cowboy”, it always makes me smile-- she was down bad but getting back up. Too often I feel more like Richard than like Joni, more like Souther than Sill. Which is to say, a loser. Sill and Mitchell’s albums are still worthwhile because there is emotional bravery, an abiding belief in love as a savior. Maybe it manifests as Jesus, maybe it’s a map of Canada.

I attached myself to the Eagles because I made them out to represent everything I don’t like about myself. These guys were greedy and egotistical, dumb and thoughtless. They let stupid things like money and machismo get in the way of relationships that mattered. Obsessed with their documentary, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees-- I didn’t realize I was projecting. But listening to Joni and Judee, it’s impossible for me not to face myself fully. Because I want to believe in something. I don’t want to be hobbled and silenced by cynicism. I want to be patient in love, even though sometimes that makes me want to tear my skin off. Blue and Judee Sill are two masterpieces, testaments to the power of being fearless when you are terrified. If Laurel Canyon is to be defined, it should be through these albums. Not the Byrds. C’mon.

[thejonzone]

Treasure Hunters and Lost Jewish Memories in Menachem Kaiser’s PLUNDER

It is a tricky business, looking for meaning in this world.

In Plunder, author Menachem Kaiser discovers that his grandfather, his namesake Maier, had spent decades trying to reclaim a property in Poland lost during the Holocaust. Maier was the only family member to survive the war, but died before Menachem was born. Menachem learns that his grandfather hadn’t properly filed the claim in the Polish court, so he travels to Poland to take up Maier’s legal battle. He does this in an attempt to understand his grandfather, writing “The building, maybe, was a means to access a history, a person, that I’d always thought inaccessible, immutably closed.”

Plunder is very aware that it fits into a genre of the American Jewish return story. These pilgrimage stories, of Americans searching for family stories in the old country, have their tropes. But Plunder is so compelling because as much thought is dedicated to the journey as to the motives behind the journey.

Plunder is a grim, critical, and often funny postmodern travelogue, with Menachem going to Europe and meeting others who are also still searching through the memories and artifacts of the Holocaust.

The story in Poland takes place in Sosnowiec, a town in Silesia’s Owl Mountains. Kaiser's foregrounding of place brings vitality to the memoir, as he writes “The hometown is significant because it is the setting of the story. (Otherwise it’s entirely uninteresting, just one of ten thousand shtetls: I wouldn’t make a great effort to go to your grandfather’s Polish hometown.)”. It’s true-- the personal drives the story, yet the story isn’t bogged down by sentimental fixtures of a deeply personal quest. In an article for Jewish Currents, Kaiser said “I am not sure if Jews I know here in the US have the bandwidth for these hyperlocal histories. They tend to want very personal stories with big, universal themes.”

But the focus on the hyperlocal makes Plunder feel special. In one fascinating chapter, Kaiser traces Silesia’s history of wealth and greed in the Owl Mountains through folkloric tales and more contemporary anecdotes. The Owl Mountains, it becomes clear, have long been changing hands between local powers and arriving conquerors, where valuable items are hidden or lost, then found centuries later. Our Holocaust legend for Silesia is the mysterious “Golden Train”, rumored (but never substantiated) to be hidden somewhere underground, filled with stolen valuables from Jews.

Menachem falls in with a group of European hobbyist-explorers. They’re attempting to discover more of Project Riese, an unfinished Nazi tunnel system in Silesia built by forced Jewish labor, where theoretically a Golden Train could be. Basically, these guys like to cosplay as soldiers, get really drunk in the forest, and search for old Nazi weapons in caves and holes. These are jovial fellows ultimately-- there is a great scene where Menachem is invited to a dig with the explorers, gets shitfaced on vodka, and realizes he can’t communicate with them because the translator, like all of them, is also drunk as hell.

Menachem’s interactions with the treasure hunters ends up making for a remarkable story. It turns out that he is related to the person we have to thank for knowing anything about Riese. Abraham Kajzer helped build Riese, and his memoir detailing his survival is the basis for pretty much everything we know about the Nazi tunnel system-- for the treasure hunters, it is a canonical text. Menachem ends up learning a lot more about Kajzer (a removed cousin) than his own grandfather. But discovering Kajzer’s story is noteworthy because his is still a living story.

Because the Holocaust is still a living story. Somehow (we know how, of course), the Holocaust is still being litigated. As we learn every week it seems, there are others in this country-- like the Texas schoolteacher who advocated to hear both sides of the Holocaust-- who see it a different way.

Menachem spends a lot of time with these treasure hunters, and therefore a lot of time trying to understand them. Because so little is know about Project Riese’s aims, it has become ripe territory for conspiracy theory. For example, some believe Nazis invented anti-gravity technology in the underground laboratories of Riese. Kaiser explains what conspiracy theories need to exist, all the accompanying information, “a blend of skepticism and unskepticism irrationality and hyperrationality…”. Nazis are shrouded in myth and exceptionalism-- considered so profoundly evil that their actions can take on multiple meanings.

What Kaiser gets to, by writing about Nazi conspiracy theories and treasure hunters, is that all this glosses over the truth of the Holocaust. Clinging to the idea that Nazis made a time machine, fixating on it is, as Kaiser puts it, “not blatant denial...the murders are recontextualized, are inserted into a ‘grander’ narrative, usually one with a technological or occult arc.” The Holocaust changes, the Nazi agenda changes. The mass death of the Holocaust shifts to accommodate the Nazi’s real plan, which was to invent an anti-gravity machine. Of course!

To follow this conspiracy theory to its logical endpoint means that the real culprit is not Nazis, but the forces trying to keep “the truth” of anti-gravity technology hidden. If you can believe it, the “behind-the-scenes powers” stifling this knowledge are, of course, Jews. So while the conspiracy theory might not be outright Anti-Semitic, it is still incredibly Anti-Semitic.

-- - -- - -- - --

The more I write, the more I realize just how difficult it is to communicate anything at all. To explain something complicated, something you’re unsure of, or something that makes sense in person but, as you realize later, is a blur of strange logic that makes no sense written down.

