Chronicle #5: June-July 2020
Possibly the most interesting chronicle yet! From cultural appropriation to artistic appropriation to remixes to one of the best releases of the year.
Jessie Ware - What’s Your Pleasure?
If only I could love this album. If only I could sit down with it, worship it, make a monument out of it, shoot a bootlegger of it, crown it every title imaginable, if only it were so simple. Actually, no. If only it weren’t so simple. I reach out to touch this album’s hand and the album responds with a warm, powerful, loving embrace and I feel that heat and that power and that love. It’s bursting with something holy that I can have access to, its magic wrapped in its disco balls accessible to all, a certain purity of mind, body, and soul that judges none and invites all. No strangers here, everyone is everyone and everything is valuable, airtight and shut like bathroom doors and bedroom floors, every touch and every sentiment is the right one. All with a simple push of the play button, you’ll find everything there. But it’s only a dream. Let’s take a step back.
What’s Your Pleasure? is the brand new album by English pop songwriter Jessie Ware, her fourth overall. She used to be mainly known for a certain brand of ‘art pop’, in which she dabbled with alternative R&B and soul to frankly mixed results. She was part of this very weird and poorly aged British boom of the early 2010s of “serious” pop music, the kind that was too good to be just pop music, and needed to have some vague, artistic indie veneer behind it, and therefore became too clinical and anemic for its own good-the only artist whose material from that time has aged fairly well is Ellie Goulding’s. In Jessie Ware’s case, it was a shame she got a breakthrough with that sort of material, given that she did have a really pretty voice and a couple of songwriting tricks up her sleeve-her pretty alright pop-soul 2014 album Tough Love is proof of that.
But this is a complete and total reinvention. Leaving behind her previous insertions into ‘artful’ R&B, she has now thrown herself into the late-70s soulful R&B disco sound, alongside the early 80s dance-pop aesthetic, from Donna Summer to Madonna to Prince-just around the time where pop music became synonymous with synth-funk and never looked back-alongside some early 90s house touches for flavor. What’s Your Pleasure? is immersed in a disco haze, in which every aspect of meeting and getting with a potential lover is explored and exploited. The Moroder pacing synths hum and make their way across the harpooning strings, the wild percussion that hides beneath the shadows to provide that never-ending rhythm, and Jessie’s smoky voice, dissipating into the night and hitting every button of serotonin and thrill. This music bounces like little else out right now and understands the components of what it’s trying to recreate with essentially no flaws. It’s a chance encounter that means more than anything else at the moment, and isn’t afraid to go for more. It’s in the title, “what’s your pleasure?”. It’s looking at what you desire and realizing that it’s right there, you can have it, you just need to hold on to it and you know exactly how, and time seems to slow down so you can make all the right moves at exactly the right time. It’s never been as good as this. But it’s a farce.
It’s a pretty little lie that you can tell yourself, a sweet fantasy that you can’t exactly bring to reality. I live in a state of ecstasy in this album, but the second I try to remove myself from that state and try to bring it to reality, the music crumbles, it self-destructs. It can’t stand, it won’t stand. It’s too pristine, it’s too pure. It gets too much right, leaving no room for error. One of the main magics of disco music or freestyle or house music-all of them (not coincidentally) originally and predominantly black and queer genres-is that of the uncertainty, of the anxiety, of the longing, of the yearning. Music born out of the need to resist the outside world, and realizing the outside world will filter through anything. It’s that conflict that makes music like this so pompous and strong-it’s joyous because it needs to be. This, on the other hand, is joyous because it knows everything is alright, and the second this music walks out of the studio or the club, it will find a home. It’s escapism so well done that it leaves me, the listener, outside of it. Disco music, house music, that’s ragged music, dislocated music, rough around the edges, and through those cracks is where the listener can come in and commute with everyone. What’s Your Pleasure? has no edges-it’s all clean-cut, polished, clear, like a cover on an electric socket. Not to romanticize pain, but this is gentrified disco.