It is in this sense that Kaiser’s memoir is so well done. This is a story about confusion, about the lack of reliable information at the heart of our myths. It is about the unknowability of events like the Holocaust, which continue to define us as American Jews. Kaiser is moving through a bureaucratic system in a different country, speaking with people through translators, all with the hope to understand something that happened generations ago. And all of that is in the hopes that it might help him feel more connected to a man he never knew. These journeys we go on in order to understand ourselves are so fraught, and Kaiser’s success is in distilling that foggy desire, how truth shifts and gets lost. The idea of treasure is titular-- not just in the sense of buried gold, but how we construct our identities, how we steal stories from others, take them for ourselves in order to give our lives meaning.

[thejonzone]

A Lifetime Gone: Notes on Jim Sullivan and The Hours

Laura Brown does not want to be Laura Brown. She is one of three protagonists in The Hours (played by Julianne Moore in the movie adaptation), and for her it is 1949 in the hot desert suburbs of Los Angeles. Laura has a husband and a young son but dreads her housewife role, knowing it isn’t for her, knowing she can’t keep it up. She stays in bed for as long as she can, her eyes drop with empty relief as she watches her husband pull out of the driveway, and she reads, despairing for a different world.

After a failed attempt to make a birthday cake and an intimate moment with her neighbor Kitty, Laura has an existential panic. She drops her son off at a friend’s house and, under the guise of running an errand, takes a drive into the city: “As she pilots her Chevrolet along the Pasadena Freeway....she feels as if she’s dreaming or....as if she’s remembering this drive from a dream long ago.”

20 years later in Los Angeles (and in real life), Jim Sullivan records his debut album, U.F.O. It’s first song, “Jerome”, begins with a bright, unsettling orchestral arrangement. Swelling and theatrical but foreboding and alone, it’s the musical equivalent of “red sky in morning, sailors take warning.” Something is wrong. But just as the tension peaks, it all falls away, and for a moment everything is still.

Jerome is a town in Arizona, but you’d be just as right if you thought Jim Sullivan’s song was describing a person. In the late 1800’s, the town in the Arizona desert boomed with copper mining, but the mine closed in the early 1950’s, and the people left with it. Sullivan sings about buying drugs and wanting to go to Jerome, but he doesn’t know where it is or how to find it. He wonders where this ghost town could be. Is it “just a town out there”? Can you only find it “if you’re driving slow”? What exactly does Jerome mean to Sullivan, and how real is the place he’s searching for?

Jerome revitalized itself in the early 1970’s, in part due to its proximity to Sedona, the nearby capital of new-age spirituality. Sedona is known for its vortexes, places in nature that supposedly have high spiritual energy. It doesn’t seem coincidental that Jim Sullivan mentions Jerome-- he and his wife were both interested in New Age mysticism. The album has a clear spiritual bent, exploring reincarnation, religion, and grief: the foggy space between worlds. Even without knowing his strange and tragic backstory, Jim Sullivan’s U.F.O. captures the uneasiness of a dream world, the rising anxiety of realizing you’ve been traveling in the same circle, over and over again. It’s a nightmare. U.F.O. is about illusions and ghosts, it’s full of ghosts, one of whom (in hindsight) is Jim’s ghost, which haunts the album more than anyone he wrote about.

There’s a decent amount written about Jim Sullivan’s story. It ends with him in the New Mexico desert in 1975. Before that, he’d been living in Los Angeles. He made two albums that both failed to create any real traction for him. He had some small success (he was in the movie Easy Rider) but decided to leave his family behind and drive to Nashville to find session work. And that’s that. He never made it to Nashville. He disappeared, was never found or heard from. Ever again! They found his car, all his stuff in it, but never found him. For a guy that talked about driving into the desert and disappearing, it’s spooky how 6 years later he drove into the desert and disappeared.

His music faded to almost nothing, until Light in the Attic reissued it in 2010. My initial fascination is summed up by PopMatters: “When you discover a story like [Jim’s], you start hearing the music differently...It seems impossible not to hear the lyrics as a prediction...that he would come to some kind of mysterious end.” It kept tickling my head, the already cryptic and confusing lyrics morphing into some type of eerie prophecy I felt compelled to piece together.

For Sullivan, it’s not what we see, but how we see it. Eyes show up all over U.F.O. “Plain As Your Eyes Can See” is a lamentation of unreciprocated love. The song is claustrophobic: A crowd’s whisper amplifies to a drowning yell, fallen rocks constrict a bridge’s path. As the world contracts, the narrator realizes they don’t have a place in their love’s life. The song’s idiomatic title is deceptive. Because something that’s as “plain as your eyes can see” should be simple. But U.F.O. is full of moments when our eyes observe something strange, when seeing is anything but plain. He tells us that eyes can easily be deceived, and now here we are, our eyes deceived. The album is a disappearing act, a magic trick.

Throughout the album, characters have surreal, impaired vision. “Whistle Stop” begins with “thunder and lightning in my eyes”, before the narrator describes an interaction with a woman he believes to have known from a past life. “All the air seemed quite foggy to me,” he says, setting up a dream world where he contemplates the soul having some type of knowledge that transcends a body. On “Rosey”, men look at the titular sex worker with “diamonds in their eyes”, and Sullivan tries to figure out who really sees who in the exchange. The song is dark and melodic, the strings and horns are exalting at times, dangerous elsewhere.

The characters in Sullivan’s songs are observers, peering from windows, or watching from crowds. They are searching for answers and they search by watching. In the title song, the narrator describes watching a religious ceremony as “checking out the show / with a glassy eye”, whereas in “Johnny”, the narrator is watching a crowd form to watch a boy who is flying in the sky. They yell out to him to come down, and then wonder if he has discovered anything from up there. As the album goes on, it becomes clear that Jim himself was a watcher, as lost as his characters. Even the album’s cover art expresses a fractured and confused gaze, as 5 duplications of Jim’s face, rapt in attention, look up curiously at something out of sight.

Laura Brown, after some aimless driving, decides to rent a hotel room for the afternoon. She’s impressed by the “cool nowhere” of it, a place of travel and transition, a place to sleep but not a home. After checking in, she realizes how “far away from her life she is. It was so easy.” In the hotel, she sees her anger, her panic, her nervousness, all still in existence, but separate from her: “It’s almost as if she’s accompanied by an invisible sister…”

It is Sullivan’s discussion on death and reincarnation that proves most eerie in hindsight. Even with Rosey’s protective facade, she’s surprised to feel seen by her johns, as they see a part of her that she “often thought was dead”, which makes that part of her alive again, if just for a moment. U.F.O.’s title song begins with strings that feel celestial, so it’s only right that he sings about Jesus and resurrection-- “the only man I know that got up from the dead”. It’s neither critique nor praise of Christianity; the narrator wonders if people can come back, if they can ever be seen again. That idea is carried over in the most affecting song on the album, So Natural. In it, Sullivan most directly grapples with a grief that permeates the whole album: the death of his brother. He again is a watcher, this time at his brother’s funeral. His bizarre take on the experience is how natural his brother looks in death. Sullivan has molded a character who is both alive and dead. In a later verse portending his own death, Sullivan wishes for oblivion: for nobody to be at his eventual funeral, for his ashes to scatter across the desert. And here’s the wild part: both those things effectively happened.

Free of her responsibilities, Laura reads Mrs. Dalloway in her hotel room: “did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely, did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” And after closing the book: “It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, how she-- how anyone-- can make a choice like that.” It’s a grounding realization for Laura. It’s not necessarily one about suicidal ideation, although (at least in the movie version) she does attempt it, but one about agency. Death changes from something that happens to something one can make happen. In that moment, Laura realizes that she can choose life.

So what happened to Jim Sullivan? There are a few theories, and of course, nothing is confirmed. One is that he was killed, perhaps he ran into an unsavory figure, maybe small town police, maybe a remote branch of the mafia, maybe just a wrong place wrong time situation. Some think that he was abducted by aliens. I don’t think it should be ruled out that he chose to disappear.

After driving back from the hotel, Laura picks her son up on the way back home. She steps out of the car, feet planted back in the real world, and “is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing...it seems that by going to the hotel she has slipped out of her life…”

“Highways”, U.F.O.’s emotional centerpiece, sparkles and trills in a way that would certainly make Sufjan Stevens shit. Sufjan for sure takes a page from Sullivan’s book. Both these fellas love horns and using place to ground their songwriting. Both seem to float over the scenes they describe. Highways is optimistic, in a way. On an album where he’s searching for a place to feel at home, he finds it: being lost. He’s lost both physically and spiritually, as he describes losing his sense of identity. But that doesn’t concern him. “It’s easier to stay here, think I know my way here”, he sings. The place he feels most comfortable in isn’t a place so much as a state of motion. It’s part of the fantasy of escape, that giddy rush of being invisible, of not owing anyone anything, it’s that same feeling that coursed through Laura Brown as she drove down her own highway. “Highways” sounds like Jim Sullivan making a promise to disappear one day.

But he doesn’t disappear, at least not right away. He returns after a trip both in and out of our world, returns home, but he doesn’t return fully, he returns on the final song as a Sandman, bringer of sleep. It’s depressing, dark, insidious-- “honey now your sandman’s back in town” Sullivan croons, a promise of someone who knows death, holds it with him. Laura Brown, similarly obsessed with death, also doesn’t disappear right away. Her afternoon in the hotel makes it clear that she needs to leave, but she formulates her plan and waits for the right moment before doing so. As Laura delays having to join her husband in bed, she thinks over her life-changing day: “She might be nothing but a floating intelligence, a presence that perceives, as a ghost might. Yes, this is probably how it must feel to be a ghost. It’s a little like reading-- that same sensation of knowing people, settings, situations, without playing a particular part beyond that of the willing observer.”

I know what it is to fear life. To tip-toe, lie, crumple, appease, stay quiet, get angry, run. I know what it is to become a ghost. I want to believe that desire is stronger than fear, but I know it’s a choice like anything else. Jim Sullivan made a decision to improve his life. He chose to go to Nashville, and either was killed along the way, or chose to go away, just like he said he wanted to. I want to believe that we will do whatever we can to achieve what we need, but I know it’s not so simple. Jim’s voice is weighed down by despair, yet it’s clear he had a deep spirituality within him, some guiding force. He teases us to see, to really see.

Jerome is a town in Arizona, but you’d be just as right if you thought Jim Sullivan was describing a person. A person who once existed, a person who might come back. Jerome is the person who we are when we stop lying to ourselves, and it’s the place we’re constantly looking for. Good luck finding it on a map. Jerome is Jim Sullivan’s opening statement on his baroque pop nightmare, his declaration that we never really die, that we are constantly alive and dead, and what defines those qualities is rooted in what we’re searching for and what we’re hiding from. In the end though, it’s the Jerome Tourism website that puts it most mysteriously and succinctly: “Forever? Jerome never knows.”

[thejonzone]

It's True that Kendall Jenner Loves Neil Young

On the Beach, Neil Young’s ode to perserverance, plus its direct predecessor, Tonight’s the Night, represent my favorite section of Young’s discography. These albums are motivated by grief, the death of Crazy Horse’s guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, both to overdose. Young begins Tonight’s the Night with the title track, and gives a concise obit for Berry-- Bruce Berry was a working man / he used to load that Econoline van. The albums arrange Neil’s grief and combine with his desire to isolate in reaction to the huge success of his music.

The two albums are incredible-- inherently searching, Tonight’s second half takes place on the road, as Neil drives and sings and smokes and cries, intent to get out and away. And while Tonight is ramshackle, On the Beach is more polished, and has a bit of a wider scope, not so much blindly in reaction to death and fame but taking in the larger landscape of his life and his era, trying to make sense of where he was.

What makes Neil Young’s music appealing to me is that his cadences, melodies, and pacing always seem to match my depression. Often downtrodden and lethargic, his music moves to the same slow-thumping heartbeat in me that thinks about throwing it all away.

On the Beach has always struck a chord with me, not even considering the music, because of the album cover. A car lies crashed deep into the sand, only it’s back bumper still sticking out. A pair of beach chairs sit empty underneath an umbrella. Neil is in the background, hands in his pockets, looking out at the water. It sets the tone for the album, with Neil as maybe a bit of a party pooper, contemplating rather than reveling, on the outside looking away.

It is a little bit strange that I found Neil Young’s title track to On the Beach in the middle of Kendall Jenner’s Apple Music playlist “Summer of ZAZA”. Certainly, Kendall herself didn’t put this playlist together, but why is “On the Beach” included? One keyword search led to another, yada yada yada, now Neil’s song about the disillusionment of fame lands on a collection of “sunny, beach-ready songs”.

It’s easy to think that Neil’s song’s placement here is a mistake. But what if it isn’t? Is it such a stretch to imagine that Neil Young and Kendall Jenner are more similar than different?