It’s hard to really pinpoint any highlights here because, taken on their own, just about all these songs are excellent in their own way-from the sultry mystery of “Spotlight” to the Apollonia 6 reject that is “Soul Control” to the misty eyes of “Save a Kiss”, one of the few moments on the album where you can sense a tad of anguish (like if it knew its moment was merely an abstraction), to the easy-going vibe of songs like “Step Into My Life” and “Read My Lips” to the truly moving outro of “The Kill”-all gorgeously made tunes with a lot of craft behind them. But that self-awareness in which the music can’t seem to ignore the fact that it’s gonna be beloved by everyone almost without trying (and the fact that it worked) can’t be shaken off so easily. It’s getting everything I ever wanted and asking myself “what’s the catch?”, only to later discover that the catch is that it all comes at the expense of not recognizing queer, black, Latine musicians who could be doing this kind of music just as good or better if they had the resources Jessie Ware does here. A shame? Maybe. But then I put on Prince’s Dirty Mind or Donna Summer’s Bad Girls or one of Frankie Knuckles’ mixes (or even from this year, Empress Of’s solid I’m Your Empress Of or SoulLab’s fantastic house album Into Our World) and kinda forget about it.
Plus, on a personal note, I’m not sure I want my escapist disco fantasy to be engineered by the fucking Arctic Monkeys producer.
Pop Smoke - Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon
This was both inevitable and completely avoidable. All posthumous albums feel weird to listen to, knowing that the artist you want to support and endorse despite them being dead have not authorized the music to being out. That feeling is especially strong with someone like Pop Smoke, a rapper so inventive and crushing in his art that his tragic, saddening death at 20 years old means he had the world ahead of him, and that reflects on the art that was left unfinished showcased here. Pop Smoke was known as the main driver of the New York drill scene, taking a lot of cues from the UK’s stomping, vibrant beats filled with a manic, low-pitch delivery, but you could hardly tell if you listened to Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon and nothing else, which delivers a nearly total shift in sound towards more current, melodic trap; more guitar-based, mellow, leaving behind the abrasiveness he was known for.
It’s very easy to point fingers towards once-titant now-hasbeen 50 Cent, who was the executive producer for this album, for the switch in sound, but the thing is, there’d be simply too much to change in order to make that assertion. It’s very easy to forget that, again, Pop Smoke was merely 20 years old; having conquered one style of music, he might as well could have decided to conquer a different one, a more approachable one. A style of music that’s the leading sound of modern mainstream rap music and that was very much ready to welcome him. Listening to some of these tracks, one can tell Pop Smoke was very invested in them. Songs like “For the Night” and “Mood Swings”, with their R&B hooks and a softer delivery come as a surprise, not only because of Pop taking on this style of music, but owning it pretty well. Even a song like “West Coast Shit” where Mustard takes in with late night pianos and meandering guitars on top of traditional hip hop drums he can own very well; there’s a knack for further experimentation on behalf of Pop Smoke that this project, at times, can showcase very efficiently.
But then again, this is a posthumous project, and a very obvious one at that-songs like the “intro” and the “outro” are that because they’re clearly unfinished demos. And because these songs were very much not ready to be published, on many of them you can hear signs that they could work if he’d had the chance to develop them, but as they are, they just feel awkward. The big single “The Woo” with 50 Cent and Roddy Ricch is tepid and confused, so are the more romantic cuts like “Something Special” and “What You Know Bout Love”, and the failed experiment tacked on right at the end to make a hard, bombastic banger a la Meek Mill that is “Got It on Me” should have remained in the drafts-probably because that’s what it was. Not coincidentally, the best song here by far is the one where he remains in his comfort zone, the rebellious “Make It Rain” that tears itself apart with each move. But as a whole, this album feels perverted-it’s a former no-judgement zone for Pop Smoke to experiment with new ideas and refine them on his time, now put out in its incomplete fashion for the world to see, with the main artist having no say. Makes one want to listen to either Meet the Woo and weep. A visionary turned into yet another statistic.
Arca - KiCk i
A monument to self-liberation and pride found in the strangest places. Listening to Arca’s discography, one can find various movements in which the artist finds a lane and then proceeds to absolutely destroy it. From her mixtapes and EPs to her full-fledged albums consisting of fragments where it was up to the listener to find something to hold on to amidst all the industrial alien noise-one could argue she still hasn’t topped Mutant from 2015-to hearing her take more approaches to something that might resemble pop music (in her own, twisted way) as she literally tried to find her own voice 3 years ago on her self-titled album, a flawed but powerful search for a derailed identity which marveled at its own, grotesquely beautiful existence. One thing that’s always characterized Arca is, at least on her own material, her insistence to work alone-to create fractured musical landscapes empowered by their hurting all by herself. Which is why it’s so surprising to suddenly see her pick up as many guest features here as possible-from Rosalía to SOPHIE to Bjork. But what’s even more interesting is the pushing forward of her own persona to reflect more heavily than ever both on her own Latine culture, and her identity as a non-binary trans woman.