But first...what exactly is a summer of ZAZA? Is it short for pizza pizza? Or perhaps a nod to Hungarian-American actress Zsa Zsa Gabor? Zaza is, I believe, a slang term for weed-- is Kendall endorsing a summer of flying high on grass? Maybe ZAZA is a new term, one that Kendall wants to get the ball rolling on. “How was the pool party?” “Oh, simply zaza, darling.”

The playlist is, surprisingly, melancholy. And that’s not just because Gorillaz’ “On Melancholy Hill'' is included(???). Some songs are sad and don’t feel like beach-hangin’ standards, like Linda Ronstadt’s cover of Blue Bayou, or Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Idaho”, a song I do not know but who’s lyrics include: Now it’s white as snow / watch the evening glow / across Idaho. Which are not summertime fun lyrics! Sure, there are 2019 summertime hits like “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo and “Venice Bitch” by Lana, but Yo La Tengo’s “Today is the Day”? Maybe included because it is on the album Summer Sun. SahBabii’s incredibly horny "Squidiculous" is here (Skinny jean king, can’t fit my nuts in this bitch), but why is that alongside the yearning coo’s and admittedly not fun in the sun vibes of Bobby Vinton’s “Please Love Me Forever”?? The playlist is strange in this way, and makes me wonder if Kendall Jenner is sad.

“On the Beach”, the most out of place song with the best SEO, does line up in some ways with Kendall Jenner. Young moved to Los Angeles in the late 60’s and found a lot of success there, helping to define the Laurel Canyon folk sound. Not only was he a part of Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, but upon going solo he had a megahit with 1972’s Harvest. Neil Young’s level of fame might not have reached a Kardashian level ever, but it’s not like he was some podunk folk singer playing to three people in a basement. He was a star.

And he had trouble with it-- with people’s expectations of who he should be, of what he should make next, of everything he ended up representing. It weighed on the guy. And it’s clear on On the Beach’s title track that Young is torn between the visibility fame gives him and his desire to be alone and hidden: I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day to day / Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away / I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day to day, he sings.

I’m not here to say I understand or know how Kendall Jenner feels. But I imagine that if I had cameras constantly pointed my way, making posts for my millions of faceless followers to support the empire of attention that had been built around me, I might relate to Neil.

But then again, I’m not so sure Neil and Kendall would get along. On the Beach is full of moments where Neil is quite candid and straightforward in his wish to smash Los Angeles’ rose-colored glasses, like in “Revolution Blues”, when he sings Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars.

Just like Neil considers the body of water before him on the beach, so have I, staring out, taking in the contours wind creates on the surface, watching cormorants dive underneath for fish, waiting for them to re-emerge. Sometimes the world comes back together when you take a step back. Neil’s album is so great because it hits on something that I think is universal-- we watch water and it causes us to think past ourselves. I want to believe that Kendall goes out to her private section of the Pacific Ocean and stares out at it. Maybe Neil’s plaintive harmonica floats around her head as she fantasizes about giving it all up, taking up an alias, and moving up to Alaska. As Neil sings later on in the album, on "Motion Picture (For Carrie)", Well all those headlines they just bore me now / I’m deep inside myself but I’ll get out somehow. The Summer of ZAZA was almost certainly made by an overworked Kardashian-employed social media person who typed “on the beach song” into the Google search bar. But maybe right now Kendall is staring out at a cloudy California beach, running “Ambulance Blues” back, and considering which Zuma deep-cut is going to make this year’s playlist. I’d rather the latter be true.

[thejonzone]

Riverdale is the Best Show You’ve Written Off

About once a month, a tweet will go around, reading something like “I can’t believe Netflix cancelled [SHOW X], but Riverdale is still on?!? *eye roll emoji, angry cussing emoji*.” It can be difficult to read tweets like these, because I like Riverdale. But I understand why it has struggled to keep an audience-- there is a perception that the show has gone completely off the rails, a chaos of hot actors in their mid-20s playing glamorous high school sociopaths, with the show choosing excess over narrative cohesion. That perception is pretty accurate. It’s an easy show to write off and easy to make fun of, especially because, as a CW show, it’s ostensibly geared to teens. So it brings me no pleasure to say that Riverdale, currently in its 5th season, has reached a renaissance, and its episodes so far this season represent its high-water mark. 

To appreciate how stunning and exciting Riverdale’s new direction is, it’s important to understand how we got here.

In the first season, a murder in the titular town revealed an underbelly of thugs, power brokers, and shady backroom rulers, all vying for control with gothic morbidity. What followed after that season though, was something else entirely. 

Riverdale, ramping up during Seasons 2 through 4, became a beautiful mess. I think it’s important to state that no other show on television is even attempting to do what Riverdale did/is doing. The show is, at any one point, 5-7 wholly different shows. There is a season’s worth of plot per episode. It’s storytelling mania and in-real-time dementia. I don’t remember what happened at the end of last episode because SO much happened. And besides, coherence is overrated! Give me hot actors, give me drug-addicted mobsters, give me creepy principals! On Riverdale, the parents are both former teen heartthrobs and serial killers, children operate underground speakeasies, and for some reason not one therapist has realized they could make a fortune helping our cast work through the intense psychological terror and emotional abuse they receive every episode.

This show is beyond pastiche, hyper-loaded with reference. My roommate and I had a joke that the show’s third season could be mapped to a quadrant of influences: Twin Peaks, True Detective, The Sopranos, and Gossip Girl. At any point Riverdale was acknowledging and playing into the influence of one of these shows. Season Four doubled down on the show’s horror anthology tendency. No one wants you to miss the references being made. You know that menacing boarding school Jughead attends in Season Four? You’d be right If it reminded you of Donna Tartt’s A Secret History. After all, consider Jughead’s classmate, whose name is Donna Sweet. Maybe you picked up on the violence simmering underneath the surface of Jughead’s other classmate, Bret Easton-Elli--  I mean, Bret Weston-Wallis.

Every week, the show seems primed for failure, attempting to juggle more storylines than possible or even necessary. The show is like a house of cards that has already fallen, and yet the writers are somehow still haphazardly adding more cards to the top. “Be reasonable!” I would plead. To no avail. And that’s the thrill of it. The plotlines are secondary to the spectacle. The show is a celebration and parody of violent legacy dramas, camp, teen horror, canonical literature, and anything else it can stuff under the hood, as much an ode to other pieces of media as it is an original work itself. 

But now, something completely different is happening. The beginning of Season Five brought an end to the seasons-long saga the show felt trapped in. Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead graduated high school, and the show flashed forward seven years. What might be considered a hokey technique was one of the best decisions the writers ever did. Because now we have a blank slate for our main cast. The writers effectively cut the fat from three seasons of violent, ridiculous maximalism. And it’s psychically refreshing.

At the heart of any good sitcom, we just want to see our main characters hanging out together. Change is part of life, but it shouldn’t be in television. Which is why this new season is so exciting-- Riverdale is now in the process of bringing its four main characters back from their adult lives and re-engaging them in the deadly politics of their hometown. Pop Tate, the owner-manager of Pop’s, Riverdale’s diner, is retiring, and Archie gets the gang back in town to celebrate the man who helped make the diner such a great hang-out spot. In the words of Jughead, “You gave us a home, Pop.” Like so mant other sitcoms before it, Riverdale used Pop’s to establish its characters and their relationships to each other.

I grew up on Seinfeld so I’ve always been attracted to the idea of the diner. The pandemic has made me yearn even harder for the sitcom diner, that idealistic place where all my friends are, where people enter with problems to be solved, drama to be explained, good news to be celebrated. Riverdale’s acknowledgment of Pop and his diner as the show’s connective tissue is a grounding and human choice. It works fantastically to set up this upcoming season, where our gang must confront the newest nefarious plot for control over the soul of Riverdale.

No doubt the show will continue its pattern of naming and spoofing genre. Veronica, in her adult life, had an Uncut Gems-style few scenes where she works as a charismatic (of course) diamond merchant. She married a possessive, boring guy who’s only characteristic seems to be that his voice is *exactly* like Veronica’s megalomaniac dad, Hiram. Something something Freud, something something daddy sexy. And credit where credit is due, Mark Consuelos is really hot.

Jughead is a writer now, in the most white guy college freshman fantasy of being a writer possible. He attended the Iowa Writers Workshop as an undergrad, something that is definitely not possible. He’s written a hit book but now suffers from *gasp* writer’s block?? He’s a cool guy writer who, in his opening montage, gets recognized by, hit on, and then has sex with a college-aged fan. Back in Riverdale, Jug writes a speech for Pop’s retirement and sends it to his agent. His agent is smitten with the work, calling it “tragic americana” and proclaiming that Jughead’s next book will be titled “Elegy for a Small Town”. This is almost certainly a reference to J.D. Vance’s bad book, and I’m sure the show will be bringing in more elements of “tragic” “americana” as the season unfolds. 

Betty is FBI in training, because as the show has loved to tell us, Betty has “the serial killer gene”, but is using it for good. For the record, her dad was a serial killer, and her brother was a serial killer. And it’s not like her mom or sister can cast the first stone. Betty’s endured enough trauma to fill 100 lives with unending pain and I’m sure the show will have no trouble heaping more on top. Already in the new season we’ve seen flashbacks to some point during the time jump when Betty was taken hostage, in what’s clearly a homage to The Silence of the Lambs. 

And then there’s Archie. I don’t know if anyone knows what to do with the guy. Played by K.J. Apa, who is both really good-looking with his shirt off and a god-awful actor, Archie has been in the army. The show is using him to shill for the military-industrial complex. 

I’ve long joked that the Riverdale writers have no idea what they’re doing. But through a global pandemic affecting TV production and *the* major narrative complication in any high school-set show (graduation), the Riverdale writers have seamlessly transitioned the show to a new stasis. Past seasons are informing this one, but we aren’t bogged down by the details in this new season. The bigger joke, of course, is that the writers have known exactly what they’ve been doing this whole time, and I’m just an idiot. Well I mean, of course I’m an idiot. I use television to regulate my emotions and simulate a static friend group that doesn’t leave or change. And Riverdale is perfect for that. If a renaissance is a rebirth, well then my friends, cut the umbilical cord and save the placenta to put in pills, because Riverdale is cranking out episodes that are better than ever.

[thejonzone]

Jon Writes a Year-End List

My favorite songs of 2020, alphabetically by artist

Bedouine (Margo Guryan cover)- The Hum

The original Guryan version is good but Bedouine’s take is cleaner, all the better to emphasize Guryan’s blissful songwriting. I could listen to the chords in the chorus forever.

Bob Dylan- I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give My Heart to You

It’s nice to hear Bob sing a yearning and clear-eyed love song. And the way he stretches out his words gives the whole thing a confidence that’s easy to get lost in. 

Boldy James- Giant Slide

Boldy had a great year, and it’s The Price of Tea in China with Alchemist producing that stood out to me. 

Empty Country- Becca

I don’t go to music festivals anymore, but listening to this album makes me dream of hearing it live, while being dehydrated, sweaty, feet hurting, holding in a p*op, a late afternoon sunburn loading. I want the whole thing!!

fawning, Rui Gabriel ft. Jack Riley- God

Toss it on the cloudy day walking playlist!

Frances Quinlan- Went to LA 

Great cathartic yell in this one. Quinlan builds up a palpable tension here. It rocks.

Judy ft. Jack Dolan, jommis- Say What U Mean

You’ve got to imagine these fellas knew they had put a few catchy melodies down while trying to out-croon each other.

Kurt Vile ft. John Prine (John Prine cover)- How Lucky

A Prine acolyte with a feature from the man himself. RIP.

Lala Lala, Grapetooth- Valentine

Kind of like a slow-dance song at nightmare prom. I love the percussion and Frankel’s villainously-low voice.

Lil Durk- Street Affection

The range of emotions Durk can access and scroll through is impressive.  

Miranda Winters- Little Baby Dead Bird

Scuzzy guitar and violin create a hypnotic effect in this evocative dirge. Miranda Winters is such a good singer. Check out her main band, Melkbelly-- they put out a great album this year!

Nap Eyes- Mark Zuckerberg

Two guitars: one is pointy, the other is chugging. That is the correct way to do two guitars.

Noname- Song 33

This song is 70 seconds. 70! Noname casually negates J. Cole and the song isn’t even about him. She’s so great. 

Ratboys- I Go Out at Night

Julia Steiner is on her The Hours shit in this melancholic fantasy of leaving and not returning. 

Rio da Yung OG, Lil Yachty- 1v1

I like how Yachty comes in on his verse! It’s been fun to see him back in action with his new Michigan friends. Rio is the star here, though. And Enrgy too. 