KICK i may be the most overly personal album Arca’s ever done, and the results, mixed as they may be, still produce some of the most fascinating music of her career. The sounds are more approachable, her singing is more direct and melodic than ever, and the arrangements show a certain delicacy and poise that wasn’t there before, even if her typical harshness remains. The biggest development on this thing is her voice, and her expressivity. She still has a certain kinetic power of sounding like a damaged angel on songs like “Calor” or “No Queda Nada”, but there’s a dominance in her delivery that wasn’t there before. Part of that comes in the waves of self-defining like on the opener “Nonbinary” and the frenetic “Watch”, but how she effortlessly owns Latin slang typically saved for the crunchiest of reggaeton on songs like “Mequetrefe” and “Riquiquí” is impressive and something no one could have seen coming even 3 years ago, especially when she pairs herself with chaotic instrumentals, like the club was the most dangerous place possible, and the only way to get out of it was to perrear her way out of it.
And that way, the album begins to somehow make sense. Arca searches to take back her identity through her art, and that narrative shines throughout the album. She reclaims Latin slang mostly used from a man’s perspective to properly use the showing of herself and her body as a sign of empowerment; she takes the by-now cliché reggaeton storytelling of a girl going out dancing on her own knowing the threat she is, and turns it into a tale of letting everyone know who she is, showing it off as a sign of resistance no matter how scary the outside world might be (on “Mequetrefe”: “She came walking from her own home/She doesn’t take a taxi/They will see her in the streets/She doesn’t take a taxi, or Uber, or Lyft” as the percussion grows into a battlefield… until peace returns). And she treats her desires and yearnings as seriously as she can, no matter how ridiculous they may seem on paper, like on the dramatic ballad “Machote”, longing for a strong, macho man that’s sung and delivered with a fragility that’s about to burst; she takes traditionally feminine sentiments that have been ridiculed for decades on end and gives them a gravitas like nothing else on the album. That’s the power Arca and this album have; she’s understood what society has ignored about the needs and desires of women and here, she validates all of them.
Thanks to this, most of the album’s best moments are the ones of conflict, between Arca’s still conflicted inner world put in contrast with the rest of the world. Her collaboration with Rosalía, “KLK” obviously is a world destroyer, with its cumbia synths mixed with alarmed percussion and the scattered snippets of melody from both Arca and Rosalía that get to highlight the tension and despair found in the dancefloor, where you can find the worst mistake of your life in between the lights, and yet you don’t want to leave-this is music complacent in its own self-destruction, and it’s loving it. Not too revolutionary if you’ve heard anything indie record label NAAFI’s been up to, but still the kind of sound that deserves to be known and spread. But “La Chiquí” with SOPHIE is even better, the kind where it single handedly details the fear and anxiety of breaking out of one’s cage to express oneself; Arca says “menealo menealo menealo” over and over on top of angelic voices that suddenly get trapped in the middle of the world’s scariest machine distorting and chopping everything around it, and as everything tries to put itself back together, it’s swallowed by a black hole of sound. It’s terrifying. Which is the more soothing moments of songs like “Machote” and “Calor” are welcome, especially when they’re this well done, with the former’s hurt voice and the latter’s lamenting pianos like a cold, cloudy winter’s day inside of an abandoned factory.
There are some moments that don’t fully work. Bjork’s collaboration “Afterwards” feels a bit too rehearsed and thought out, it’s nowhere near as fluid as it wants to be, which is odd considering how often both of them work together. And some of the more chaotic moments like “Rip the Slit” and “Watchgirl” rely on gimmicks way more than they should, instead of anything truly menacing. But as it stands, if this is her incursion into more ‘accessible’, less abstract territory, it’s as good an entry as one could get. It’s sharp-focused, determined, and it comes off almost naturally-it’s 38 minutes long and it feels like much less. She may end the album with a song called “No Queda Nada” (“nothing remains”), but there’s a lot left untouched.