Soccer Mommy- yellow is the color of her eyes 

Sophia Allison’s delivery of “The tiny lie I told to myself is making me hollow” might be my line of the year. 

Swamp Dogg- Memories

The whole of Sorry You Couldn’t Make It is great, but for Swamp Dogg, who has covered John Prine, to work with the man before he died is a special accomplishment, and we’re better off that it’s recorded. 

Tall Juan- Irene

One of my favorite 2020 releases. And I’ll be a bit vulnerable here folks….when I am walking outside and this song comes on, I push my butt out a little bit and walk like I have rhythm and purpose. 

Tierra Whack- Dora

I’m so excited to see what Tierra Whack does, from her beat selection to how she jumps between flow and cadence. She understands herself so well. 

Non-2020-specific Music I Enjoyed, in Superlative Form

Group Vocal Performance Most Likely to Pierce Your Heartless Facade

Yesu Ka Mkwebaze

Best Song to Listen to if You are an 1850’s-era whaler in Your Feels

Mary Ann

Favorite Duet (Not Blood-Related)

Emmylou Harris and Herb Pedersen (but mostly Emmylou) create such an intricate and gorgeous melody on “If I Could Only Win Your Love”. Pedal steel heads and mandolin freaks, eat up.

Favorite Duet (Blood-related)

The Louvin Brothers- When I Stop Dreaming

Any longtime friends of the show know I’m a big fan of the singing duo The Louvin Brothers. They’ve got that golden country tone but it’s the blood harmony that turns these guys into something else entirely.

And here’s the kicker, folks. Emmylou covered When I Stop Dreaming! How coincidental for all of us reading this End of Year list…. The Louvins are my preferred version, but Emmylou, that you could help me make this connection is enough, dayenu!

Most Surprising Use of a Song in a Network TV Show

"Yama Yama" by the Yamasuki Singers, Fargo Season 2

When I was a dishwasher at St. James Cheese Co., late 2016ish, this CD was in our back of house music rotation. It is a magical album-- a Japanese children's choir with French pop production (think a bunch of bells and shit). I never learned the name of the album while working there and it fell out of my mind until years later when, after remembering how much I loved it, realized I had no idea how to find it. The pain of typing different spellings of “japanese children’s choir” into google for days on end.....I literally yelled when Fargo used this in its Season 2 big boy shootout. *chef’s kiss*

Best Album by a Spiritually Hungry Musical Genius, Lapping Her Contemporaries in Arrangement, Theme, and Songwriting, Gone Before Her Time

Judee Sill’s self-titled debut. 

Best Use of a Second Keyboard in A Keyboard Solo

Fountains of Wayne’s Red Dragon Tattoo

Do I mean to say synthesizer? Not sure. RIP Adam Schlesinger and long live FoW. What a loss.

Best Vibes/ Song I’d Most Want to Show Ezra Koenig so That We’d Bond & Become Friends

Zibote

Best Lyrics Written by a Jew in 1920’s NYC Being Sung by Willie Nelson

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea / to the open arms of the sea

Favorite TV Shows

Ramy

-Second season shook its focus on the titular character and oh am I thankful. Not that Ramy himself isn’t great, he is, but the entire cast here deserves attention. The Uncle Naseem episode. The Uncle Naseem episode. Ahem. The Uncle Naseem episode.

Joe Pera Talks with You

Lovecraft Country

-Small gripes and complicated plotlines aside, this anthology connecting gothic horror, racism, and American history is phenomenal. 

Small Axe

-The second installment in this series, Lovers Rock, which takes place at a party, is the vicarious shot in the arm you deserve, you little extroverted thing you. 

I May Destroy You

Betty

The Last Dance

-The first Bulls game I ever went to was the first game *without* Michael Jordan, at the beginning of the ‘98-’99 season. Bad timing.

The Chi

Schitt’s Creek

-This show was never about the plot. Am I allowed to say that? I’ve never cared less for a plot and more for a cast. Catherine O’Hara is in her own league above us all.

Jon Writes a Year-End List

In 2019, my roommate June and I took a road trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was out of a relationship, happily or unhappily I wasn’t sure yet, but along the way I downloaded Tinder hoping to meet a local who’d be excited to make out with me. There wasn’t much bite on my line, but by the time we reached Marquette, largely due to my good looks and charisma I’d orchestrated some type of group date with June, me, a girl from Tinder, and her friend. 

We met at a dingy karaoke bar and drank for cheap. Nobody wanted to hear me sing, but I got on stage anyway and gave “Willin” by Little Feat a go. Some guy at the bar in a maroon work shirt looked at me, scoffed, and left to smoke outside. The four of us weren’t hitting it off, even with alcohol. I and the friend made a plan to sing “Mommas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys'', but she quickly abandoned the duet after we had begun, citing a lack of vibes.   

But we kept singing and drinking and hours later I was leaning against the bar, waiting to order, standing next to maroon-shirt guy who had so easily shrugged off my existence earlier. What caught my eye as I stood next to him was a Star of David tattoo on his forearm. And sure enough, the name tag stitched onto his shirt identified him as “Isaac”. Well I’ll goddamn be-- this guy was frickin Jewish! I was shocked-- I assumed he was goy in the same way I assumed everyone I ran into up there would be. 

For just one unconscious assumption (I’m the only Jewish person in this Marquette karaoke bar) to be wrong felt great. My assumptions are really awful. I assumed maroon-shirt hated my guts. I assumed these two girls we were drinking with thought I was a loser too. I assume people don’t like me or respect me or have any interest in getting to know me. I tell awful stories about myself to myself, and my assumptions about the world are limiting and boring! With patience, “guy at bar who kinda scowled at me” had all of a sudden turned into “my new friend Isaac” who, after a few minutes of conversation, I “asked to bum a cigarette from.”

One of my favorite shows of 2020 was Joe Pera Talks With You. I still remember watching Joe Pera’s stand-up for the first time, and then rewatching and rewatching, savoring his cadence. He dressed and spoke like a grandpa, replete with pitch-perfect, kinda-gross mouth sounds, stutters, and low-but-driving energy. It’s a good bit, and Joe has morphed it into probably the funniest, sweetest, and least-pandering show of 2020. What I love about this show is its foundational belief that anyone can surprise you, you just need to give yourself time to notice.