Special Interest - The Passion Of
A mush of synergy, mud, and smashed vocal cords. A cry into the city night so loud everyone can ignore it. Walking into a crowd full of empty bodies with a megaphone. You’re only worth the sound’s while if you can handle it, if not you might as well be dead to it. Few acts nowadays carry the hard crushing spirit of the first wave of no wave as well as Special Interest, and they mix that original crushing point of misfits with a slice of modernity. The Passion Of is the name of this album, and that “of” seems almost redundant, everything here is passion-betrayed passion, passion gone wrong, passion that was misled and mistreated, and knows how to react.
This band has found something special in their lead singer and writer Alli Logout, who yells and twists her voice with an endless fury that can’t possibly have been rehearsed, even though that’s very much the case. She’s not a leader or a commander of the people, she’s just another voice lost and mixed in the middle of the crowd, but her message doesn’t get lost. Her calling out to the marginalized, proudly black and queer, to observe, call out and annihilate the hateful, neglectful, gentrifying society that continues to push aside and jail those like her. “But would you bat an eye/Waiting for war machines to pass you by?” was already one of the best lines of the year, but it being immediately followed by “But aren't we going out tonight?” makes it become the tipping point, the cusp of something that’s finally starting to break. This is social poetry that gets to the point and then tears itself apart, realizing the answers aren’t all there. And all along, Alli crumbles. She turns herself and breaks apart in a combination of social frustration and sexual anxiety. She twirls and twirls begging to be submitted and rebelling in the morbid pleasure both known and completely unknown to her, and she takes phrases like “I got no” and “She’s best friends with Tina” and invents new languages out of them because there’s simply so much. Ignored for so long she knows what she deserves and knows she won’t get it. She’ll become the biggest brat of them all. “Maybe I don't know myself but to know you, now I know.”
She knows because the music guides her. These are daring compositions with an even more daring sound, the kind that overtakes everything around it. An oval-shaped bass that doesn’t stop moving surrounding industrial drums that make no time for nothing to be processed, guitars that swerve like broken swords and break with every stomp as if they knew they’ll be lost in the oblivion and the chaos, and synths that invoke and evoke the humid hue of the dark streets where everything goes down and lost souls don’t find each other. No bullshit here. This album lasts less than half an hour yet it feels like so much more, simply because the amount of ideas here is crushing. “Disco III” begins the album with a yell that resonates throughout the rest of the album, and while it may be about preparing to ruin what’s out there, it’s already doing it. “All Tomorrow’s Carry” portrays a world quick to forget what it destroys with the ghosts of what’s been left behind ready to eat anything that passes their way. “With Love” is a barricade of teary-eyed words that demand the culture and the innocents that white society stole from them. If there ever were to be a revolution, this wouldn’t be the sound it-and it knows that, and it’s proud of it. I got no time for no heartless cinema. Are we going out tonight? This is rock n roll.
100 Gecs - 1000 gecs and the tree of clues
How do you solve a problem like 100 Gecs? A band that seems to have taken the “Very Online” part of the Internet by storm, that may be on their way to becoming one of the most polarizing yet influential bands in the alternative scene whether we like it or not, that embodies so much of what is current today that even a 21-year-old myself who likes the Gecs can sometimes feel confused. What these 2 have done is commendable and worthy of attention: they have taken the “rawr so random” online aesthetic of the mid-to-late 2000s, taking genres like emo, pop punk, metalcore, bitpop, nu-metal, trance, dubstep, nightcore (if you don’t know what “nightcore” is, stay the hell away from this band), etc., all these genres that were ridiculed and maligned by critics and people who thought themselves “above” this material, and they have merged it all together into an electronic slurry that somehow, along the lines, forces listeners to give those types of music a tad more credibility. Laura and Dylan seem to be so proud of their influences and their own take on it, they almost border on satire or parody-but deep down, they really seem to love that aesthetic and bringing it to the forefront of contemporary musical conversation. Sure, not all their results might work, but their debut album from last year 1000 gecs may have given them one of the most passionate fanbases the Internet has right now, for better or worse, and that can’t be discarded immediately.