I didn’t end up making out with anyone but I did wake up the next morning with the worst hangover of my life. Wake up, barf, whimper. As June drove us out of Marquette, I could barely keep my eyes open. I did notice, however, a massive, wooden structure jutting out into Lake Superior.

It is this same Lake Superior structure that Joe Pera Talks With You fixates on for its first shot of Season 2. Yes, this is an Adult Swim show that takes place in none other than Marquette, Michigan! Which is weird. Think about other movies, shows, or books that take place in the U.P. You can’t! Even zooming out to include the larger Upper-Great Lakes region leaves us with an almost-empty net: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot and titular Gatsby’s origin story on Lake Superior. These are stories of hard living and life and death on the dangerous Great Lakes. But neither of those are specific to the Upper Peninsula.   

Regions are an easy if reductive lens with which to attempt to view and understand people. In 2020, broad and sweeping generalizations about large swaths of people continued to gain power. There was the movie adaptation of JD Vance’s ahistorical Hillbilly Elegy. Woolly-eyed liberals trotted out fake maps of a preferred America that holds only the “good” blue states, not at all engaging in the history of racism and voter suppression that got us here. Besides the fact that Georgia went blue. And Democratic strongholds like California, New York, and Chicago betray any notion of a “better” America. The sins of this nation are not cordoned off into one section or time zone, no region is monolithic, and most importantly, no person can be explained away with a quick sentence.

There is no regional monolith more widely misunderstood than the Midwestern gestalt. Fargo (the show) does a great job of serializing this one type of Midwestern character-- they say “oh sure, happy to help” and they’re murderers. So for Joe Pera to settle his show in the U.P. is a fun choice. Most Americans are probably hard-pressed to conjure an accurate mental picture of who the U.P. is, so Pera creates his own flavor of a seemingly-recognizable small Midwestern town.

In the first episode, Joe walks us through the bean arch he’s growing. Why grow snap beans? “Beans are straightforward.” Straightforwardness, or the appearance of, is central to Pera’s charm. Pera’s shtick is walking the audience through a basic task that can serve as a metaphor for a larger existential question. This conceit isn’t new to Pera, but it has been en vogue recently, with shows like Andy Daly’s Review and the new HBO show How To with John Wilson. These shows present a simple stated goal that obfuscates a larger, more complex grapple. 

Joe Pera Talks With You is incredible and endearing because of the genuine tone Pera gives his tight-knit Marquette. We’re getting deranged lunatics like Conner O’Malley and Dan Licata to write jokes for 70-year old Michigan grandmas at a salon. The show trades in the perceived Midwestern folksiness for a punchline, yet doesn’t lose itself in irony or resentment. 

Every character in the Joe Pera universe has the opportunity to be profound. Pera gives every character the patience they deserve; even O’Malley’s berserk Joe Rogan listening-caricature Mike Melsky gets incredible moments of vulnerability. It’s a rare comedy: self-aware but not self-obsessed, sweet but not gross, and uniquely funny.  

Nowhere else on TV are you going to see such consistently great acting. Some of the best working comedians are in this season. Conner O’Malley has found a way to tap into his unsettling grotesque that is a pleasure to watch, playing characters at the ends of their ropes, shrieking. Jo Firestone is hilarious and essential as Joe’s doom-prepper girlfriend Sarah. We get guest stars like  genius Carmen Christopher. Even one-line role players like Joe’s teacher-coworker, who says Joe and Sarah go together “like desk and chair,” knock it out of the park. 

The questions at the heart of Talks With You feel more pronounced in a year of death and isolation. How do we connect with people? How can we really be there for our loved ones? How can we feel comfortable in our own skin? The show came out pre-pandemic but Pera’s touch and pacing is universal.

It’s difficult not to compare Talks With You to How to with John Wilson. The two shows have a lot in common. Both protagonists are soft-spoken, and speak at an arrhythmic clip. John Wilson’s voice is affected just like Pera’s; both vocal deliveries are meant to engender trust by signaling to us that they’re lacking some social confidence. But I don’t buy Wilson’s shtick as much as Pera’s.

John Wilson’s show is not straightforward in the same way Pera’s is, and the show suffers under the added weight of pretense. Wilson’s tangents lead us to places that barely fit under the established thematic umbrella and feel forced. On memory, Wilson’s adventure with the Mandela Effect turns from fascinating to boring as the truthers devolve into sketch characters, viewing simple spelling errors with magnifying glasses. “How to Cover Your Furniture” spends an upsettingly long amount of time with an anti-circumcision advocate as Wilson works through the question of how much we are allowed to change parts of other people. Meant to appear as if they effortlessly fell into place, these characters feel shoe-horned in.

Both characters and shows are performative authenticity, and Joe Pera and John Wilson’s whole deal is their status as observer. This year, many of us have become observers. I know I have: unemployed, unable to see people, watching death counts climb, sending money to various bail funds and rent relief to people and organizations near and far. There is a responsibility to being an observer. It is not some callous task. Being an effective observer means allowing your subject the space they need to be as they are and not foisting your own nonsense onto them.

In Joe Pera’s America, it’s understood that everyone is weird. By virtue of being human, we are all weird, off, we do confusing things, and say dumb stuff that doesn’t make sense. Even you’re a weird freak. John Wilson’s subjects seem like circus animals, squeezed in front of the camera for their fucked-up little flip. I can’t shake the feeling that John Wilson is making fun of the people he’s observing. Pera’s observations are rooted in the fairness that comes from seeing humanity in people-- every person has an equal chance of surprising you with how weird they are if you just make them comfortable and let them talk. We owe that to each other.

To be fair, these shows are also very different. Wilson’s found-footage, documentary style is ingenious, hilarious, and completely not the vibe that Pera and Co. are going for at all. And region here is everything. Wacky stuff happening in NYC? Eh, isn’t that par for the course over there? Wait, a show set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? Ok...now that I’ve never seen. 

Obviously I was wrong about Isaac in Marquette, just as any broad assumption about a region and its people will be. I actually learned that Jews have a significant relationship to the U.P. And I found similarities between my own Jewish history, covering a similarly nebulous area of the Rust Belt/Midwest, and my U.P. cousins. Yes, home was closer than I thought, even across the length of Lake Michigan. Yes, people don’t just hate my guts. Yes, we can overcome lazy assumptions and we can even connect with people. We can make a better world. It just requires patience and listening.