What we can do, instead, is take a look at this bizarre document of the Gecs’ influence, 1000 gecs and the tree of clues, a remix album that’s also a covers album that’s also a live album that’s also packed with new material, presumably because they were asked to check all the boxes now that they’re signed to Atlantic Records. Since this is essentially a compilation, there’s no use discussing this as a whole, so we might as well tackle the less significant portion of the album first. The new songs, “came to my show” and “toothless” are both pretty alright, although they would be low-tier on a proper Gecs project. The former is the weakest, with a well-meaning chorus and a gentle production all things considered, but it’s too quiet for the Gecs, it’s a nice piece of self-mythologization. The latter though has a more standard compilation than usual, a pop trap composition mixed with PC Music-esque pointillistic synths with a great hook (up until it’s not); easily the standout, and it promises exciting things to come if they’re willing to go in this direction. The live tracks at Fishcenter are useless.
The main bulk of this album though, is a celebration, a victory lap where they invite all their friends and collaborators for a party where they get to have their own spin on the Gecs sound. And as inconsistent a mixed bag as though this may be, it’s interesting to find how most artists stick to the same structures and formulas that the Gecs used in the original songs; as chaotic as those compositions may be, most of the covers or remixes don’t stray away from the original structures, only adding to them. Either that or they’re complete reconstructions, nothing in between. Although the latter of those are exceptions. The Injury Reserve remix of “745 sticky” is interesting as an idea, and the beat they make out of samples and vocal snippets is well put together, but it feels as though they could have gone harder and trusted their instincts a tad more; they’re playing coy. Unlike the star-studded remix of “ringtone” with Charli XCX, Kero Kero Bonito and Rico Nasty, where they create an atmosphere simultaneously more comforting and paranoid than the original. Instead of it being an individual experience of laying in fetal position waiting for the text (the text), now it’s a whole group; more dangerous and fragile. A remix so good it makes the second remix of the song on the album, courtesy of umru, sound pale and simplistic in comparison-like most of the versions here, it attaches itself to the original way too much while the songs call for everyone to remodel them at their own will.
As for the rest, it’s very easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. Nothankyou’s remix of “hand crushed by a mallet” can fuck off, it’s distortion for the sake of distortion, the same thing with the incomprehensible remix of “745 sticky” by Black Dresses (if this gets to anyone who can explain why beyond a smiley emoji, they’re more enlightened than I’ll ever be). And though Dorian Electra effectively owns “gec 2 ü”, it feels like their talents are better spent elsewhere. Meanwhile, GFOTY’s cover of “stupid horse” could have come off so unbearable (and I’m saying this as a fan of “stupid horse” and GFOTY) but by simply changing the ska guitars to happy hardcore synths and running along with the relatable stupidity of “Stupid horse, I just fell off of the Porsche” and stealing money instead of losing money it’s a party! Speaking of party, Tommy Cash proves he’s a superstar on the excellent remix of “xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx” alongside Hannah Diamond’s electroid vocals that showcase what a wonderful, sugary hook the song has! (Props too for rescuing Dylan’s original Tokio Hotel-esque bridge.) Like the best of euro-trance, it’s a wide-open embrace into the arms of the one you think you love, even if dimensions seem to collide. But the real surprise is the second cover of “hand crushed by a mallet” which, even though it features a scarce and shitty Patrick Stump and an underwhelming Nicole Dollanganger, is mostly carried by Punk Goes Pop-scene famous Craig Owens, who takes the original’s pop punk ethos and turns it into a crushing statement of denigration and dismissal. “I’ll never go, I’ll haunt your studio” becomes a much more menacing phrase under this guise, as the guitars crunch until they become into a biting creature that swallows the whole song, a scene’s zombie with a machine gun; you could not count the amount of 2009 12-year-old kids that have been revindicated.
So at the end of the day, this project both can and can’t go unnoticed. It can’t because it’s a reaffirmation of the statement and purpose of 100 Gecs, whose clout grows more and more each day, and they may become a bigger deal in the future. It can because if you’re not onboard the Gecs train already, this won’t do much to persuade you-it may even alienate you further. I appreciate the Gecs and their friends are drawing such a decisive line in the sand, a line so free and spiritful that it goes beyond any criticism one might have for them or their music; these are just words on electronic paper, these guys are doing something else. So how do you solve a problem like 100 Gecs? You don’t-and this is a 50-minute long testament, for better or worse, as to why.