Now, on to my thoughts regarding Fiona Apple’s landmark album Fetch the Bolt Cutters...

[thejonzone]

MGMT’s CONGRATULATIONS CAME OUT 10 YEARS AGO TODAY

I remember when MGMT played Saturday Night Live to promote their new album, Congratulations. I was a sophomore in high school, and I didn’t realize it yet, but I was in the eye of the hurricane: chubby, acne, no style, charm, or hope of talking to girls, who I was increasingly hopeless over. And then MGMT popped up. It was a defining performance. It awoke something within me.

On SNL, Andrew VanWyngarden confused me (sexually): his hair in a gorgeously messy bees nest, a black shirt with white polka dots on. He was so quiet, it seemed like he was whispering, his eyes mostly closed. I didn’t necessarily want to fuck him-- I wanted to be him). The song itself, “Flash Delirium”, explodes to life after an intro, and so too did the band, and we see that they are all wearing equally incredible, vivacious outfits. The energy that the band exuded was spooky, entrancing. Whenever the camera shifted to the second guitarist, he stared back with a wide-eyed, almost treacherous gaze, as if he was attempting to hypnotize the viewer. It felt like they were playing with dark magic, each different section of the song like an element of a spell, like they were invoking something evil. After watching the video (over and over), I felt as if I understood myself better. Understood my direction, toward whatever that was. 

I never got why the album didn’t receive acclaim. It’s better than Oracular Spectacular, more singular, more specific. It doesn’t have radio-ready hits, but it also doesn’t have early cringe like “The Youth”. It married the catchy pop sensibilities of their hits with the druggy, proggy, synth-driven bent of Oracular’s back-half into one cohesive project.

Congratulations doesn’t miss. “It’s Working” pulls baroque keyboard and tides of thumping drums. They keep their energy on “Song for Dan Treacy”, a Halloween-adjacent song that conjures haunted houses and faces lit only by candles. “Someone’s Missing” builds its crescendo, and it’s gorgeous when it breaks-- perfect 60′s pop. “Siberian Breaks”, their 12-minute multi-part suite lurches forward like Frankenstein’s monster. They really stacked catchy piece on top of piece. The eponymous final song, “Congratulations”, has always affected me, it’s slow-paced and gloomy. It captured something about how I felt in high school, ignored and sad about it but shy and not even sure how I wanted to be perceived.

I’ve attempted (and maintained) my version of VanWyngarden’s hairstyle in the years since. That may be the most tangible effect of the album on me. But 10 years later, it is still a masterpiece, a testament to being and finding yourself.

[thejonzone]

ARTHUR RUSSELL- IOWA DREAM

I wish I was more creative. Meaning: I wish I was less judgmental: to others, to myself. Therapy tells me that it’s not (fully) my fault, and why even bring the notion of fault into the equation? Something about parents, something about childhood, something about a bright afternoon dimmed by drawn blinds. I suffer when I can’t create. When I can’t express how I feel, or can’t name it, it sticks around. But I’m so afraid of being judged. I’m so afraid of how I will judge myself. I’m so afraid of how, in a dark room somewhere, rules are being dictated to my invisible jury by a tall foreman whose mouth waters at the thought of sticking pruning hooks into my lovehandles. It’s irrational, and I tell myself that above all, no one gives a shit about me enough to be so viciously judgmental. It persists, though. 

I’ve always been jealous of people who don’t seem to have these internal speedbumps. I remember my childhood friend Terrence who made homemade videos, shaping silly narrative with random items from his basement. There was a levity to it all that made it fun. I’ve always been envious of these people, who create with speed (intensity). Arthur Russell was one of these people. I’ve learned about him through posthumous releases, big compilations like Love is Overtaking Me, 20 songs with everything from oscillating cello to folk guitar and gutteral humming. I was taken by how playful it was, even when Arthur was weaving his way through a heartbreak. He had such a commanding hold on melody that it all sounded good. It was experimental in a way that interested me even more. Sure, he’s been idealized since his death in 1991. These compilations feel like sandboxes, spaces of wandering and wondering. While I know Arthur Russell was a stickler and a perfectionist, his songs still feel like they were crafted in a single afternoon, a progression teased out, pieces of sound clumped together with ease and expression. 

My greatest fear is that I’m cold and reserved and missing out on something essential to life. Maybe it’s that I don’t have the fearless expression that Arthur seemed to have. I feel too calculating too often. However, I can begin to feel it pool up when I listen to Iowa Dream. This collection is not as popcentric is Love is Overtaking Me, but it feels unique, it feels childlike in its expression. It’s a joy to listen to.

[thejonzone]

MELKBELLY- PITH

I’ve been feeling more anxious than usual. With the world ending and everyone being forced to stay inside, I’m not sure why! Melkbelly, a Chicago noise rock group, on their second album, PITH, have decided that they want to add to the net anxiety of the world with their cavalcade of dynamic, harsh, and rewarding rock.

Melkbelly know how to craft a melody. Songs like “Sickeningly Teeth” and lead single Lcr are hard, fast, and catchy. Lcr at times morphs into power surf rock, biting but cool as lead singer Miranda Winters dreams up an escape to the “the softer roads of Michigan.”

Melkbelly comes across as a band from hell, and Miranda Winters is the ringleader of the dark carnival. She carries the band’s arsenal of doom with her: math-y, unforgiving drums, walls of feedback, and guitars acting as droning sirens, panning across the listening field with alarming frequency. She is my favorite part. Her voice is slick, presiding over the chaos. She reminds me of 90′s women like Liz Phair and Kim Deal. Whenver she sings, her cool detachment plays so well in opposition to the band’s earnest solidity. When she takes a break for the guitars to scream, the balance is off.

While they showcase an ability to carve melody from chaos, they’d rather bathe in the chaos itself. Their songs stretch over brutal sonic landscapes, asking the listener for patience as they tinker with long instrumental sections. On the over-7-minute-long “Kissing Under Some Bats”, they reserve the last 5 minutes for a blistering guitar exercise, one that is further nerve-tweaking due to the chord they repeat coming from an unresolved chord progression. That means 5 minutes of anxiety, 5 minutes of waiting for a show that won’t drop.

Every day it feels like we are moving further into hell. Sometimes we need music to escape that feeling. And sometimes we need Melkbelly, who will remind us we’ve always been here, and to settle in for more.